Olivia Wilde (2022)

I struggled to share the widespread enthusiasm for Olivia Wilde’s feature directing debut, Booksmart (2019).  It’s only too easy to be part of the consensus that her second film, Don’t Worry Darling, is NBG.  The setting is 1950s California – a town called Victory, whose residents are good-looking young married couples (and, in a few cases, their children).  The husbands set off for work each morning in a procession of standardised cars.  The wives keep house and themselves beautiful.  In the evenings, after dinner, the couples sometimes get together for boozy fun.  The men’s workplace is somewhere in the surrounding desert, their employer the company that virtually owns the town.  So maybe the company should be blamed, rather than Olivia Wilde and Katie Silberman (who, with Carey and Shane Van Dyke, wrote Don’t Worry Darling), for the unsubtle symbolic name of the place.

The women aren’t supposed to ask questions about the men’s work and certainly mustn’t visit Headquarters (sic).  Margaret (KiKi Layne) took her little son there; he died or, at least, disappeared – according to Margaret, the company abducted the child in order to punish her transgression.  At a party hosted by Frank (Chris Pine), Victory’s founder and the men’s boss, Alice (Florence Pugh) notices Margaret’s husband (Ari’el Stachel) trying to medicate her.  This isn’t the only thing that Alice, the story’s heroine, observes that she shouldn’t and which messes with her head.  She spots Frank with a camera trained on her and her husband Jack (Harry Styles).  Riding a trolley across town, she sees a plane crash nearby.  She runs to help, inadvertently coming upon Headquarters.  After touching one of its windows, Alice starts to experience surreal visions.  She receives a phone call from Margaret, who says she’s experienced the same visions.  Alice immediately visits Margaret, just in time to witness her slit her own throat.  Jack insists Margaret fell to her death accidentally – a diagnosis confirmed by the creepy town doctor (Timothy Simons), who puts Alice on prescription drugs too.  When she fails to take them and calm down, she’s forced to undergo electric shock treatment, which generates further disturbing scenes inside her mind.

It doesn’t take long, in other words, for dreadful cracks to appear in the ‘idyllic’ façade of the place and its people.  It takes a great deal longer for Olivia Wilde to deliver her big reveal:  we have to endure three-quarters of her two-hour film before confirmation arrives that Victory is a ‘simulated’ world whose creator is the sinister Frank, that Jack has forced Alice to inhabit it because she was unhappy in her real life in the present day – working unsociable, exhausting hours as a hospital doctor (while Jack is unemployed).  The news that they comprise refugees from twenty-first-century America does something to explain the otherwise surprising ethnic diversity of the affluent Victory community, but not much more.  In the meantime, Wilde tarts up her tiresome, unoriginal story with black-and-white inserts of Busby Berkeley-ish chorines and more in-your-face images of female claustrophobia – Margaret trapped behind glass, Alice swathing her head in cling-film and fighting to tear it off before she suffocates.

Having two English actors in the leads draws attention to the fact that Alice is American while Jack is British for no better reason, it seems, than that the film-makers realised it was expecting too much of Harry Styles to sustain an American accent.  To be honest, acting more generally looks to be beyond him on the evidence of this film.  At the other extreme, Florence Pugh brings conviction to a role that’s a waste of her time and great talent.  I’ve not liked Olivia Wilde as an actress to date (especially not in Richard Jewell (2019)); as Alice’s friend Bunny, she does nothing to change my mind.  The cast also includes Asif Ali, Kate Berlant, Gemma Chan and Nick Kroll.  The closing credits are accompanied by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers’ ‘Where or When’.  The same number once featured in a film about a different Alice:  Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974).  Wilde’s song choice may or may not be making some kind of ironic connection between the circumstances of Florence Pugh’s Alice and Ellen Burstyn’s (both, in different ways, on the receiving end of men).  ‘Where or When’, in combination with Don’t Worry Darling as a whole, certainly had this viewer wanting to escape back into the world of 1970s cinema.

29 September 2022