Courtesy New Line Cinema
Florence Pugh (Midsommar) is too good an actor for Don’t Worry Darling, the newest entry from Booksmart director/actor Olivia Wilde and a rather toothless and tactless primer on gaslighting and feminism-lite as doled out through bits and pieces of other and often better films.
In fact, Pugh is probably too good for all the drama that’s surrounded the film, from Wilde publicly claiming actor Shia LaBeouf—who was originally attached to a role that ultimately went to singer Harry Styles—was fired from the film to allegedly make the set safer for Pugh, to rumors that Wilde herself was unprofessional during filming. With the caveats that safety for women in film is of paramount importance, and we absolutely need non-cis-hetero bros in the movies—not to mention how nobody wants a shitty work environment—these things hang like a dark cloud over Wilde’s new opus, and it’s hard to disconnect from them while watching.
In Don’t Worry Darling, Pugh is the doting Alice, a young wife whose 1950- or 1960-something existence boils down to cleaning by day, serving her hardworking husband, Jack (Styles), by night and hanging out with the neighborhood gals for shopping and drinking and, for some reason, ballet class. Alice and Jack live in one of those Levittown kind of places run by something or other called the Victory Project. Everything seems too clean and too quote/unquote normal, but obviously there’s scary shit lying in wait just beneath the surface. Jack and the other husbands go off to mysterious jobs each day they can’t discuss; the wives wait at home. It seems idyllic and all, but when another neighborhood woman starts acting erratically and asking questions of the charismatic town leader Frank (Chris Pine), Alice starts to feel like something ain’t right. And so it goes.
All hail Pugh as the gaslit housefrau who repeatedly finds herself at odds with her environment and all the people in it. Something indeed is awry with the Victory Project, and Pugh soars through her dialogue with the salt and powerful nature of cinema’s greats. Against Styles’ stilted and timid delivery, however, things stall, and there’s only so much Pugh can do while swimming against the tide.
Widle herself joins the fracas as a neighbor, though her character is basically an expositional sounding board for other characters who ask her things like, “Oh, yeah, what happened with that again?” She happily explains. Comic Nick Kroll plays her husband, and is somehow even more pointless. Pugh and Pine sing, though, particularly in their all-too-brief scenes together. As a sort of Alex Jones/Joe Rogan type, Pine crafts quiet and subtle horrors that threaten to emerge but never quite do—making it all that much scarier; Pugh dominates everyone around her, not that it’s a competition, but again, she’s too good for this thing.
Don’t Worry Darling lacks subtlety, exchanging the joy of discovery and post-screening conversation with tedious hand-holding and finger-wagging. If you have to straight up tell us a character sucks, maybe your writing wasn’t quite good enough? And though Pugh never utters the word “gaslighting,” she just about sprints right up to the line. Find also what is hopefully homage and not thievery from films like The Matrix, The Truman Show and The Village; though it’s impossible to know if Wilde and writers Katie Silberman, Carey Van Dyke and Shane Van Dyke are familiar enough with the Fallout series of video games to know what narrative elements they’ve repeated almost wholesale.
Even so, interesting nods to those who sit by and let misogyny run rampant add some depth, and the look of the world is fantastic and icky in its sickeningly cheerful brightness. It’s just that we delve only slightly into the broadest strokes of gender politics and feminism without any true message. Men can be and often are trash, that is so, so very true, but when the moral seems to break down solely to “man bad, woman good,” it doesn’t allow for any real exploration of the reasons people do or allow for things to happen in the context of shitty relationships. The film does have some cool Busby Berkeley nods, though, no question.
5
+Pugh is a powerhouse; outstanding set design and lighting
-Clobbers you over the head with its own ideas
Don’t Worry Darling
Directed by Wilde
With Pugh, Styles, Pine, Wilde and Kroll
Violet Crown, Regal, R, 122 min.
