Late to the Party: Don't Worry Darling
Or, what happens when behind the scenes drama is the most entertaining part of your movie.
(Late to the Party is a feature in which I watch a movie for the first time after the discourse surrounding it has died down. Some spoilers should be expected.)
Don’t Worry Darling should have been a sure bet. A thriller with an all-too-timely premise, it stars Florence Pugh, one of our best actresses under 30, and Harry Styles, making his long-awaited (to some, anyway) leading man debut, along with Chris “Best Chris” Pine, who always adds to any movie just a little bit more than it deserves. It also marked the second directorial effort of Olivia Wilde, who earned a lot of critical goodwill thanks to her charming debut Booksmart. And yet, in the months leading up to the film’s release, Wilde seemed to be on a baffling one-woman campaign to generate her own bad publicity, shooting herself in the foot so many times it was a wonder she didn’t end up in a wheelchair when it was all over.
For one thing, in talking about the film, Wilde focused less on the incel culture that clearly inspired it, and more on the sex scenes in it, which, to hear her describe them, were both numerous, and explicit. While it is true that depicting characters actually having sex seems to be a rarity in film these days, Wilde’s focus on that as a selling point for Don’t Worry seemed misplaced, as if she felt she needed to ensure that, despite its feminist themes, men would still want to see it too. Then, it got out that Wilde’s marriage to Jason Sudeikis fell apart while filming took place, largely due to an on-set affair with Styles, which in itself allegedly resulted in so much unprofessional behavior that Pugh, the film’s one bankable star, refused to participate in any publicity for it.
Finally, when it was revealed that Shia LaBeouf had been originally cast to play Styles’ character, Wilde claimed that LaBeouf was fired for his own unprofessional behavior, while LaBeouf, in turn, claimed that he left voluntarily, despite Wilde begging him to stay. LaBeouf brought the receipts, as the kids say, releasing a recording of Wilde implying that it was Pugh (whom she referred to rather snidely as “Miss Flo”) who had an issue with LaBeouf’s casting, and hoping that it could be worked out so that he could stay on with the production. Though usually a little behind the scenes gossip never hurt a movie, once Don’t Worry Darling was actually released to middling at best reviews, audiences who might have originally came out for it were simply tired of hearing about it, and it only made the slightest blip at the box office, before being forgotten altogether. It was like watching a horrific car crash almost happen, and then at the last minute it turned into a minor fender bender.
After all that, I would love to tell you that, assessed solely on its own merits, Don’t Worry Darling is a secret success. Alas, it looks like Wilde had the right idea in drumming up controversy, because it’s an attractive nothing of a film, offering a number of potentially interesting ideas, but clumsily executing them. It’s sort of a horror movie, but not really, with some sci-fi elements, but not really, and seems to exist mostly as a vehicle for vintage fashions and mid-century décor, like Mad Men without the depth.
Alice1 (Florence Pugh) lives the cushy life of a 1950s housewife with her husband, Jack (Harry Styles), in Victory, a planned community out in the middle of the southern California desert. The brainchild of motivational speaker Frank (Chris Pine), it’s an all-American back to basics small town, where the men drive off to work in their shiny new convertibles every morning, while the women stay home, clean and cook, and occasionally gossip with each other. In the evenings, all the couples get together for interminable dinner parties, where everyone, even the visibly pregnant Peg (Kate Berlant), constantly drinks and smokes. The men are secretive about what they do for a living, and occasionally the ground shakes like a minor earthquake, but no one is all that concerned about it.
It’s meant to be an enviable life, but it’s also crushingly boring, and it gives Alice plenty of time to start noticing strange things, like that the eggs she cracks open to make Jack’s breakfast are empty, or that a trolley driver refuses, with sheer panic in his eyes, to help her look into a plane crash that happens just outside of town. Her suspicions that something is amiss increase when neighbor Margaret (KiKi Layne), whose erratic, paranoid behavior is dismissed as “exhaustion,” slits her own throat and jumps off the roof of her house. Though Jack, along with the sinister Dr. Collins (Timothy Simons), tries to reassure Alice that Margaret merely fell (but she’s feeling much better now), it does little to minimize her fears about what’s really going on in Victory, its Jordan Peterson-like founder Frank, and maybe everyone who lives there, including Jack himself.
I won’t spoil the twist in Don’t Worry Darling, but it’s not hard to figure out. Beyond its predictability, it’s a twist that not only falls apart the very second you try to ponder the practicalities of it, but also betrays itself in its execution. For one thing, I just don’t buy that men living in a patriarchal utopia would be all that invested in female sexual pleasure2. If anything, other than Alice and Jack’s active sex life, Victory is an oddly chaste community, where no one is chasing their secretary around a desk, carrying on with mistresses, or coveting each other’s wives, and the only sign that anyone else is getting it on is Peg’s pregnancy. The most off-color it gets is a charmingly old-timey burlesque performance from Dita Von Teese, during which all the wives are present, and the husbands behave themselves.
The men’s lives don’t look any more fulfilled than the women, as they’re stuck in an endless cycle of going to work, playing golf, and making meaningless small talk (usually about work or golf), with no hobbies, no intellectual pursuits and no needs or wants beyond a steak dinner at 6 o’clock every night. Despite all the talk about Victory being a perfect, highly coveted place to live, nobody who actually lives there seems happy, which might explain why everyone always has a drink in his or her hand. Which answers the question: what is the point of all this? Even before Alice begins to have doubts, Victory seems like a failed experiment, where the women just repeat the same day ad infinitum, and the men have to spend so much time keeping the whole thing a secret that they have no time to enjoy the fruits of their labor. It’s an interesting question that goes unanswered.
That’s perhaps the most frustrating thing about Don’t Worry Darling (besides its refusal to put a comma where it belongs in the title). It brings some interesting concepts to the table, particularly in the era of “motivational speakers” like the aforementioned Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate having a disturbing hold on young men, and the rise of the “tradwife” trend with young women on social media, but does nothing with them. The themes of gaslighting and minimizing women’s fears are obviously present. Alice’s friendships with the other women of Victory are distant and perfunctory, and they all back away from her the minute she brings up her suspicions that all is not right with the town, which reads like commentary on white women too often voting against their own interests. However, the script, written by Katie Silberman, doesn’t pursue any of it. It feels like a cop-out, tossing crumbs to the audience and giving them nothing for picking them up. Even the teased “explicit” sex scenes are restrained, shot in a way that, like a gay character in a Disney movie, makes it easy to edit out for an international audience.
On the upside, as usual Florence Pugh mops the floor with everyone else in the cast, with Chris Pine the only other actor able to go toe to toe with her. Don’t Worry Darling’s best scenes are between Alice and Frank, with whom she has far more chemistry than Jack, her actual husband. He seems to be more intrigued than angered when Alice starts figuring out what’s going on, as opposed to Jack, who mostly just whines and throws tantrums. Much has already been said about Harry Styles’ less than solid acting chops (and very shaky, inexplicable American accent revealed late in the film), so I shan’t retread that ground. I will say that he does try, at least, and even stronger actors might have struggled with such a thinly drawn character.
If you watch Don’t Worry Darling with the sound off, it’s spectacular, thanks to Matthew Libatique’s cinematography, top-notch production design by Katie Byron, and Arianne Phillips’ gorgeous costumes. The relentless desert sun gives everything an overly bright artificiality, and Victory’s aesthetic doesn’t so much speak to how the 1950s actually were, but rather someone’s idea of them, an anachronistic mixed bag of Tommy Dorsey meets Andy Warhol pop art meets Norman Rockwell. If the same kind of care and polish that went into giving the film a very distinctive look was also expended on the plot, it would have been a good-to-excellent film. Instead, it’s all in service to a script that’s not nearly as creepy as it should be, and not nearly as smart as it thinks it is.
I propose that any writer considering naming a character who finds herself trapped in a fantasy world “Alice” should be hit with a non-fatal but painful electrical shock directly through his or her keyboard.
Considering how much incel culture overlaps into racism and antisemitism, I also don’t buy that Black, Jewish or interracial couples would be allowed to live in Victory.