harry styles

Don’t Worry Darling (2022)

/ swampflix / 9 Comments

We’re all familiar with Dr. Manhattan and how he exists everywhere at once now, right? Like, it’s not just comic book nerds; the meme(s) mean(s) that everyone knows the whole deal, right? So if I were to describe to you those three panels, but in each one, I’m saying: 

  • It’s 1998 and my mom has rented The Stepford Wives for us to watch while my dad is out of town.
  • It’s 2004 and I’m sitting in a theater watching the modern version of The Stepford Wives.
  • It’s 2022 and I’m sitting in a theater watching the modern version of The Stepford Wives. 

…you get the effect I’m trying to achieve, right? 

Don’t Worry Darling is the sophomore picture of one Olivia Wilde, who delivered a stunner with her freshman flick Booksmart. I first saw the trailer before Men when I caught that in a May screening, and was captivated by it, and I’m glad to say that it delivered for me, even if it isn’t for others. Florence Pugh stars as Alice Chambers, who plays house all day in her gorgeous Midcentury modern bungalow located in a perfect little cul-de-sac. Each morning, she sees off her husband Jack (Harry Styles) as he and all of the other husbands in the neighborhood drive off to work in their pristine 1950s cars (I’m not a car guy and I guess there’s not a lot of overlap between car guys and this movie, since there would normally be a list of cars in the IMDb trivia by now, so your guess is as good as mine; I’m certain at least one was a Chevy and that’s all I’ve got). They’re all residents of a company town called Victory, and Jack and all of the men work for Frank (Chris Pine) on something called “progressive materials,” which is of course classified. The gals spend their days with housekeeping and idle leisure — shopping, spending long days creating perfect meals, drinking poolside, scrubbing bathtubs, keeping fit with ballet lessons from Frank’s wife Shelley (Gemma Chan), and making beds. Of course, it’s not the 1950s we know, and we’re tipped off by this from the film’s first moments, where we see the Chamberses hosting a party with an interracial couple (with the Loving V. decision still a decade away) and living in a desegregated neighborhood, as evidenced by the presence of Margaret (KiKi Layne) and Ted Watkins. 

All is not peachy keen for everyone in Pleasantville, however, as Margaret is going through a difficult time. Some time before the start of the narrative, she believed that she saw a biplane crash in the desert hills that surround the town and went into the Headquarters’ restricted zone with her son to find it; only she came back alive, and Alice’s best friend Bunny (Olivia Wilde) in particular is judgmental of the whole situation. For Alice, however, things are perfect: she has her handsome husband, her perfect life, and her gorgeous friends, and he’s getting a promotion! That is, until she sees a plane crash over the ridge as well and, going to inspect it, comes upon a reflective, man-made structure that gives her a surreal vision. She awakens back at home, but it’s as if the veil of her reality has been pierced, and as more traumatic events take place in Victory, she begins having nightmares and hallucinations that affect her sense of reality. And, as you would expect, nothing is as it seems. 

Almost five years ago, a new employee joined my company, and in his icebreaker, they were asked, If you could live in a fictional tv or movie world, what would it be? Their response? “Mad Men,” they said. “I really like the late 50’s and 60’s. I know the time is not fictional but the show is. I’m not a big fiction fan. That time period had the best designed cars, furniture, homes, fashion, etc.” I’ll leave aside that this person voluntarily said that they were not a “fan” of “fiction” (although woof), because I had my own collegiate phase in which I refused to read non-fiction and said of all non-fiction works, saying “They’re all the same, it’s all about white people having a spiritual experience at the expense of colonized peoples or some person thinking that they can’t climb a mountain only to realize that they can,” and then I would perform what is colloquially known as a “jerk off motion.” I get that I can be closed-minded too. But I was also completely agog that my new colleague sat down and watched Mad Men and the lesson that he absorbed from it was “Dan Draper is cool,” rather than “nostalgia without inspection is poisonous and insidious.” When I mentioned this to a friend, I was surprised to learn (as a person who ended up watching the show rather late into its run) that there was actually a fairly large misaimed fandom for the AMC show during its heyday. The lesson I took from that day is that some people are very easily won over by candy-coated Midcentury modernism, so much so that even when the text is blindingly obvious in its intent to convey the message that the past is always worse than you think. The show’s timeline overlapped with the lynching of Emmit Till and the assassination of MLK and intentionally so (it would often skip a year or two between seasons, so when a contemporary event fell within the scope of the narrative, you knew it did so with purpose), and that’s just the big picture stuff, not even getting into the social normalization of casual littering, child abuse, and just about every bigotry you can name. And yet some people only noticed the Noguchi coffee tables and the Coupes DeVille. 

Supposedly, Pine’s character, the enigmatic Frank, is based on self-titled “public intellectual” Jordan Peterson (not the one who’s a MEN.com exclusive), the Canadian social media personality who subsists on a diet of nothing but meat and who exercises by stre-e-e-etching to find something new each day in the media to take personal offense to, and then makes his indignation about black mermaids and She-Hulks the subject of his personality while calling other people “snowflakes.” If he is a stranger to you, bless you, summer child, and look no further into the existence of this man. If he sounds slightly familiar, it may be because he went on a recent multi-site frothing-at-the-mouth/crying tour because Sports Illustrated put a woman on the cover that didn’t make his dick hard. Some of that is lost when casting sends over Chris “Kirk but a Chad” Pine to stand in for a man who looks like a ghoul on a good day. I can see how that intent may have been clearer in the script, given that Frank has created an environment in which the strict 1950s gender roles of breadwinner/homemaker is enforced in more ways than simply socially, and it’s not just that he owns the whole company town like Hank Scorpio, but his endless pablum of radio-delivered doublespeak sounds exactly like the purposely dense nonsense talk of Peterson. Where it fails is in the fact that Pine, with his lantern jawline, piercing eyes, and taut abdominal muscles, doesn’t look like Jordan Peterson; he looks like a movie star. And while those who have seen the movie and know its twist could argue that Frank might not really look as good as he appears to us, given that another character is seen as their un-idealized self at a different point, but I’d also argue that the difference between the “normal” and the “idealized” versions of that character are minimal (Janey Briggs looked more different in her before-and-afters). 

I made two notes immediately after watching this movie. The first, “People want to live in Mad Men and it sucks,” I think we’ve already discussed in detail above. The other, “Trying to recapture ‘the glories of the past’ and all of the purported good thereof also sucks.” L.P. Hartley famously wrote as the opening line to The Go-Between that “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” It is perhaps the greatest malady of modern man that he is still so susceptible not only to lies about an imagined “better” (or worse, “great”) past, so trapped within the limited horizon of their self-awareness that they can’t seem to understand that there is no going back to “innocence” because “innocence” isn’t a time in the past, it’s a time in your past, that continuum of moments that all took place prior to the day you realized that something you didn’t realize you had was gone, and maybe had been gone for a long time. 

Within Don’t Worry Darling, the Victory Project is the modern incel’s fantasy about what they’ve been tricked into believing about the past. Narratively, it’s so similar to the Stepford chronicles from which it cribs heavily that it wouldn’t be something novel enough to comment upon if it weren’t for just how beautiful and expressive everything is. Cinematically, the movie is breathtaking, with shots of an impassable desert, an impossible community, and all of the furniture, architecture, and style that harkens back to a time that never really existed. There are a few pacing problems on occasion, but special style points must go to the crew for all the work of blurring the lines about how much of what we see we can actually trust. As Alice starts to experience hallucinations and surreal nightmares, the imagery is effective and fascinating. I can only hope that the 5-star “Harry is hawt” reviews from children can do enough to balance out the 1-star “hur hur feminists will like watching this movie with their cats” reviews from CHUDs to ensure that people decide to, uh, do their own research and make up their own minds. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Dunkirk (2017)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

I sometimes complain about missing an essential Dad Gene that would enable me to care about certain traditional macho movie genres: Westerns, submarine thrillers, James Bond entries, etc. I’m not faced with the pressure to watch any other subcategory of these Dad Movies nearly as often as I am with The War Movie. Films about battleground warfare, especially set during WWII or The Vietnam War, tend to put me to sleep. There’s a grim, heroically macho routine to battlefield dramas & thrillers that typically makes them feel indistinguishable from one another, like a sea of uniformed soldiers solemnly marching in unison. Christopher Nolan’s recent war thriller, Dunkirk, broke that spell and made me question my Dad Movie prejudice. Dunkirk feels much more like a personal obsession with the story of a single historical event than yet another echo of the war movie genre trappings that dull down so many of its peers. I’m usually unable to distinguish any particular World War II battlefield picture from the long, uniformed line that marched before it, but Nolan’s auteurist interests in things like time, intense sound design, and muted performances from actors like Tom Hardy & Cillian Murphy make Dunkirk feel like a wholly new, revitalizing take on the genre. Instead of checking my pulse for signs of life at the top of the second act, I found myself holding my breath in anxious anticipation throughout, due largely to Nolan’s technical skills as a craftsman and, in a recent turn starting with Interstellar, personal passion as a storyteller.

Dunkirk dramatizes a colossal military disaster where 40,000 French & British heroes & cowards awaited rescue on a beach while surrounded by the German enemy in World War II. With a massive cast & sparse dialogue, Nolan does little to provide character detail for any of these thousands of soldiers, but rather tells their story as a massive unit. Even actors like Murphy, Hardy, Kenneth Branagh, Mark Rylance, and pop star Harry Styles, who all should individually draw attention through the virtue of their mere presence, are but tiny gears in a larger machine that sounds & functions like clockwork, ticking away until the enemy bombs them out of existence. Nolan fractures this larger narrative through three narrow focus storylines: a two man beachside escape mission that lasts a week, a three man boat ride that lasts a day, and a two man airplane skirmish that lasts an hour. These three narratives barrel towards an inevitable point of convergence: a historical event where private vessels & fishing boats were employed to rescue soldiers from the beach, since all traditional Navy ships were being sunk by the enemy. Although Nolan tells this story through a precise, coldly technical build-up of moment to moment tension, he takes a breath to glorify this triumph of The Dunkirk Spirit in a rare stint of nationalistic pride. When the tiny pleasure yachts roll in to Bring Home the Boys under the German’s noses, Branagh admires their bravery in silence, nearly holding back a single manly tear as if it were Nolan himself watching the waters. It’s possibly the only moment of relief offered in Dunkirk‘s entire runtime, a much needed breather in an otherwise tense, relentless chokehold.

Besides Nolan’s typifying play with the film’s sense of time & a bold decision to never depict the enemy onscreen, Dunkirk also avoids war movie doldrums by echoing the structure of near-plotless obstacle course movies like Gravity or Mad Max: Fury Road. All that really matters is clearing the next hurdle. Whether searching for drinkable water & smokable cigarette butts in city streets or avoiding drowning inside of a ship that is both sinking & on fire, Nolan’s camera follows his soldiers & their civilian saviors as they conquer one obstacle at a time. This makes for an entirely nerve-racking experience from opening to closing credits, an intensity amplified by Hans Zimmer’s sparse, haunting score of ticking clocks & building strings. This score is only softened when the complex sound design is overwhelmed by sudden, deafening air raids that leave all soldiers ducking & praying for survival at irregular intervals. Nolan mirrors the impossible technical feat of rescuing that large of a number of soldiers on a fleet of tiny civilian vessels by staging his own series of aurally terrifying, temporally ambitious, and brutally logical technical feats of filmmaking & narrative craft. The anticipatory feeling of seeing the film on a 70mm print opening night felt more like an Event or an Experience than a typical trip to the movies. It was something akin to a film fest vibe (although with a notably more bro-populated crowd), but it also reminded me of waiting in line for a rollercoaster. Dunkirk is a quick, dizzying trip through pure adrenaline thrills & for-their-own-sake technical marvels. It gives you little time to attach yourself to any one character or narrative in particular, but the complexities of its basic structure & overall effect are so impressive that it never really matters.

The few isolated beats where I wasn’t fully onboard with Nolan’s vision were when he did attempt to stir emotion instead of building tension. That scene where Branagh admires the civilian volunteers’ makeshift rescue efforts while the ticking clocks score gives way to triumphant orchestral strings reminded me so much of the war movies that typically do nothing for my shriveled, cynical heart. Those moments are few & far between, however. Dunkirk mostly mines tension from an increasingly complex series of moment-to-moment tasks spread out over sea, sky, beach, and several converging timelines. To deny the power of the film’s technical feats because of its lacking emotional impact or detailed character development would be asking it to be something entirely different from the story Nolan set out to tell. As someone who has an impossible time focusing on the particulars of battlefield drama in more traditional war stories, I very much appreciate Nolan’s approach here. It’s likely that he personally found much more emotional resonance in the film than most of his audience possibly could, but the experience of watching him reach for that emotion in his tightly controlled, meticulous recreation of wartime chaos is as immediately impressive as it is likely to be unforgettable.

-Brandon Ledet