The Next Three Days

Written at the time of the film's release...

Thinking Outside the Cell-Block
or
"It Doesn't Matter What We Believe"

Director Paul Haggis, you either love or you hate. The haters find him manipulative and obvious (I'll buy the second charge, but movies, even documentaries, are—du-uh!—manipulative by their very nature) and will never forgive him for making Crash, which beat out Brokeback Mountain for the Best Picture Oscar.* The lovers, well, there aren't too many of them outside the movie industry—but Clint Eastwood and the Bond producers love him, and that's good enough for me.

His third film, The Next Three Days, which he wrote and directed,** tells the story of a couple (with child) who are separated, when she (Elizabeth Banks) is arrested, tried and convicted for murder. Her husband (Russell Crowe), a school teacher, exhausts their finances—selling two homes—and all legal recourse, trying to prove her innocence. After three years of incarceration, her child doesn't even acknowledge her (having lived half his life without her), and after her last appeal is turned down, she attempts suicide.

Time to think outside the box...the legal system, and the penal system. The civilized courses have failed...as a matter of course. It's time to take action, and matters...into one's own hands.

In a way, this is the same movie Haggis has been making all along, his thesis converted into an action plot device more positive in its usage than negative in its omission. Both Crash and In the Valley of Elah feature protagonists trying to do more than the expected by-the-book (or society) response, to subvert the easy knee-jerk "comfortable" reaction, and (I dunno) think a little deeper. He seeks the help of a multi-prison escapee (Liam Neeson, in a too-short cameo), who gives him a broad picture of the strategies of going over the wall, and more importantly, staying out. One of the first things he says may be what's written on the first page of Haggis' screenwriting notebook, as it informs so much of his work: "You have to do a lot of lookin'—things that disrupt the day-to-day routine." That semi-somnambulent day-to-day routine has been the loam Haggis has toiled in over the years, and in this film, he finds a protagonist who tries to take advantage of it, rather than subvert it.***

It's a heist film, basically, with human valuables. It is also, for a brief time, an "incredible mess" movie as Crowe's John Brennan must—painfully—learn the ropes of the outlaw life (and occasionally be beaten with them). This pays off later in the film—well, nearly everything pays off later in the film—as the "anything that could go wrong" scenarios start piling up in the film's nerve-rattling desperate finale, and one remembers how those early efforts only served to make matters worse.

The barriers that Brennan must overcome are represented by a filming scheme that places so much of the film behind screens and windows of various opacities—a traditional trope of prison films (it just doesn't happen so much out in the so-called open, as it does in here—Haggis wants us to know there are traps inside and outside prison).

Great cast. Crowe is nicely casual initially, then gradually turns into the ragged obsessive/compulsive he needs to be, Banks does drama as well as she does comedy (very), and, beyond Neeson, there are nice cameos by Daniel Stern, Olivia Wilde (as a divorcee...really?)...and particularly, Brian Dennehy, who, with the least amount of dialogue, makes the most of his scenes.

There will, no doubt, be an increase in interest in "bump"-keys, and breaking into vehicles with tennis-balls, and Haggis even throws a bone to his critics by purposely leaving a plot-thread frustratingly unresolved. It's a good film, professionally done, and with enough twists and turns to keep one engaged, while still taking the time—one of the critical elements the film focusses on—to keep things realistic, and not turning the down-to-earth perps into clairvoyant superheroes.

* A decision I've always agreed with: I think Crash was reaching for something to say—especially about the 7-10 split of a city that is Los Angeles, and the casualness of racism as the easy way out.  Brokeback Mountain, although I admired its photography and I thought Heath Ledger had the best cowboy voice in movie history (great work, that—Jake Gyllenhaal, not so much) felt too much like a Joan Crawford movie in reverse-drag.  Mellerdrama at its sawdustiest.

** After Crash and In the Valley of Elah, The Next Three Days is not original—it is based on the French film Pour Elle (Anything for Her, 2008)

*** Even a late-minute extreme act by one of the protagonists is an expression of trying to break out of the routine, to think outside the box (or in this case, the van) and break the lock-step the other is in.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone

Written at the time of the film's appearance in a puff of smoke...and featuring a small, but perfectly played part by Alan Arkin, who (contrary to recently published reports) I believe to be immortal.

"Sometimes the Magic Works...."

or

Wanna See it Again? No?

Repetition, repetition, repetition. It is the secret to prestidigitation. Do it over and over and over again, honing the skill, making it more fluid, perfecting the illusion, increasing the speed, so you leave the audience dazzled by the pixie dust of distraction. Then, once perfected, you do it again and again and again in performance, producing a jaded hardening of the artistry, the audience becoming a revolving series of marks you hit over and over again. You lose respect of the audience and the skills and the gig. The magic goes away.

Repetition is the key to The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, too. One of its major themes is the drudgery of performing the same tricks over and over and over again, a process that turns the titular magician (Steve Carell) into a zombie with a spray-tan, barely able to speak to his partner Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi) as they perform the umpteenth repetition of their standard Vegas act.  Not even the addition of a new assistant, Jane (Olivia Wilde) can stop the ennui, as the self-absorbed Wonderstone keeps calling her "Nicole" for some reason. Probably because he can, she looks more like a "Nicole" than a "Jane," and he doesn't care. At all. So, he always calls her "Nicole." "Jane" she immediately corrects, but he doesn't get it.

Repetition is also the key to Burt Wonderstone's comedy. They throw out that "Nicole"/"Jane" joke a half-dozen times throughout the movie, and a good many others, too, usually to expose the shallowness and perpetual myopia of the characters as well as the flatness of their learning curves.

That flatness, that lethargy or lack of magic, is the starting point of the character arcs. Burt is at the top of his game, successful, bored, settled into the day-to-day—the romantic encounters he engineers (if you can call them romantic) are one-night stands he pulls from the audience, provides a quick tour of his pad, a complimentary memento arranged for the evening, the signing of a non-disclosure agreement, and it all ends when he pulls a disappearing act. Whatever happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Except the magic. It left a long time ago. 

Burt (Carell) and Anton (Buscemi)—"Pure Magic"

Because success isn't very funny, Burt and Anton stagnate, especially when there are newer, edgier, geekier magicians with reality shows—like the masochistic, egotistic Steve Gray (Jim Carrey) who bills himself as "the brain rapist." The owner of Bally's (James Gandolfini), where the two have performed to sell-out crowds for years, sees the attendance softening, and demands something more "street" than his regulars can provide, and so they get canned, split up, try to rebuild, crack up, and then the story can actually begin. 

As typical romantic comedies go, this one is by the numbers: Burt's career set-back is completely unprepared for, and he finds that without the safety net of Anton, and the routine of their act, that he can't start over, or reclaim his former glory, so before long he finds himself sinking to rock bottom (performing magic at an old folks home), where, by the prestidigitation of convenient screen-writing, he finds his magic mojo again in the form of Rance Holloway (Alan Arkin), mentor and Obi-Wan Kenobi-figure who critiques Burt's work and attitude ("What, magic makes you feel 80 again?" cracks Burt).

Anybody knows, if they've taken a screenwriting class, or seen any Tom Cruise movie from the '70's-'80's knows how it will run in its course (success kills your soul, there's a rival/villain, and one must have a sage elder to find the proper path), but at least the thing maintains an entertainment value throughout and right up to the end.  Thanks to the mixture of the personalities—Carell, Buscemi, Wilde, Arkin (I'll see anything with him in it), and especially Carrey, who makes the most of his small screen-time—there's always a sprinkling of surprise, a detail, a quirk to appreciate among the over-arching familiarity of it. There's something magical about that.

Tron: Legacy

Written at the time of the film's release...

"A Shaggy God Story" 

or 

"Rebel Without a CLU"

 

A sequel to Tron seems unnecessary: the first film was not that good.* A simple story of corporate (analog) white-collar crime that is resolved and revenged in the digital realm of computers, it only came to life in the (at the time**) high-tech sequences that were computer-generated with simple high-contrast wire animations. But, given the advances in techniques since 1982, it seems inevitable that a more sophisticated sequel be envisioned and given the green neon light. Anyone looking at the original Tron in the modern light of CGI must look at it as if they were watching australopitheci playing with femurs and utter a contemptuously chauvinistic "Aww, isn't that cu-ute?...and so primitive?"

Tron: Legacy, set 28 years later (and directed by Joseph Kosinski), is a better film in construction and underlying story-line—it has to be. The Matrix films, which resemble Tron in a tesseracted inside-out way, raised the stakes, so audiences are no longer satisfied with cycle-chases and neon-frisbee duels.  Gladiator games are no longer enough. The story must matter, and be relatable, tap into a collective story...and mean something. Even if what it means is dumb.

The movie tries hard. At times you see glimpses of Matrix, Terminator, and The Dark Knight, "Frankenstein," the Star Wars prequels, with an underlying "Daddy" conflict out of Oliver Stone. But, to their credit, there's some Despero there, too.  The Jeff Bridges character Kevin Flynn, CEO of ENCOM (as a result of events in the first film) turns into a messianic figure, part Steve Jobs, part Steve Ballmer, whose vision of life under his brave new cyber-world, promises much—but only if you're not related to him. He's gone missing, with only grandparents to raise his entitled son, Sam (who grows up to be Garrett Hedlund). Sam lives a solitary life (although he is a majority stakeholder in ENCOM) wanting nothing to do with the family business—maybe some Godfather in there too?—except for a yearly prank to keep the board from getting complacent. Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) is still around,*** and a stray page from the old Flynn's arcade compels Sam to visit, and (wouldn't you know it?) he gets zapped to Tronleyland, which has had some extensive renovation done.

With the help of his digi-gangers to his analog counterparts, Tron, Clu and the others, Flynn has constructed a civilization in his cyberworld, until life, finding its way, is generated on its own. The ISO's, as they're called, are a new lifeform, that could bring new possibilities to life outside the grid in Flynn's vision. But every Creator must have his serpent, and Flynn's counterpart visionary, CLU, has his own designs for the future, which includes the invasion and occupation of territory—our world.  The stage is set for a confrontation between Flynn and his monstrous creation over their mutual goal, with Flynn's son, Sam, as the ghost in the machine, the spanner in the works.

The actors do fairly good work, given that they all performed in a green-screen purgatory, and Hedlund, with the biggest role, is okay, sometimes even engaging. But it's Jeff Bridges' film. Playing two roles, Flynn as his scruffy self, and CLU in a digitized de-aged '80's version of himself—pretty darned good, if the mouth movement is a little dodgy at times—he manages to push through two versions of the same personality, one that has grown older and wiser, the other that just stayed locked in his decades-old fantasy. Every once in awhile, Bridges' Flynn will say something "Dude-ish" that seems more clever than it is, merely for the fact that it provides a refreshing touch of analog in a digital construct.

A construct, and very derivative. But with so many bits and megabits from so many sources, it does add up to some genuine sparks of ingenuity there, far beyond the original's "parallel wars" equation, and certainly moving beyond merely the highlight of the first film, the gladiatorial games theme. Tron: Legacy is a bit like taking code from different sources to make new, more sophisticated functions. The key element being: you have to go with the program.

* My opinion, of course.  There are lots of folks who've been influenced by Tron, including John Lasseter of Pixar/Disney, and Roger Ebert, who booked Tron into his first Overlooked Film Festival.

** Okay. Here's a factoid: the computer they did the SFX on at the time had only 2MB of memory.

*** Look for Cillian Murphy in an un-credited cameo as ENCOM's chief programmer.

 

The original light-cycle sequence from Tron (1982)
How far we've come.

Babylon (2022)

I admire writer-director Damian Chazelle's work, so it pains me to say that Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day.

 

Angels and Ghosts of Toxic Nostalgia

or

Make Hollywood a Cesspool Again 

 

Yeah, well, nostalgia isn't what it used to be. 

 

Damien Chazelle's Babylon tries to be many things in its break-neck, inarticulate way: a love-sonnet to "Cinema", an hysterical screed about ambition (the uphill) and the Fickle Finger of Fate—and Fashion (the downside), an impotent rage about the inevitability of Change, and an excremental wallow in excess "just because we can."

 

It's also a bit of a litmus test on how you feel about Hollywood: starry-eyed dreamy or worm-at-the-bottom-of-a-tequila-bottle cynical. You can love the taste of sausage, but you don't want to see how it's made. 

 

Movies about movie-making rarely make a lot of coin at the box-office, but the industry does love to bestow them with Oscars. Babylon has failed at the former, and, because it's not properly rose-Technicolored besotted with The Art, it won't win any bling, either.

It's 1926, and Kinoscope studio head Don Wallach (Jeff Garlin) is throwing a wild party—security is loose, morals are looser, and everybody is either tight or flaccid—at his palatial Bel Air estate high atop a graded mountain with nothing around it but steppe and orange groves. The house looks like it fell out of the sky to the most desolate place on Earth. Thus, it's quite a task to transport anything to the place. We meet Manuel Torres (Diego Calva)—"Manny" to just about everybody who can give him a job—who has convinced one of Wallach's assistants (Flea) that he can deliver an elephant to the party. An elephant. This proves problematic and particularly perilous as the pachyderm's poundage prevents purchase. The solution? Roughage. The subsequent eruption of elephant diarrhea—which Chazelle stages like a famous silent film clip (thanks, Damien! This won't influence my review at all!)—blows enough ballast to allow everyone to get all the way up the hill.

That serves as a warning shot for the next 30 minutes as Chazelle presents his version of the "Godfather wedding", where he introduces all of the principal characters attending this orgiastic party of excess. But, where Coppola stages his sequence with snapshots of telling detail, Chazelle glides his camera in, up and around the frontal and backal nudity bumping and grinding to obfuscate the- something-to-offend-everyone anything goes-ery of his bacchanal.

We meet: Manny (of course), Mexican immigrant, who is the ultimate volunteer ("I'll do it!") to get ahead; the gossip columnist Elinor St. John (Jean Smart), who's seen a lot ("I knew Proust, you know..."), but only divulges the choice bits when it's to her highest advantage; star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), a reigning light at M-G-M, slumming it at the party which he attends on his wife (Olivia Wilde) just announcing that she's divorcing him as the capper to their latest spat, Lady Faye Zhu (Li Jun Li), the most capable one of the bunch—she does a rich Dietrich routine to a song that's hard to believe was of the period—but is a minor player at Kinoscope because 1) she is bi-sexual (which she can hide) and 2) she is Asian (which she can't). 

There's bandleader Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), who is professional amidst all the madness, but still keeps the energy of the party lively through his work. Late to the party (and not invited) is Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), a New Jersey native who just knows she's going to make it in Hollywood ("Ya either a stah or ya ain't! And I'm a stah!"), and whom Manny instantly crushes on.

After a cocaine-binge with Manny, Nellie's go-for-broke dancing at the party attracts the attention of Kinoscope brass, who are in need of an actress on-set the next day—it seems the one they hired has just died upstairs after a drug-fueled micturating display for star Orville Pickwick. By the morning, Nellie's on her way to the Kinoscope set out in the desert, and a drunken Conrad has been driven home by Manny, whom the star immediately makes his assistant ("He can do anything!").

Conrad tells Mannie the movie set is "the most wonderful place in the world," but when Nellie gets there it's anything but. The "studio" is a large field, fenced off to keep the "Hire me" crowd at bay, and there are 10 sets running simultaneously (there's no sound to interfere with silent movies), orchestras playing to provide "mood music" and a sense of chaos going on everywhere. Nellie is shuffled off to make-up, brought back, made up again and then thrown into the shoot, where she acts and dances with abandon, overshadowing the film's star (Samara Weaving). Meanwhile, a hung-over Jack takes Manny to the space where they're making his costume epic with 10 cameras filming a battle scene where the knights are played by skid-row bums off the street. One of them gets killed by running into his own spear.

It's anarchy, but, despite that, sometimes magic happens. When Nellie is asked to cry for a scene, the director (Olivia Hamilton) is amazed that she can produce them on cue. "You think you can cry a little less?" "How many drops and which eye?" Nellie asks, and, as promised, delivers that many drops from that eye. "How do you DO that?" her director asks. "I just think of home." Nellie says matter-of-factly.

You see where this is going: Chazelle the director is in love with "the timeless" image and Chazelle the writer is showing the work, patience, pain, suffering, and craziness employed to achieve it. Even if it kills you. Throughout the time-frame of the movie—1926 through (significantly) 1952—the stars will have their ups and downs, the first become last, the insignificant achieve power, and they all can lose it with a bad headline or a stupid choice...in a land and profession rife with the possibilities of both. Lives and relationships are fragile and are erased and forgotten in the quest for the indelible image made by artifice. 

The advent of talking pictures will be a life and game-changer for the industry. Technicians will be under more pressure, and the performers will have to be all-around actors, not emoters, not just-pretty-faces...and if their voices destroy the illusion the audience has of them, it's a career crusher. We've seen the story before. What Price Hollywood? (or its progeny, the various versions of A Star is Born) The Artist. Truffaut's Day for Night. Bogdanovich's Nickolodeon. Directors get nostalgic for the simpler times of film-making and return to it once they have success. It's as if they have to re-torch the pilot light to remember why they loved making movies in the first place. As the bandleader Sidney Powell says of making movies "I think they got the cameras pointed in the wrong, direction. That's what I think." Directors can't resist the urge of turning the camera.

And there's one more most appropriate example:

 

Singin' in the Rain.

Made in 1952. About the struggles of performers to adjust to "The Talkies." It is no coincidence that Chazelle references it twice in Babylon, and does so directly when Manny goes to see the movie and breaks down in tears. It's a story he lived. But, instead of death and ruin, it's in Technicolor with music and songs and laughs, even in the face of humiliation and tragedy. No one thinks of Clara Bow or John Gilbert or Anna May Wong or "Fatty" Arbuckle while they watch Singin' in the Rain. The film-makers are too good at their jobs. They're having too good a time. If you laugh, the world laughs with you...

Chazelle shopped Babylon around town after Whiplash caused a stir and he was advised it was too big a project too soon. Someone suggested a musical and so he made La La Land, instead—the modern era's version of Singin' in the Rain with music and dancing and aspirations and baked-in nostalgia. But, it's the antithesis of Babylon, just as one could say that, with Babylon, Chazelle made the "anti-Singin' in the Rain," telling the same story, but without the Technicolor-tinted filters, the practiced and fluid choreography, the charm or the illusion. Oh, it's got production value and good performances and period detail and moves like a bat outta hell. It just doesn't leave you with any feelings other than wanting to take a shower.

Babylon tells the story of what happens when you lose success, but, in an unintentionally meta-way, it also tells the story of what can happen if you have too much. You make a bad movie that you think is wonderful and important.

In the pre-showing "vamp", Margot Robbie says she's grateful that Babylon can be seen "as it should be...with an enthused audience." Well, keep wishing, sister.

 

Booksmart

Booksmart (Olivia Wilde, 2019) Two preppie straight razors, Amy and Molly (Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein), reach the end of their senior school-year with a shared world-shattering epiphany: for all their efforts to be nose-to-the-grindstone students and at the top of their class, many of their fellow graduates will be going to the same prestigious colleges, but with the bare-minimum amount of work.

 

This is bad. Superbad, in fact. But, better.

 

Their reputations as by-the-book wonks firmly embedded in the zeitgeist of the student body (who have no idea they have a zeitgeist), the two decide that on the party-filled night before graduation that they will prove that they are party animals and try to fit in a night of fun to make up for all the time they spent in the library—the college library, for which they have bogus 24 hour access cards (that's as "radical" as they get).

Their goal on their penultimate school-night is to attend a party being tossed by student council VEEP Nick' (Mason Gooding)—Molly being president—who's aunt isn't coming home from her cruise because the ship's many heads have gone tail's-up. They plan to show all the popular kids that they can be just as wild and reckless as they can. Trouble is 1) they don't know where the party is and 2) they have no transportation. They tell Amy's parents (Will Forte, Lisa Kudrow) that they're going to the library. That's what they usually do, so no prob'!

They'll eventually hit three parties, become perpetually embarrassed in front of peers and mentors, ingest accidentally, trip badly, have their romantic hopes realized only to have them dashed irrevocably, get thrown in the slammer, and actually be late for something for the first time in their lives. And at the end of it, of course they graduate. They've earned it.

It sounds a lot like a lot of teen comedies from American Graffiti to Porky's to American Pie to all those terrible Cannon films nobody can find anymore to Superbad, but this is the teen Bridesmaids, where, instead of focusing on horny guys, it focuses on ambitious horny girls. You've come a long way, sista's, but one should make note of it, especially suffering through their male-centric predecessors for oh-so-many years. Sure, you can point to precedents, but one cannot deny that Booksmart is faster and more furious than any of those others, like one of those coming of age movies with an "Incredible Mess" storyline* at the pace of the original Deadpool, with performances that fall more in the Strangelove-Zero Mostel type of intensity. Credit must go to the screenplay writers, but also heavily to the cast (encouraged to ad-lib their lines at every opportunity) and the anything-for-a-joke direction of Olivia Wilde.

Wilde fills the frame to bursting at the same time that she's optimizing the "great-but-do-it-faster" style of directing. There's no hesitancy for laugh-pauses, no stuttering momentum. This is a pell-mell blitzkrieg of humor and if you miss a joke, then, well hell, that's why there's DVD's, slow-poke. And MVP awards should go to Deyer and Feldstein for their comedic pairing which has the same schlemiel/schlimazel drive of Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel in The Producers. 

Laugh? I thought I'd hemorrhage.

 

* Usually reserved for comedies—but they can be dramas, too—"Incredible Mess" movies are one where the protagonist or protagonists, for reasons of their own, get into a situation that makes their situation worse, which only becomes more intricately worse when they try to resolve it, leading to an escalating series of calamities that seem insurmountable. Good example? It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Dr. Strangelove. Risky Business. After Hours. Don't Look Up. Incredible Messes. But very good films.

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.