Near the end of last weekend’s most popular theatrical release, “Don’t Worry Darling,” the perfect 1950s homemaker played by Florence Pugh finally begins to piece together the insidious puzzle of her life. She’s living inside the confines of her marriage to a rising young executive (Harry Styles) as part of the larger, fastidiously planned desert community of Victory, California, a company town with a cryptic corporate mission.
We know something’s off from the beginning. Screenwriter Katie Silberman, who rewrote an existing script by Carey Van Dyke and Shane Van Dyke (Dick Van Dyke’s grandsons), drops clues hither and yon and then beyond yon. Why is that plane in the sky “glitching” in a very non-’50s way, as if part of some sort of computer simulation? Why are the eggs in Alice’s wonderland of a midcentury modern kitchen mere empty shells, like wee metaphors of her existence?
After Alice comes upon the forbidden company headquarters in the mountains, she slips into a looking glass — right through the literal glass window of the building, where the peculiar visions and memories plaguing her daily life feel fully formed, and “real.” Then, following nearly two hours of movie trying to make sustainable sense of an hour’s worth of plot, she realizes the nightmarish reality of her situation.
When the big reveal arrives, the writing has a lot of ‘splaining to do. Styles, alas, bears the brunt of the last-minute explanation, exposition and exasperation. Not even Pugh can make persuasive sense of it. As Dana Stevens wrote in Slate, the reveal can’t stand up “to the level of scrutiny any two viewers riding the escalator to the theater lobby would bring to a casual post-movie conversation.” This was also my experience: In Chicago, after a packed preview screening, an invisible gray cloud of confusion and dissatisfied “Huh? Wha?” hung over the crowd, wandering out the door and into the night.
“Don’t Worry Darling” garnered a discouraging B-minus CinemaScore exit poll rating, reflecting a sample, at least, of the opening weekend response. That’s the ending talking.
So much can go wrong with a movie months, even years, before anyone gets to the set. Hollywood filmmaking rules from earlier times do not apply to ours. Ever since “The Matrix” and “Inception” (among others) defied studio expectations and made huge profits, doggedly linear-minded blueprints for science-fiction success went out the window.
Big reveals hinge on daring narrative leaps, with the promise of big rewards, seldom reaped. No twist or surprise or cliffhanger pleases everybody, nor should it. Fifteen years after the fact, the debates over the finale of “The Sopranos” have led to zero consensus, an excellent sign of creator David Chase’s nerve and imagination.
When a movie is essentially about peeling the onion, and getting to what’s underneath the first few layers as in the case of “Don’t Worry Darling,” the closer the audience comes to the big reveal, the more a movie becomes the sum of its screenwriting parts, faulty or otherwise. But here is an example of why blueprints have their limits. There are blatantly far-fetched thrillers, brilliant ones, that haunt us for decades in spite of their narrative inelegance or the quality of their gotchas.
“Vertigo,” for one. Adapting the French novel “D’entre les morts” (”Among the Dead”; the English-language translation carried the title “The Living and the Dead”), director Alfred Hitchcock and screenwriters Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor labored, valiantly, to Americanize the setting and warm up the ending so that the story avoided the novel’s resolution, with the tortured protagonist killing the woman who has duped him.
Even with the changes, partly made to deal with the crumbling Hollywood standards of “decency,” the movie was a box office shrug. Too grim, probably. And, in truth, there’s something off with the rhythm of the final, crucial minute, which I think betrays Hitchcock’s own lack of confidence in where their big reveal has left them, hanging, like James Stewart at the beginning of the film.
We will know in a few days if “Don’t Worry Darling’s” first-weekend polling results spell a quick fade after week two. In the end? Well, this column’s big reveal is probably no more convincing than “Don’t Worry Darling.” Nonetheless, it is this: You never can tell. You never know if a twist or a big reveal that reads well will play well — or will just lead to a lot of head-shaking and thoughts of end credits.
In the Marx Brothers film “Animal Crackers,” Chico is at the keyboard, repeating a phrase of a song over and over, to the impatience of everyone at the swank dinner party thrown by Margaret Dumont. “I can’t think of the finish!” he says. To which Groucho replies: “That’s strange. I can’t think of anything else.”
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(Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.)
