A stylish, saucy entry in the “stepford wife” subgenre, Don’t Worry Darling treads familiar ground while wearing a killer pair of pumps. The movie won’t surprise you (although I found its “reveal” to be timely and perhaps even prescient), but it sure looks great while not doing it.
At first, Alice Chambers (Florence Pugh) thinks she wants to wear chic shoes too. Dolled up in a dress and rubber gloves, she scrubs away in her sleek, mid-century home while her husband Jack (Harry Styles) is at work. At the end of the day, she’s ready to greet him with a cocktail in hand and a roast in the oven. All the wives in their neighborhood—a planned, pop-art oasis in the middle of a searing desert—have the same routine; they’re happy to sit at home or by the community pool while their husbands contribute to the Victory Project, an undefined initiative involving “progressive materials” that’s led by the vaguely inspirational Frank (Chris Pine). All seems well until Alice grows curious, prompted by brief, intermittent visions of Busby Berkeley-style dancers and a song that’s stuck in her head.
Don’t Worry Darling represents something of a left turn for Booksmart director Olivia Wilde, who is working again with one of the screenwriters on that project, Katie Silberman. (Carey Van Dyke and Shane Van Dyke also share story credit here.) Booksmart was a riotous teen comedy with a deep affection for its characters; while Don’t Worry Darling has its moments of humor, there’s also a wickedness at play. Rather than laughter, the sound design pulses with strange sighs, panting breaths, and the occasional, admonishing hush.
Booksmart had some fun visual flourishes (including a stop-motion sequence), but nothing like the inventiveness Wilde displays here, using camera movement and close-ups to convey the claustrophobia creeping into Alice’s catalog life. Working with immensely talented cinematographer Matthew Libatique (Requiem for a Dream, Chi-Raq, Birds of Prey), she fashions a film in which the surface sheen of the 1950s begins to collapse in on itself—quite literally during a moment in which Alice’s home begins to close in on her, squeezing her between a hallway wall and a sliding-glass door.
Wilde also has fun onscreen as Bunny, one of the neighborhood’s more martini-mad wives. As should be expected, however, it’s Pugh who stands out among the cast. Rather than introduce Alice as a naive fool, Pugh shows us from the outset that this is a woman with individual spark (in exchange for that after-work drink, she gets what she sexually wants from her husband). So it’s natural that once questions begin to arise, Alice is going to pursue answers—which is when we get the indomitable Pugh from the likes of Lady Macbeth, Little Women and Midsommar. There’s a great moment during a dinner party at the Chambers’ house where Frank quietly threatens Alice in the kitchen and she responds by taking Jack’s seat, across from Frank, at the head of the table. Pugh is not an actor to be put in her place.
As for Styles, the pop star/aspiring thespian is more than serviceable, if never quite up to Pugh’s level. (Few are.) He has a dance scene that’s disarmingly goofy (and makes more sense after the movie’s twist is revealed). And in the one moment that really matters—when Jack and Alice are making a crucial decision about their future—he manages the tricky sort of ambivalence the scene needs to work.
If there are any new ideas at play in Don’t Worry Darling, they enter into the film after the reality of Alice’s situation is revealed. (Slight spoilers ahead.) It’s a bit Shyamalanesque in its construction—meaning, don’t think about the logistics too much—yet also provocative for the way it takes the central conceit of 1975’s The Stepford Wives and updates it for a “metaverse” age. For men still emasculated by the idea of women in the workforce, virtual reality could be a pernicious gift. Why acquiesce to equality when—like the James Bond poster that we see in the background of one shot—you can just put on a nice suit and play pretend?
(9/21/2022)
