Don't Worry Darling

Director: Olivia Wilde
Starring: Florence Pugh, Harry Styles, Olivia Wilde, Gemma Chan, KiKi Layne, Chris Pine, Nick Kroll, Sydney Chandler, Asif Ali, Kate Berlant, Timothy Simons, Douglas Smith, Ari'el Stachel, Dita Von Teese
Running Time: 123 min.
Rating: R

**The Following Review Contains Major Plot Spoilers For 'Don't Worry Darling' **

★★★ (out of ★★★★)

Hardly the disaster it's been purported to be, Olivia Wilde's psychological thriller Don't Worry Darling does have more than a few things going for it, regardless of all rumors surrounding how strained the production may have been. What's on screen matters most, making it somewhat ironic that Wilde's direction and Florence Pugh's lead performance are the film's two biggest strengths, mostly eclipsing some admitted deficiencies. The latter also again earns all the justified the hype anointing her  one of our most talented contemporary actresses. It's not a coincidence that of those scarred by the commercial and critical drubbing this took, she escapes completely unscathed, if not more appreciated than before. 

Recalling elements of The Stepford Wives, Get Out, Pleasantville, The Matrix, The Truman Show, Inception and probably a few others, Katie Silberman's script may not be entirely original and is largely set-up and mood, but it slowly builds to a satisfying enough payoff that prevents the film from buckling under its own ambitions. And however you may feel about the execution or conceit, the ending twist is definitely a doozy worth sticking around for. A mess at times, portions play like your standard thriller, even as its visual look and performances work in raising it a notch. But what it most feels like is a prototypical sophomore effort from a hotshot director who had a big hit out of the gate and is given leeway by the studio to do what they want. And both for better and worse, Wilde does that. 

Alice (Pugh) and Jack (Harry Styles) Chambers live in the idyllic, utopian 1950's-like community of Victory, California, a small company town where the men go to work everyday at Victory Headquarters manufacturing mysterious products. Heavily discouraged from asking what their husbands actually do or venturing anywhere near the desert headquarters, the wives stay at home to clean and prepare dinner for when they return. Alice has a circle of friends that include neighbor Bunny (Wilde), Peg (Kate Berlant) and Margaret (KiKi Layne), but when Margaret starts exhibiting alarmingly disturbing behavior after losing her son in the desert, she's ostracized upon her return to town. 

Suspecting there's more to Margaret's story than meets the eye, Alice's suspicions heighten after witnessing what she believes is a plane crash in the desert and begins experiencing many of the same nightmarish hallucinations that plagued her friend. Soon, this catches the attention of Victory's enigmatic but seemingly benevolent leader, Frank (Pine), who's clearly hiding something. But as Jack rises up the ranks at the company, Alice must decide whether it's worth risking the comfortable life they've built together to escape a controlling force far more sinister and dangerous than anyone in Victory ever imagined.

What's immediately apparent even before all the story's pieces are put together is that this isn't taking place during the 1950's, and even while all the cars, wardrobe and myriad of era-specific music may signify otherwise, there's something else going on. Without any recognizable or meaningful history, the characters seemed to have been plucked from somewhere and placed in a very stylized, heightened version of what that era would look and feel like filtered through present day. The film straddles that line particularly well in making us believe these people would fall in line without a second thought, mistaking the cult-like creepiness for stability and comfort. It's clear none of them are there by choice, whether or not they realize it, and thus far, most don't. 

The townsfolk are the living embodiment of "going through the motions," as husbands pull out of their adjacent driveways for work in synchronicity every morning as their wives wave them off. If it feels like a staged production, earning those Truman Show comparisons mostly through DP Matthew Libatique's lensing and Katie Byron's authentically retro production design. For many, this will be where the praise begins and ends, as the film's feel supports its concept more than the actual content, which eventually ends up in familiar territory. 

In Wilde's defense, this is a more worthwhile attempt than expected in replicating this well-worn formula, mainly due to Pugh, who's so good at playing a woman torn between this loyalty to her husband and the growing disorientation that she's merely a cog in a mysterious, controlling machine. Danger mounts the more curious she becomes and her questions are unwelcome intrusions hardly looked kindly upon by Victory's mastermind, Frank, and to a lesser degree, his wife Shelley (Gemma Chan). 

In a massive departure, Chris Pine's all in on this, taking full advantage of the opportunity to play the kind of sleazy villain he's rarely cast as. And while those comparisons to author and motivational speaker Jordan Peterson (off whom Frank is supposedly based) become more apparent later, it's also reminiscent of Tom Cruise's similarly nefarious turn in Magnolia. Convincingly good at playing bad, you almost wish Pine had more to do, but his cat-and-mouse game with Alice during a memorable dinner table face-off effectively sets the stage for the stockholm syndromed neighbors to doubt her as they did Margaret.

Jack's the wild card, too ingrained in this lifestyle to notice this as anything other than an Alice problem. Harry Styles doesn't register much early on but as the story's underlying layers are peeled back and he's given more complicated shades to play, his performance starts coming alive. It's not absurd to suggest he'll have a decent movie career and holds up just fine in some of the more dramatic scenes, even if the far superior Pugh carries him through the wacky finish. As for the film's much talked about sex scenes, there sure are a lot of them, but existing mostly to shock and titillate, served up as a stark contrast to the repressed society these characters inhabit.    

When the town's shady charlatan Dr. Collins (Timothy Simons) and Frank's red suited henchmen descend upon Alice, Wilde gives us a last act that's certainly a choice. It was inevitably going in this direction, with the only remaining questions being how and why. The not so subtle implications that all of what these characters are experiencing either wasn't real or a simulation of some sort is confirmed, even as we're taken aback by how literally Silberman's screenplay leans into that premise. 

After being gaslit left and right, Alice awakens to the reality (or lack thereof) in front of her, igniting a change in the women with her actions rather than words. There's a lot of baggage to unpack with the idea of characters held hostage in some kind of sexist, throw back male fantasy prison that seems to have sprung from the mind of a fringe podcaster. Intentionally or not, the movie's kind of fuzzy on the details beyond the "real" Jack being an unkempt loser who's stripped surgeon Alice of all autonomy under the guise of rescuing their marriage with this simulation. 

Viewing this entire experimental society as a metaphorical rape might recontextualize those sex scenes, but if that seems like a jumbling of various ideas you also wouldn't be wrong. It all leads to a pretty spectacular car chase sequence that proves Wilde could probably make an exciting action movie down the line if she chooses, or now more accurately, if anyone lets her. Still, you can't help but wish the whole thing was a little crazier and wonder if spending more time on the background and origins behind the reveal would have helped or hindered the experience. 

As much criticism as the film's gotten, it's at least easy see why Pugh initially decided to be a part of it, as her work makes the heady material more watchable than it has any right being. Neither the putrid, self indulgent spectacle some were fearing or the culturally significant thinkpiece it's aiming to be, Don't Worry Darling lands in some weird gray area in between. It just may take a little while to process exactly where.        

Dunkirk

Director: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, Harry Styles, Aneurid Barnard, James D' Arcy, Barry Keoghan, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy
Running Time: 106 min.
Rating: PG-13

★★★ ½ (out of ★★★★)

Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk clocks in at a tight, ambitiously intense 107 minutes. This bares mentioning not only as an under-reported detail in relation to its quality, but because at just over an hour and a half, it's one of the shortest war movies in decades. And by today's standards, it just might be one of the shortest movies, period. As tough as it may be to believe, there was a time not too long ago where every major release wasn't averaging two and a half hours in length. In fact, producers would do all they could to keep a film's running time to a minimum (remember "Harvey Scissorhands?"), interfering so heavily that the actual editor takes a backseat. The shorter the movie, the more theaters it could play in, and the more money it made.

The rules have now changed as actual brick and mortar theaters rapidly dwindle in the age of home viewing. Desperate to get anyone into a theater, studios are relying on bells and whistles like IMAX, 3D and insuring every movie "experience" is as long as humanly possible. You see, if it's an amusement park ride, you'll never want to get off, no matter how terrible. There's also little sense in leaving anything on the cutting room floor, hoping it'll be a bonus feature or deleted scene on the now defunct DVD format. The result has been movies getting progressively longer. And worse.

When you're packing stuff in just for the sake of it, there's no way the quality doesn't suffer considerably. It's also easy to forget the final bloated product we see is often the heavily edited, shorter version. A scary thought. You wouldn't have guessed the writer and director to break that streak would be Nolan given his career-long propensity to overindulge, with mostly positive but sometimes mixed results. It's still one of the industry's biggest mysteries how The Dark Knight managed to win a Best Editing Oscar when it was the very definition of a picture that would have greatly benefited from a snip and a trim. But implying Dunkirk's greatness only stems from its brevity is just as ridiculous as blaming a film's failures entirely on it running long.

While many factors are at clearly at play, it's still not unreasonable to suggest its length is the end result of many things done well, such as Lee Smith's masterful editing, which assures there isn't a single wasted or unnecessary moment. Proving a war epic doesn't have to be packed with story beats to succeed, Nolan creates this claustrophobic, almost terrifying sense of immediacy and impending doom that reverberates until the final minutes. With its emphasis squarely placed on spectacle and scope over story, it's in many ways the perfect antidote for those put off more emotionally-driven war entries like Saving Private Ryan.

It's 1940 and many of Allied soldiers have retreated to Dunkirk, France to await evacuation during World War II. One of them is Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), a young British private who survived a German ambush and now joins Gibson (Aneurin Barnard) in attempting to transport a wounded soldier from the beach onto a hospital ship. Meanwhile in Weymouth, Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance), his son Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney) and teenage friend, George (Barry Keoghan) set out to the beach aboard his boat for a civilian rescue mission that's derailed when they save a shell-shocked, shipwrecked soldier (Cillian Murphy) with little interest in returning. In the air, Spitfire pilot Farrier (Tom Hardy) must assume command after their leader is shot down, but with a shattered fuel gauge, it's likely he won't last much longer himself.

Divvying the screen time between three separate, occasionally interlocking stories that center around the evacuation, Nolan focuses on what happened on land, at sea and in the air, with the each event serving as an entry point.We already know the subject itself is often enough to warrant massive praise and awards consideration, and while this probably will to, he at least went about earning it with some creatively inspired decision-making. Consisting primarily of suspenseful action set pieces with very minimal dialogue, Nolan conveys that war is lost or won on the battlefield and does his best at keeping us there, rarely letting the narrative get dragged down by unnecessary details or needless editorializing.

Despite the obvious commitment to period accuracy, there's this slick, contemporary look to the production design and cinematography that fits Nolan's vision. Sounding like something straight out of a 70's horror movie, Hans Zimmer's pounding, foreboding score never lets up, creating an uncomfortable tension throughout. There's also a significant reliance on practical effects over CGI, which only seems to enhance the authenticity unfolding in front of us. This isn't a character study and I'd argue that unpacking backstory on all these men wouldn't have necessarily brought us closer to the situation they're in and may have even slowed the momentum. What pulls us closer to the event is exactly what Nolan does in simply showing it. If everything we learn about them comes from the situation they've been thrust into, it's still an inevitability that certain segments will be the favorites, outshining others. 

Wisely casting a group of mostly fresh-faced unknowns as the soldiers, the performances are uniformly strong across the board with an excellent Fionn Whitehead as the terrified private being the closest we have to a full-blown lead in terms of screen time.  He's backed up nicely by the very known, but completely unrecognizable Harry Styles, who so seamlessly slides into his larger than expected role as Andrew, a determined British Army infantry private, you'll have to check the credits twice to believe it's him. The strongest plot thread involves Mark Rylance's civilian mariner and the friend of his son who just so happens to tag along, with all getting much more than they bargained for in taking on Cillian's Murphy's emotionally fractured, muted soldier.

In having to stay calm for the boys while navigating a potentially volatile situation, Rylance gives the film's quietest and most assured performance alongside Barry Keoghan, who conveys all the enthusiasm and apprehension of an eager volunteer trying to help, but instead finding himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, resulting in tragic consequences. With his identity as concealed here as it was in The Dark Knight Rises, Tom Hardy spends nearly the picture's entire length masked up in a cockpit, letting his voice and eyes do all the lifting, which we already know he's quite skilled at. Kenneth Branagh and James D'Arcy probably have the least to do in their respective roles as British Commander Bolton and Colonel Winnant, if only because there's so little talk of either strategy or politics. It's essentially non-stop action, which works to the film's benefit.

Despite a tame PG-13 rating, nothing about Dunkirk feels sanitized or glossed over to appeal to wider audiences. And yet, it's still one of the more accessible in its genre and among the chosen few worth rewatching. While all of the events are fictionalized, what they went through is very much inspired by true events and feels it, with Nolan employing a fast-paced, docudrama style approach that puts us right there with them. It's almost as if he set all the preventive measures in place to cut off the depressingly common "been there, done that" feeling that's accompanied most war pictures released over the past 25 years.