![]() So where does a story like this go when it’s obvious right from the get-go there is something deeply twisted going on under its surfaces? Cinema has already given us two versions of The Stepford Wives as well as Suburbicon and Blue Velvet and Pleasantville and any number of other films about the corrosive underbelly of pleasant, old-fashioned domesticity. The movie isn’t exactly subtle on this point. “The people we are playing were real people in a world very much our own,” Pine said. ![]() At the Venice press conference for the film, Wilde and her cast talked about how despite the period trappings of the movie, it’s really about today. There is grace in symmetry.” On the radio, the voice of Frank (Chris Pine), the Victory Project’s leader, offers forcefully stated bromides such as “You are worthy of the life you’ve chosen.” Later, he’ll talk about how the enemy of progress is chaos. The women go to dance classes where they are told, “There is beauty in control. The men drive off in gleaming, uniform, multicolored cars into the desert. The wives all wave their hands in unison at their husbands. ![]() The Chambers’ neighborhood is part of something called “the Victory Project,” where everything is cleanly coordinated and regimented, where men are men and women are women, where steaks and cocktails are waiting when hubby gets home, and where the characters are rewarded with lots of happy kids and/or great sex.Ĭlearly, something is deeply wrong here. military during the development of the atom bomb. Set in a carefully manicured, mid-century suburban utopia placed smack in the middle of a desert, Darling explores the growing self-awareness of a young housewife, Alice Chambers (Florence Pugh), whose doting husband Jack (Harry Styles) sets off every morning with all the other men to a top-secret job where he works with what is referred to only as “progressive materials.” There are overtones here of the “ secret cities” of the Manhattan Project, the prefab residential communities built by the U.S. The film is smooth, competent, (mostly) well acted, and merely tedious. Hearing all the rumors of a troubled set and of actors falling out with the director, one might have expected a cacophonous, cobbled-together catastrophe. Arriving at the Venice Film Festival on a rapidly growing tidal wave of toxic buzz, Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling is neither as bad as some are clearly hoping it will be nor as good as it probably needs to be to overcome the public-relations nightmare its press rollout has become.
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