Film

CULTURE

Olivia Wilde’s flick is visually compelling and filled with emotional resonance.

OK, this movie isn’t (that) bad

By Eileen G ’Sell

COURTESY PHOTO

Greedy for gauzy sunlit

patios, candy-colored Cadillacs and clinking martinis, I expected Don’t W orry Darling to be a brilliant disaster, a fau prestige flick worth viewing for its production design alone. I e pected to en oy the film in the same way I en oy watching and rewatching narratively preposterous fragrance ads from the early ’ s o substance o problem. s livia ilde’s second directorial feature and perhaps the most gossip plagued movie of the year — Don’t W orry Darling has so far received more attention for the personal skirmishes between its cast and director and sheer presence of arry tyles than for any salient failings of the film itself. ut the public has always adored a good catfight, real or imagined, especially between smart, beautiful women who dare to maybe dislike each other. ust as the public loves punishing smart, beautiful women for daring to do something serious.

Don’t W orry Darling doesn’t succeed as serious art, but it does work as a decent dystopian drama with some seriously memorable cinematic moments. et in ictory, a s company town nestled in an unnamed desert valley, the film follows lice lorence ugh , a something wife to ack arry tyles , a rising “technical engineer for ictory’s top secret “development of progressive materials. arly on, we get a whiff that this idyll of glossy pools and glassy houses isn’t what it seems. “ e shouldn’t be here, declares argaret i i ayne , one of ictory’s few lack citi ens, disrupting company head rank hris ine during a speech in his backyard. Indeed, no one knows why they are there, and Margaret pays for making a stir. ictory, it seems, is only possible if no one asks uestions, and the wives never tread past a boundary after which nothing is “safe. ound like a clunky metaphor for male oppression erhaps, but it’s also not far off from the literal s reality of a ew e ico community built by the . . government where the llies’ top scientists and engineers tested nuclear weapons while their wives were kept as ignorant as possible. I’m not sure if story writers consciously drew on this history, but its geographic similarity to ictory often felt uncanny. or those interested, Tara hea esbit’s e cellent novel The W ives of Los A lamos e plores the vantage of these wives to eerie, often profound, effect.

R eminiscent of Pleasantville,Stepford W ives, and R evolutionary R oad with a brutal dash of C lockwork O range , Don’t W orry Darling may be derivative, but that would hardly seem to matter in an age when every other film is a sequel / prequel / contemporary remake. hat it does with its dystopian flourishes is often uite original, as are the film’s furtive final images that have prompted Inception level interpretations online.

Throughout the film, the visuals themselves outshine the plot and script often to hypnotic, unnerving effect. treme close ups of coffee poured, eggs fried, and breakfast plated — all taken from a bird’s eye view mirror recurrent black and white clips of usby erkeley like showgirls forming geometric shapes with their bodies, gesturing not only to the ways that domestic and se ual duties conflate wives with household props but also to ictory’s fascist overtones erkeley, let’s not forget, was influential to eni iefenstahl . In an early visually dis uieting scene, lice wraps her face and head with the aran wrap out for her husband’s lunch, her face smashed as to be unrecogni able till she tears it from her skull. ith its sun blanched, menacing atmosphere and ugh at its helm, the film perhaps most strikingly resembles ri ster’s Midsommar, in which ugh played ani, a reluctant whistleblower at a cult like wedish festival. In Don’t W orry Darling, the year old once again plays a complicated woman who refuses to be gaslit. nce again, she breaks down into righteous hysterics, her torment never compromising our faith in her udgment and reliability.

In the role of her passive, if amorous, spouse is arry tyles can he pull it off That doesn’t really matter his character, like most of the men onscreen, are more caricatures of patriarchal power than flesh and blood husbands. or those among us who en oy watching ugh play whistleblower who en oy watching her incredibly e pressive face and body do, well, practically anything tyles can remain ust “style, as it were, a cardboard cutout of a heartthrob hubby who seems to enjoy cunnilingus.

I’m too old, thankfully, to care about tyles but young enough to find ilde’s filmmaking debut, Booksmart, a surprisingly fresh yet relatable bildungsroman that values the levity and comple ity of teenage girldom. lso written by atie ilberman, Don’t W orry Darling isn’t as good as Booksmart, but it also isn’t as bad as people want it to be. In fact, it isn’t bad at all, when you consider most of what passes for cinema these days. It is an uneven, but visually compelling, film whose emotional resonance rests on the s uare shoulders of ugh, her generation’s answer ate inslet.

Is it brilliant o. ut it also isn’t bad. on’t be gaslit. ee it for yourselves.

Don’t Worry Darling

Rated: R Run-time: 123 minutes