Don’t Worry about Don’t Worry Darling

T here has been a great deal written about the drama surrounding the making and marketing of Don’t Worry Darling, director Olivia Wilde’s follow-up to her nerds-night-out debut, Booksmart. But I’m of the opinion that critics should be concerned with what’s on the screen, not off it. My only nod in that direction will be to say that, purely in terms of what ended up on the screen, it seems a shame that Shia LaBeouf was replaced by Harry Styles as the film’s leading man.

Over the course of his curious career — thinking here of American Honey and Honey Boy in particular — LaBeouf has proven himself capable of putting across the febrile intensity of the frustrated soul. He surely could have managed the desperate devotion, wounded weakness, and submerged fury required of Jack Chambers, husband to Florence Pugh’s Alice. Pugh is very much the star here; she fairly glows with they-had-faces-then glamour, and there’s all sorts of spunk and gumption on display in her willingness to be put through the wringer. But when you’re a woman in a feminist fable that dares to ask the question, What do men want? you need a proper foil. And Harry Styles ain’t it. He may be a popular singer, but as an actor, he doesn’t register. Especially when he’s performing next to Pugh.

What do men want, anyway? Remember 1975’s The Stepford Wives, the horror film in which (spoiler alert) the menfolk of a Connecticut enclave figure out that life is better if you replace your wife with a submissive simulacrum? Toward the end, the heroine asks the silver-haired Men’s Association president, “Why?” He raises a bemused brow and replies flatly, “Because we can. Think of it the other way around: Wouldn’t you like some perfect stud waiting around the house, praising you, servicing you, whispering how your sagging flesh was beautiful no matter how you looked?” Well, that’s one answer. Don’t Worry Darling’s take is rather more connubial — e.g., from what we’re shown, it seems Jack is more interested in Alice’s sexual satisfaction than his own — but it comes from a similar source: Chris Pine is the community’s master planner Frank. Frank has built a paradise in the desert called Victory, and when we meet him, he gives a speech to its residents that warns, “Chaos is the enemy of progress.” Later in the film, that gets rendered as “Chaos reigns under the auspice of equality. We crave order. Sink into the way things are supposed to be.” Oh!

There is order in Victory. Every morning, Alice fries bacon and eggs, butters toast, and pours coffee for her man. Then she follows him out to the car and kisses him goodbye just as the other wives on her cul-de-sac kiss theirs, indulges in a little house-cleaning dressed in a pretty frock and earrings, and then scoots off to ballet class, where the teacher reminds her students that “There is beauty in control; there is grace in symmetry; we move as one.” Oh!

But that’s not to say that Victory is boring. There’s plenty of time for drinking and dishing with the neighbors while hubby is away, plenty of time for drinking and dining after he comes home, lots of sex and lots of great music on the hi-fi (pay attention to those lyrics, people). And did we mention that everything looks fantastic, in a sun-drenched, well-dressed, color-rich mid-century America sort of way? Slim Aarons, call your agent!

Of course, everybody knows that mid-century America was that terrible time and place, when a woman’s only hope was to marry well and make her home into her life’s work. (One of the Victory wives declares, “Appetizers are where I express myself.”) So maybe it’s not a total surprise when one of the women (one of the few black characters, as it happens) cracks under the strain of domestic tranquility, drags her son into the desert, suffers a breakdown, and then . . . well, it isn’t pretty. Nor is the way that the community attempts to shelve the whole unpleasant business. The advice, “Don’t get hysterical,” is brought to bear — a caution against the madness of the womb. Oh!

Poor Alice starts seeing things, including a nightmare troupe of Busby Berkeley chorus girls. So much grace in symmetry, so much moving as one. . . . She starts feeling things, including a carton of eggs that turns out to be full of empty shells and a picture window that decides to manifest the pressure a woman might feel when she’s constantly in display mode. (On that day, she’s doing her chores in a semi-transparent nightdress.) Oh, oh, oh! And then there’s the doomed machina ex machina that sends her on a journey off the beaten path and on the way to enlightenment.

As I have been unsubtly suggesting, Wilde’s is an unsubtle film for an unsubtle age. Earlier this week, Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams made the claim that a fetal heartbeat at six weeks does not exist, and further, that what a six-week sonogram conveys “is a manufactured sound designed to convince people that men have the right to take control of a woman’s body.” I know, I know — stick to what’s on the screen, not what’s off. But Abrams’s conspiracy-minded comment seems in keeping with the tenor of Don’t Worry Darling, an expression of the reason why someone might have thought the film would do for the conversation about women what Get Out did for the conversation about race. (It is perhaps notable that Jack and Alice have no children, as they’re having too much fun without them. But, when Jack starts feeling fatherly, he pitches it to Alice by saying, “I want more of you.”) It’s statement first, and story second. It’s a shame, because once you get past the thematic thud, there are good things here, good things beyond the lovely look and Pugh’s power. One example: The rise of the manosphere suggests that all is not well in man-land. What Do Men Want? Don’t be a beta cuck; subscribe to our podcast to find out! There’s just oodles of masculine anxiety on display among the men of Victory, and it’s played for laughs in off-handed, effective fashion.

Still, the overall effect is a solid miss, from the pacing to the action to the sound, which is perhaps the only thing more oppressive than the messaging — full of unpleasant sighs, hums, drones, and throbs, all loud enough to be distracting from the actual goings-on. It sounds wrong because it is wrong, you see. Yes, I see.