Wilde should be worried: Pre-release hype overshadows mediocre picture
Even if you’re not one to follow celebrity gossip, no doubt you’ve seen at least a headline or two about director Olivia Wilde’s new film Don’t Worry Darling. Stories about casting, the Venice premiere, tensions between director and star, and salacious sex scenes have saturated the Internet gossip machine. All this chatter either speaks to genuine interpersonal problems among the cast, or reveals a sly and savvy PR move by Wilde, who gained notoriety when she began dating her film’s star Harry Styles after her much publicized divorce from nice guy Ted Lasso himself, Jason Sudeikis. All publicity is good publicity, as the saying goes, and all the frenzied rumors certainly have kept Wilde’s film in the spotlight. So much so that I have to admit that the constant titillating headlines worked on me: when the screening came through, I of course had to see what all the fuss was about.
The short answer is: not much. After seeing the film, I’m now convinced that a lot of the tantalizing buzz surrounding the movie was intentional – designed to pique interest and disguise the fact that the onscreen drama isn’t nearly as engrossing as the offscreen. Wilde’s 2019 debut film Booksmart earned raves, and seemed to mark the start of an exciting new filmmaker career. But this sophomore effort, also penned by Booksmart screenwriter Katie Silberman, doesn’t even come close to matching that picture’s charm and originality.
What we get here is a glossy, 1950’s Southern California-set story of seemingly happy housewives and stalwart breadwinners, leading perfect, sun soaked lives of poolside parties, backyard barbeques and home cooked meals passionately thrown aside for a little pre-supper dinner table romp (you may never look at roast beef and mashed potatoes the same way again). In the perpetually bright and sunny corporate town Victory, the men drive off one by one in their shiny big autos from their tidy suburban homes to Victory headquarters, while the meticulously coiffed women and children stand on the porch smiling and waving goodbye. My one thought during this idyllic scene, though, was: considering they all live next door to each other, why don’t they carpool!? Apparently environmentalism isn’t one of Victory’s more pressing concerns. What the real concerns are become evident as the story unfolds.
But as films from Blue Velvet to The Truman Show to The Matrix have taught us, often a dark and brutal truth underlies such a beautiful facade. That’s what Alice (Florence Pugh) begins to suspect after she witnesses her neighbor Margaret (KiKii Layne) try to kill herself by slitting her own throat. Maybe life in paradise isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. What follows is a series of repetitive scenes in which Alice has a disturbing vision/hallucination/dream/whatever (The walls are closing in! A plane is crashing!), freaks out, and then is calmed down by her husband Jack (Harry Styles), her friend Bunny (Olivia Wilde), or Jack’s boss Frank (Chris Pine). Frank is the cult-like leader of the mysterious Victory Project, where the men work at the “development of progressive materials,” as the women are vaguely told.
Watching someone be gaslit over and over is tedious at best and unpleasant at worst, and so the picture quickly becomes tiresome. When the big reveal about what’s really going on comes at the end, we no longer even care, but also think, “that’s it!?” More than a few viewers may guess the big twist from the beginning, even as they may hope the filmmakers have something more original up their sleeve. Sadly, they don’t.
As for the film’s other elements, Florence Pugh, who is on screen for much of the picture’s running time, gives a fierce, if somewhat overwrought, performance. She definitely overshadows Styles, who seems checked out and ill of ease in most of his scenes. And Pine turns in some nice work as the slick but smarmy Frank, which at least is fun to watch. The costumes and sets, too, are spot on for the period, and provide something striking to look at as the story quickly devolves. But after all the pre-release hype, Wilde’s production ends up being a huge let down. When your picture is bound to be remembered for its scandalous whispers and nothing else, that’s a problem.
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Don’t Worry Darling opens today at Bay Area theaters.
