Men Be Controllin'

Movie: Don't Worry Darling

Olivia Wilde's follow up to her 2019 debut film Booksmart has been mired in controversy, mostly to due behind-the-scenes bad behavior on the part of Wilde. I haven't bothered to delve into all the details, but there seems to be two issues: one is that Shia LaBeouf, a noted shithead and abuser, was originally cast in the movie but was supposedly fired after Florence Pugh was uncomfortable with his behavior. LaBeouf claims he wasn't fired, he quit, and that Wilde wanted to keep him on. The other issue is that Wilde began a very public romance with leading man Harry Styles (who replaced LaBeouf) and acted unprofessionally on set, leading to a "screaming match" between Wilde and Pugh.

On top of all that, Wilde plays a character in the movie, Bunny, who wasn't in the original script. So, she created a character for herself to play. What's more, Wilde took some lines of dialogue that belonged to characters played by Gemma Chan and KiKi Layne (both actors of color) and gave them to her character instead. She additionally cut a lot of scenes featuring Layne. Very white lady of her.

Some of this might be forgiven if Don't Worry Darling was a good movie...but it's not. It's not *the worst* movie ever, but despite the lovely cinematography and costuming, and despite a great performance by Florence Pugh in the leading role, the movie is derivative and a bit of a mess. Scenes that should be intense come off as campy. The big reveal of "what's really going on", which I will spoil below after a warning, only leads to a ton of questions that are never answered. 

So what is Don't Worry Darling about? Florence Pugh plays Alice Chambers, a 1950s housewife who lives with her husband Jack (Styles) in a picture-perfect town that appears to be built in the middle of the California desert. The mastermind behind this town is Frank (Chris Pine), more of a legend than a man. Frank created the Victory Project, which includes the town of Victory where all the housewives live as well as the mysterious project itself which is only explained as "developing progressive materials". Every morning, the men of Victory leave their mid-century modern homes and drive out to Headquarters in the desert to work, and each night they return home to a meat-based dinner cooked by their adoring wives. Notably, none of the wives really know what their husbands do (the Victory Project is top secret) and are forbidden from going into the desert themselves.

Jack and Alice are especially amorous, often having spontaneous sex on the kitchen table or in inappropriate places, such as Frank's bedroom during a cookout. All seems well and good except for two issues: 1) Alice starts experiencing odd things, such as opening a container of eggs in which none of the eggs have yolks and 2) Margaret (Layne), Alice's next door neighbor, is suffering from a mental breakdown leading to embarrassing public outbursts where she asks Frank "why are we here?" and ends up costing her husband his job at Victory. No one is sympathetic to Margaret--this is the 50s, after all, and appearances are everything.

But after Alice breaks the one rule of Victory--never leave the town--when she goes out into the desert after seeing a plane crash out there, the strange visions and experiences she has begin to increase and she starts to wonder if Margaret was right to question Frank.

I'll pause before I reveal the truth about Victory and just say that Don't Worry Darling could have been much better if different choices were made. If more time was spent after the big reveal explaining how and what was going on and less time was spent showing men in bowling shirts and women in A-line dresses dancing around with tumblers of whiskey balanced on their heads, this movie could have said something interesting about why having a "perfect life" comes at a great cost and a marriage without honesty a mutual respect is worthless. But Wilde focused more on the pretty dresses and 1950s set-dressing and rushed the ending, throwing explanations at us minutes before the movie was over.

Between that and the ick factor of Wilde's unprofessionalism, Don't Worry Darling gets a big, fat

Grade: C 

Spoilers!! Spoilers!!

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Ok, so a lot of people guessed the twist even before the movie came out. People are comparing Don't Worry Darling to The Stepford Wives, but a more apt comparison might be M. Night Shyamalan's The Village because....it's not the 1950s, fuckers! It's the present day!

Turns out, Victory is actually a virtual simulation. In a flashback, we see Alice working as a surgeon and returning home to her unemployed boyfriend, Jack. Frank is basically Jordan Peterson--a neo-conservative piece of shit who thinks that present day unhappiness is tied to men not having a masculine role and women not being the fembot housewives "nature" intends them to be. We gather than Jack has forced Alice into the simulation: he has her cuffed to the bed with these Clockwork Orange-looking eye thingies propping her eyes open while the simulation runs constantly. The men of Victory leave the simulation for an allotted time and must return at the end of the day.

Alice manages to break out of the simulation at the end, and she also finds out that Bunny knew all along and chose to be in the simulation anyway because her kids died in real life and in Victory she still has them. But basically all the women are forced into the sim by their men.

There are SO MANY questions the twist brings up and never explains:

• How does Alice get proper nutrition? I didn't see any IVs hooked up to her while she was tied to the bed. I guess Jack has to keep her in diapers too?
• When the men leave the simulation, are they actually working for Frank in the real world, or just working any old job to pay for access to the simulation?
• Alice kills Jack at the end (yay!) and Bunny tells her "if a man dies in the simulation, he dies in real life"...ok, so first of all, how is that possible? Wouldn't you just wake up? She specifically says "if a man dies in the sim", does that mean women can die in the sim and be fine? What if a man dies in the sim--does the woman's body in real life just starve to death?
• After hearing the news about Jack being killed and Alice running off to the desert to get out of the sim, Frank's wife, Shelley (Gemma Chan), kills him immediately. She says "You stupid man. Now it's my turn." What does that mean? Was she also a prisoner? Is she mad that he failed? What does "my turn" mean?

It really annoys me when there is a sci-fi twist like this in a movie and it's never explained. The audience is just expected to swallow the implausibility of it all because the greater message is "1950s bad! Men be controlling!". Uh, yeah, I got that. Clearly this movie is supposed to be spooky-ooky about the dangers of men being lured into extremism online, but the movie barely fucking touches on that. You hear like one second of Frank's podcast. Also, apparently there are only like 75 people in the simulation, but in real life these dumbass men would 100% be blabbing to their buddies and the top secret project would be known by everyone immediately. 

So, Don't Worry Darling fails both as a science-fiction story, but also as a social satire. The only way it succeeds is by being unintentionally campy with a strong performance by Pugh and a good performance by Pine (and a wooden performance by Styles). 

Seeing it wasn't a total waste because it was fun for what it was, but it's not rewatchable and it's just not that good.

Grade: C

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