How Kim K explains Olivia Wilde’s anxiety fantasy
Who’s smarter about Don’t Worry Darling, Robert Bresson or Kim Kardashian? Kim K wrote the best review by distilling its cultural significance. Her 38-word Instagram post is probably responsible for the film’s $19 million opening-weekend box-office gross, influencing her nearly 300 million pop-culture followers to see for themselves what the media gossip surrounding the film was all about.
Kim K ignored the ignorable plot — about nubile white Alice (Florence Pugh) who is trapped as a housewifey sex slave in post-WWII suburban go-getter America — to praise the film’s celebrity participants in terms of her own celebrity status. So she responded with the perfect idiot-consumer review:
I just watched Don’t Worry Darling this weekend. I REALLY liked it. It’s really good! Harry is so good in it and I am now obsessed with @florencepugh, she’s beyond an amazing actress and she’s so pretty too.
Don’t fool yourself that movies mean anything more to Millennials than Kim K’s superficial satisfaction. Don’t Worry Darling is a shoppers’ paradise for filmgoers indifferent to current crises and clueless about bygone social standards.
That moral vacancy is the film’s real nightmare, which a spiritual artist like Bresson might reveal, but it eludes director Olivia Wilde, who places her incongruous characters (British actors Pugh and Harry Styles) in such an artificial setting that their behavior is acceptable only as celebrity folderol. Wilde highlights the sci-fi freakiness of Alice’s adjustment to middle-class luxe — her panic when she realizes that the bourgeois advantages of living in Victory Project, an affluent experimental community, come at a frightful cost to its cookie-cutter breadwinner husbands (Styles as Jack) and their homebody Stepford Wives.
Apparently unfamiliar with Ira Levin’s Seventies sci-fi thriller The Stepford Wives — a suburban version of Rosemary’s Baby paranoia (remade in 2004 as a forgettable Nicole Kidman vehicle) — Kim K fell for how Wilde rebooted the concept for pampered Millennials. Alice enjoys the fantasy atmosphere of a cul-de-sac subdivision that resembles the Edward Scissorhands fairy tale, the dystopia of Downsizing, and the Desperate Housewives prime-time soap opera.
Detached from social reality, it’s artsy feminist oppression. Alice hallucinates black-and-white images of platinum-blonde chorines doing David Lynch–Busby Berkeley–patterned choreography, suggested by her robotic TV-viewing habits, plus pre–women’s-lib suspicion about her regimented cocktail-party lifestyle.
The film’s fear-and-condescension title suggests dispassionate decadence. That’s why the ugly rumors hyping the film’s production troubles and promotional mishaps mean more to ticket-buyers than the story itself. Devised by screenwriters Kate Silberman, Carey Van Dyke, and Shane Van Dyke, it evokes the current oversmart cop-out that we’re living in a political simulation.
The solution: Hollywood needs more women directors. But not like Wilde, who misreads the basic spiritual unhappiness at the heart of feminism. Contemporary social unease becomes a vehicle for Wilde’s directorial aspirations. As in Booksmart, she shows no skill at narrative pulse; the period music, costumes, and shop-window design are all off-kilter.
Alice is first warned by disaffected neighbor Margaret Watkins (KiKi Layne), the only black housewife, because that’s Hollywood’s quota, not social reality. The film’s preposterous suburban ethnic diversity indicates that Wilde can’t distinguish ’50s and ’60s America from today. She buys into the current anxiety fad and then blames the arrogance of white men. (Victory Project guru Chris Pine asks, “What’s the opposite of progress?” Jack answers, “Chaos.” Then, “Whose world is it?” “Ours!”)
Wilde is remote from Covid-era terror (the tyranny that Jean-Pierre Jeunet captured well in Big Bug), even though, as an actress, she seems like one of Jeunet’s automatons: Playing the cynical, gimlet-eyed confidante Bunny, Wilde bests Pugh’s pudgy, innocent Alice. Bunny harbors the transactional secret behind conjugal excess enjoyed by an unconscious concubine. It’s Bunny who exposes Kim K’s identification with Alice: It’s some kind of self-protective celebrity projection.
How was such a dishonest film ever green-lighted? Except for Alice’s getaway in a beautiful silver antique Corvette, Wilde wastes the resources of corporate filmmaking.
Visionary Bresson, who made Les Anges du Péché (Angels of Sin) and Les Dames de Bois du Boulogne, gets the last word on Wilde’s deceitful incompetence: “Technique is a small thing if you have something to say. Even if you say it wrong, it’s okay.” But Bresson included a warning that fits Don’t Worry Darling better than Kim K could imagine: “If you don’t have anything to say, it’s always wrong.”
