DON’T WORRY DARLING is not the most coherent of feminist manifestos, but it is an ambitious one, exploring as it does several variants of toxic masculinity, some unexpected, but no less pernicious for the surprise factor. Using a devoted couple, Alice (Florence Pugh) and Jack (Harry Styles) as the focal point of gender dynamics, the film has a fresh take on an old story that ultimately falls apart even as it wrenches the heart.
Alice and Jack live in Victory, an upscale planned company community in the middle of the California desert somewhere in the middle of the last century, created and overseen by Frank (Chris Pine), a visionary with plans to change the world. There is perfect isolation from the outside world, with the men going off to work each day at the Victory plant, where they are changing the world by producing progressive materials. Not even their wives, and all Victory employees must be male and married to a woman, know exactly what happens at the plant, but their curiosity is diverted by housework, ballet classes, dinner parties, and shopping locally (and only locally) with their unlimited credit accounts. It is a life where fashion is perfectly accessorized, dinner is on time each evening, and the ladies drink and smoke during pregnancy. All is bliss until one of the wives (KiKi Layne) starts to ask the wrong questions in public, which is defined as any question at all. When Alice witnesses that wife cutting her own throat, it provokes her to start asking her own questions, putting her marriage, her husband’s career, and maybe even her life, at risk.
As a gloss of the conformity of the 1950s, the film is dead on, with men and women self-segregating and a cult of personality surrounding Frank, the embodiment of the order of the status quo. He preens before his adoring acolytes with empty catchphrases and a smile that encapsulates his self-satisfaction at being in control. Yet there is more going on here, as Alice realizes as she begins to hallucinate, or is it a new reality forcing its way into her mind? Breaking the one rule Frank imposes on the wives, as least the only one spelled out in this particular patriarchy, she ventures out into the desert beyond the security of her well-ordered suburb, unsettling her mind and exposing to her the deficiencies of being nothing more than a pampered wife.
Pugh is sublime as a dynamic woman subsumed in her identity as a helpmeet of an adoring husband and nothing more. The shock of being silenced from asking questions with the familiar patriarchal to stop being hysterical is a reaction of both spirit and body that is palpable, as is the psychic freefall of suddenly being forced to question everything her character had previously taken for granted. The aptly named Alice finds herself going through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole.
Director Olivia Wilde (who also co-stars as Alice’s gossipy best friend, Bunny), does an excellent job of maintaining an air of increasing unreality throughout, with intimations of the too-perfect village in “The Prisoner” even at the beginning when Alice and Jack are the definition of happy. There is even a hint of menace in the way breakfast eggs and bacon fry that goes beyond the rote repetition it represents about Alice’s life.
The narrative feels choppy. What, for example, is causing the occasional tremors that add a touch of excitement to the wives’ day? Why does Frank tell Alice that he is happy that he finally has someone to challenge him? Was there a plot thread left on the cutting room floor that answers that, or is it just a way to intimidate yet another curious wife? The subsequent action doesn’t make it clear. There are other plot holes, too, and some imagery that, while artistically bold, fails to illuminate.
DON’T WORRY DARLING is a challenging, visually arresting film that can’t quite support the weight of its intent. Praiseworthy for that reason alone, it is otherwise frustrating for what it might have been.
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