Don't Worry Darling

Perfectly Frank (Without Benefit of Distraction)

or

Who's Afraid of Olivia Wilde?

 

"You have a lovely home," murmurs Frank (Chris Pine) as he's welcomed to a dinner at the Technicolor dream-house of Jack and Alice Chambers (Harry Styles, Florence Pugh). And of course it is. It's a vision of America right out of TV sit-come 50's-60's, where the wives wear make-up all day, make a multi-course meal and go skipping to the door with a drink in their hand to greet the man who's come home from work...of an unknown and not-talked about nature.

 

It's a man's world, even if the shows made a pretext that the woman was secretly in charge (Really, do you think that Elizabeth Montgomery's all-powerful witch Samantha would really put up with ad-exec husband Darren's boobish "Sam, I'm the man of the house and what I say goes" before turning him back into a chimpanzee?) And Jack and the rabbit-holed Alice live in a cul-de-sac community in a desertish sub-division surrounded by mountains. The husbands drive off in their dream-cars, while the women do their house-work, listening to lectures by Frank about achieving the dream-existence, the perfect life, outside of the chaos everybody else puts up with. The men are off working on Frank's "Victory Project" off in the mountains doing...something...but every so often their world is rocked by temblors, which are dismissed with an off-hand "Boys with their Toys" remark to go back to sunning themselves and sipping their scotch-and-sodas.

It's all as fake as the blue on Jack's business-suit, but nobody questions it. Nobody asks questions. Life is good. Don't rock the boat (even if the ground does rock from time to time). At the neighborhood ballet class, the mantra is "there is beauty in control, grace in symmetry, we are as one". But there are cracks showing up in the veneer of this world just like the cracks in the sun-baked asphalt of the community streets.

Little things, like the rumor about the neighbor who walked outside the Victory City limits with her son, and only she returned. I mean there were the "Warning! Employees Only Beyond This Point (Hazardous Materials)" signs, that are ubiquitous beyond the trolley route (the trolleys have signs that say "What you See Here/What You Do Here/What You Hear Here/Let's Let It Stay Here") and the bad dreams that Alice has of dilating eyes and chorus-girls in Busby Berkley-like dance routines—that turn nightmarish. Sometimes, the eggs that Alice cooks for her Instagram-perfect meals are empty. Walls start closing in during the daily cleaning, to the sound of Frank's "Shatnering" (Pine really gets into it a couple of times).

And then, there's the plane. Alice sees it—a vintage red prop-plane—that flies overhead one day, shimmers in the air, and starts to spiral down into the hills surrounding the enclave. Alice runs out into the desert, past the warning signs, up to the prominent hill where "the boys" go to work and bangs on the structure trying to get help for the crashed passengers, but, no one answers her call. Instead, a bunch of beefy security guys in red suits appear out of nowhere and haul her away...to be corrected...before returning her back to the neighborhood.

Just what is going on in Don't Worry Darling, Olivia Wilde's sophomore directorial effort (after the hilarious and hyper Booksmart) is teased for the first 2/3 of the movie with the too-slick veneer of the film constantly being smudged by the encroaching feeling that something is "terribly, terribly wrong" (as they say in the "True Crime" docs)...but what? Is it the demands of satire, or some Shyamalanian twist that will sneak up on you at the end? Don't Worry Darling is full of incident that makes you wonder what's real, what's a dream, and what's a delusion while rarely giving you a focal point of where the truth lies.

We've seen this game-plan before. "Wandavision" did it recently. For those with more media savvy, there are doses of The Matrix and The Stepford Wives with doses of "The Twilight Zone"(s), "Black Mirror," and "The Prisoner" TV show (both versions, in fact) mixed in. It has the disadvantage of being feature length (half-hours are ideal) with the burden of wrapping things up at the end (which it does, probably not to everyone's satisfaction...but, as a "Prisoner" fan, I don't mind a little ambiguity), but doesn't take the cop-out of cliff-hangers, or taking the "X-Files" route of just ending without explanation. 

But, it also hints at elements in "the real world" (such as it is) like any "no, really, we're helping YOU" cult—along the lines of Synanon, EST, Scientology, Jonestown and Trump-land—that promises some sort of fulfillment, when the only thing that's being filled is the leader's bank account (we never know Frank's last name...it could be "Ponzi"). One could see it as a comment on "crazy cures" and conspiracy theories and their influence on a gullible, privileged society—it certainly fits—especially in regards to people who spend endless hours watching the latest News from Wackyland (or long-winded movie reviews) on their computers. Don't Worry Darling is merely an extension of that.

But, with all those references to hold a broken mirror up to, there is one more comparison to a movie (based on the play) that I want to make—Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Both films deal with the lengths—bordering on control games and shared illusions—that a troubled and failing couple might go to in order to maintain the relationship, whether for personal need or in order to just maintain a semblance of an easier status quo. There is desperation there and Don't Worry Darling maintains a constant feeling of desperation...and unease.

The third act also has some desperation problems, as well—trying to create an action-filled third act (which, unfortunately, undercuts some of the movie-logic needed to gird the film), but as long as one isn't a stickler for continuity's sake, one will find Don't Worry Darling a finely crafted tale of "disturbia" with impeccable direction and design—the music choices are inspired and John Powell's music, superb—all supported by a plucky "in-every-frame" performance by Florence Pugh that is brave, believable, and, at times, horrorific. The movie is worth seeing, just to see her.*

* Notice I haven't mentioned any of the garbage about the premiere publicity from the entertainment press and (worse) social media? The reason is it's worse than irrelevant, it's distracting. Which, in a wonderful irony, only makes the movie's point.

Eternals

You Don't Know Jack

or

The Marvelization of Chloé Zhao!!

 

Jack Kirby was "The King" of comics. That's what Stan Lee called him, anyway—and the two had their disagreements over the years. But, Kirby's influence in the funny-books from the 40's on towards infinity was immense, preceding anything Lee did. Marvel Comics, as we know it, flowed from Kirby's drawing table and legitimately his draftsmanship could be called the "soul" of that comics line, becoming its "house style". I could list the comics series and characters he created, but the list is long and there are other places you could find that information, and this is about a movie version of one of his creations, rather than some obligatory mention of its origins (which I seem to be doing, anyway). 

 

So...briefly...this is that. In the 1970's Kirby left Marvel to go over to the DC comics line—Superman, Batman—and wrote and drew "The New Gods", a series of books joined by a singular history that had nothing to do with Krypton or anything associated with DC's previous output.* The books were canceled at some point (but the characters retained) and Kirby went back to Marvel and did something somewhat similar for them, writing and drawing "The Eternals."

Marvel Studios has now made a film of the Kirby creation, Eternals, and it has a hard duty to fulfill. Kirby basically took the 2001 story-line—he did a comics adaptation of the film that same year—of an extra-terrestrial "god"—called "The Celestials"—who create two off-shoots of primitive life on Earth, homo immortalis ("The Eternals") and homo descendus ("Deviants"). The Eternals defend the nascent humans from the Deviants in order that humanity evolves into a kinder, gentler race where everybody just gets along. It's going to be a long wait, but The Eternals, borrowing Starfleet's Prime Directive, are beholden to not interfering with human history and just defending us mere mortals. That's the gist. The mythos has expanded and gotten wildly complicated since the series debut in 1976.

Eternals doesn't make it any less complicated, but they do put a different spin on it, giving it a couple of Mobius twists that have less to do with the comics and more with basic cosmology and energy equations. That comes up later, but the main thing for movie-viewers to know is that in the year 5000 B.C. ten Eternals come to Earth at the behest of the Celestial Arishem (The Judge) to fight Deviants to protect human evolution. They are (bear with me): Ajak (Salma Hayek) a healer, Ikarus (Richard Madden), with super-strength and heat-vision, Sersi (Gemma Chan) a matter-manipulator, Thena (Angelina Jolie) a warrior who can make any weapon out of cosmic energy, Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani) who can project energy projectiles, Gilgamesh (Don Lee) the strongest fighter, Druig (Barry Keoghan) who can manipulate minds, Sprite (Lia McHugh) a projectionist, Makkari (Lauren Ridloff) who's fast, and Phastos (Bryan Tyree Henry) a weapons and technology expert.

That's a lot of people to introduce in 2 hours, 37 minutes and one can look at them and go "Well, he's Superman and she's Wonder Woman and she's the Flash" and the rest have a lot of left-over powers—in fact, this Marvel movie pays lip-service to Batman's butler and Clark Kent, which is odd (I mean, they're so daaaark!)—but the basics are that over seven millennia they build up a lot of resentment towards the slow evolutionary process of mankind and they have a tendency to rebel and go their own ways. As the movie shows, that's not necessarily a bad thing, and given the proclivity of meat-puppets to do stupid stuff, one could hardly blame an eternal for self-imposed exile or discretionary mind-control.

Now, Eternals writer-director Chloé Zhao just won the Best Director Oscar for Nomadland (deservedly, I thought), and the nuance of that film, the story-telling through images, the lived-in feeling of the performances...and pretty much absent in this movie. Okay, there is some location shooting with battles out in the open instead of a disguised green-screen, but we've seen this before as the Marvel movies have been moving out of the standard New York locations since the second Iron Man movie. Performances are fine, but run the gamut of slipping dialects to "I've-got-to-take-this-garbage-very-seriously" earnestness. One gets the impression that there might be a four to five hour version of the thing because some of the transitions and montage sequences seem a bit disjointed. One says this advisedly as one realizes that the bar for audience satisfaction for these things is an action sequence every ten minutes.

For all the effort, and the obvious attempt to extend the scope of the Marvel Studio output and to make it a more inclusive film—despite stepping on some embarrassing tropes along the way—one has to say that it is considerably less than an involving experience. For all the cosmology bandied about (and it's about 5% of the "woo-woo" Kirby was capable of conveying) it comes down to trying to sell the concept that our Pale Blue Dot amounts to a hill of beans in a limitless, roiling expanse of space-time. I wasn't buying it, even if I was supposed to be rooting for Our Team. The motivations are too random and unearned...or even very well articulated. Given what has happened previously in the MCEU, I suspect that this is all some positioning of structural rebar for a bigger story to be revealed later throughout "Phase IV" of the studio's game-plan. But, at this point, I'm searching for a reason to care and I simply don't.

* Kirby's ink-stained fingerprints are all over comic-based movies—I mean, Thor, Hulk, Cap'—but the first time one of his wholly creator-acknowledged creations was realized on-screen was the character Steppenwolf in Justice League (and also Darkseid, DeSaad and Granny Goodness in Zack Snyder's Justice League).