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Don’t Worry Darling, it’s just Idle Patriarchy


It’s been a very long time since a movies’ troubled production has so overshadowed the movie itself as it has for Don’t Worry Darling, the sophomore feature from Olivia Wilde, which began the year one of the more intriguing movies to look out for and has since become something of a P.R. liability for everyone involved. I’m not so interested in that drama between Wilde and Florence Pugh, or the several gaffes that have happened through the films’ promotional tour, as unavoidable as they may be. But the negative press it brings can’t be good for a movie that already faced significant scrutiny off of its’ subject matter. And it’s sure to result I feel in a harsher attitude towards the movie than it perhaps deserves. Having seen it, it is not at all the trainwreck it has been anticipated as. But neither is it especially good in its’ limited sights and highly rudimentary themes.
As every indication by the trailers have suggested, Don’t Worry Darling is molded in both the themes and aesthetics of The Stepford Wives, as it places its’ action in a 1950s company town in a remote sector of California where all the women are nuclear-age content and subservient to their husbands. Pugh plays Alice, married to Harry Styles’ Jack, who gradually begins to question the nature of her surroundings when she witnesses a series of strange incidents.
Much of the plot is dependent on this mystery that pretty clearly from the beginning is pointing to a certain level of gaslighting, patriarchal manipulation, and reality not being what it seems. Alice’s life is so enmeshed in that 1950s nuclear model of gender power dynamics that it’s pretty clear there’s a malevolence under the surface to this whole arrangement. Additionally, disturbing images and hallucinations enter in on her min,d reflecting feelings of chaos and entrapment -themselves further clues as to what might be going on. It begins when she follows a biplane crash to the desert headquarters of the Victory project, where all the husbands in the town (also called Victory) work each day. She has a surreal blackout and when she awakens the men are extremely hesitant to discuss what goes on there as her suspicions and desperation for answers grows. And this is played with ample intrigue and some smart pacing -Wilde sets the mood quite well and is indeed pretty sharp as to her visual and technical choices in relaying this austere world. It could honestly be pretty effective if it weren’t so ordinary.
Don’t Worry Darling is explicitly about misogyny, patriarchy, and gaslighting, and in illustrating those themes it chooses for symbols, aesthetics, and storytelling points the most common stereotypes associated with those things. The 1950s as representation of a repressed time to be a woman, the very obvious dividing lines between mens’ and womens’ social lives, the flagrant manipulation of a womans’ account to suggest unreliability, not to mention all of the metaphors for being boxed in, reaching for potential beyond means. It’s all there and all played with obvious signifiers hammering in themes that are pretty banal in all honesty. All it’s missing is a scene of a woman being crudely catcalled. These notions of a very obvious sexism and consequently elementary feminism are rote by now, too base to really mean anything -and movies have been commenting on such topics in similar ways for over fifty years, The Stepford Wives of course being a prime example. This in itself wouldn’t be much more than dully simplistic if not derivative, but Wilde tries to play it as emphatically contemporary in scope.
It’s a commendable effort. And on some level it is interesting to see this movie blatantly touch on things like conservative dogwhistles and incel culture -forces in the periphery of modern sexism that can’t be ignored. Wilde has even stated that Chris Pine’s cult-like leader who weaves diatribes of incomprehensible jargon on order and structure to the men of the community is a deliberate analogue for Jordan Peterson. But at the root of these attempts to say something noteworthy and relevant about gender parity is a governing thesis devoid of nuance. In presenting only the same old signifiers of misogyny, the film shows itself disinterested in a modern non-binary understanding of the subject. It’s under no obligation of course to explore how systematized misogyny effects women of colour or queer and trans women, but it demonstrates a tact incredibly hollow to paint all women with the same brush. Further it refuses to delve past the surface on the type of misogyny it does show, resulting in a reductive feminism that hits you over the head with how empty it is while convinced it’s insightful.
The jejune aspects of the script don’t help, the on-the-nose references in dialogue and plotting, the mediocre genre motifs. There may be some more intelligent character work going on subliminally, but it is drowned out by clumsy acting choices and Harry Styles is the main offender. Believe it or not there actually is a reason for his bizarre mesh of accents, a clear method being utilized –but it isn’t being utilized well. It distracts from and hampers Styles’ performance, forcing him to compensate by stretching himself past his limits as an actor. And it only looks all the worse in relation to Florence Pugh. Pugh is, if it can be ascertained, the saving grace of the film. In spite of everything that has been discussed, the movie benefits greatly by having Pugh at its’ centre to lend even nominal credence to its’ ideas and storytelling. She goes all in on the paranoia, this being her tensest role since Midsommar, and she crushes it, carrying Styles and most of her other more seasoned co-stars. None of the rest of them much stand out, Wilde herself and Pine are mostly okay, the latter getting some mileage out of his pomposity if he too has no idea what he’s doing; while Nick Kroll, Gemma Chan, and KiKi Layne are generally wasted in one-note roles.
A lot is being made of the twist to this movie, and the ending, how it functions and whether it breaks the immersion. It didn’t for me if only because it felt fairly obvious from early on –there are several hints scattered throughout. It suffers from nothing different than the rest really: its’ conventional, reductive –on some level it is a bit of a cop-out creatively, and opens a hell of a lot more questions than it is willing to answer. As to the actual ending though, informed by this twist and which leaves on a note of ambiguity, I like. The climactic thrill sequence leading up to it is certainly flawed and indulgent, and the final point it makes is a touch confused, but I at least admired its’ tinge of audacity –something sorely absent from the rest of the movie.
Olivia Wilde didn’t skimp on the talent, which is reflected on screen in the magnetic cinematography by Matthew Libatique, regular collaborator of Darren Aronofksy. The editing and general production work is terrific as well, but at the heart of it all is a script, a concept, a thematic tether that is underwhelming, uninspired, and shallow. The weight of the ambition is felt, but I think Wilde and her writer Katie Silberman bit off more than they could chew jumping straight into a high-concept thriller/gender politic allegory off of Booksmart. It needed more time to develop, needed more mature thought and consideration as to its’ purpose and messaging. Don’t Worry Darling aspires to be a cautionary tale, or at the very least a socially-attuned thriller that is for traditional white feminism what Get Out was for racism –yet it forgets to adapt the layers and nuances that made Get Out so daring (hint: because it was about liberals as well as conservatives). In the end, the movie winds up a cautionary tale of a different sort. Can’t say I envy the people involved.

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