I told myself I wouldn’t talk about the bad press, but “Don’t Worry Darling” is a movie about lying, so I lied. Here’s one sentence of bad-press recap. Shia LaBeouf fired no wait he quit, director Olivia Wilde and Harry Styles sittin’ in a tree well maybe not, Florence Pugh ditches publicity launch no wait she’s filming “Dune 2,″ did Harry just eject something from his mouth onto Chris Pine’s lap no wait he didn’t, actually I think he did just some gum or something not actual spit right there at the Venice Film Festival.
So how’s the movie?
Frustrating! Frustrating. Everything not right with “Don’t Worry Darling” wasn’t right from the beginning. Even a good director — and Wilde is that, though her hand in developing this material clearly wasn’t without some wrong turns — must deal with script problems if they’re there, in the story, lurking and waiting to mess everything up and send audiences out muttering, wait what?
Filmed in Palm Springs, California, and environs, “Don’t Worry Darling” takes place in a planned community (and how!) housing the employees of the Victory Project, a plainly sinister operation tasked with building … something in the desert, perhaps weapons, perhaps something else. “Progressive materials,” they call it. The husbands are sworn to secrecy; the wives know very little and are prized for their discretion and their smiling conformity. The story is set in peak Sinatra period, late ‘50s/early ‘60s. The LPs are always spinning, and the two rules in “Don’t Worry Darling” are don’t worry; and don’t venture beyond the community’s limits, certainly not anywhere near “Headquarters” up in the mountains.
Pugh plays Alice; Styles is Jack, and their child-free, ring-a-ding-ding life is pretty sweet: lots of sex, drinking, red meat and bacon and eggs in the skillet. Jack has a bright future with The Company, run by Frank (Chris Pine, a witty, coldblooded guru in shades). Life in Alice’s little cul-de-sac skips from gossip with neighbor Bunny (director Wilde in a supporting role), ballet classes run with “Suspiria”-level strictness by Frank’s wife, Shelly (Gemma Chan) and aggressive cleaning regimens. But what’s that tune in Alice’s head, the one she can’t stop humming? Some refrain from the past? And why is her friend and neighbor Margaret (KiKi Layne) up there on the roof, about to slit her throat, after dire warnings of entrapment and a kind of cocktail-hour servitude completely out of the wives’ control?
The visual stress indicators fly freely in this joyless desert paradise. Grotesquely oily close-ups of marinated meat suggest there’s something not quite right with that T-bone. Alice’s hallucinations, or daydreams, or drug-induced nightmares, fixate on a Busby Berkeley-inspired chorus line, scissor-kicking in precise geometric patterns in black and white.
What has this to do with whatever the men do when they go to work?
Maybe something, maybe not. Either way “Don’t Worry Darling” is, at most, an hour of a brain-tease stretched to two. Screenwriter Katie Silberman, who collaborated with director Wilde on “Booksmart,” drip-drip-drips the clues and the eyeblink flashbacks throughout, delaying the inevitable reveal and explanation. When it comes, it comes on heavy feet, without the clarity or impact to take care of business. In interviews Wilde has dropped references to “The Truman Show” and “Inception” and, less so because The Kids don’t know it, “The Stepford Wives.” Her movie is guided by the notion of a woman wising up to the controlling, condescending patriarchal force sucking the air out of her life, and free will. Jason Sudekis, you are served!
I mean, not really; “Don’t Worry Darling” doesn’t name names, but it does underline its feminism-come-lately thesis in increasingly bright highlighter. Complicating things, the movie works on a consistent level of design and execution, with a carefully prescribed look and texture, cleverly realized, at least until an action climax that smacks of narrative trouble, not narrative completion.
Contrary to popular opinion, Styles is not “the problem” with this movie; he’s not much, and Pugh has to act a lot to get something going with him in the dramatic scenes. But Silberman and Wilde should’ve seen the problems with their story, and its central, rusty hook, literal years before filming started. In a crucial dinner party sequence, the movie’s best, Pugh and Pine square off like junkyard dogs in Atomic Age threads, and the way they finesse their cat-and-mouse routine, as Dino once sang, is a real kick in the head. Sometimes, if only for a few minutes, the right actors can save a movie from itself.
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‘DON’T WORRY DARLING’
2 stars (out of 4)
MPAA rating: R (for sexuality, violent content and language)
Running time: 2:03
How to watch: In theaters Friday
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