Harry Styles Was Right
With Don’t Worry Darling finally, finally making its way to cinemas, Storyboard Editor Ella Kemp reflects on how strangely miraculous it feels to watch an expensive, flawed, but awfully entertaining movie directed by a woman.
Two weeks ago today, which, as I’m sure you know, feels like approximately 20 years ago, Harry Styles attended the Venice Film Festival to promote his first major motion picture as a leading man, Don’t Worry Darling. I’m not going to go into detail about any of the pre-release drama and politics surrounding the film, what certain people involved have or have not said or done or lied about, but now having seen the film – that thing we never thought would actually happen – a strange realisation dawned. Harry Styles was right all along.
His exact words, sat next to Chris Pine as the pair uncomfortably discussed the film nobody had been allowed to see yet (for reasons still unclear) leaving us all whispering gossip in the dark, were: “My favourite thing about the movie is that it feels like a movie.”
It’s a pretty ridiculous thing to say, until you see the film. The trailer for Don’t Worry Darling suggests some mysterious, dark happenings in the perfect 1950s town of Victory, where Alice (Florence Pugh) lives with her husband Jack (Styles) and their beautiful, beautiful friends. The film promises you answers are coming, that whatever is lurking beneath the surface will rise to the fore and explain everything. Alice will be saved, or will save herself. These beautiful boys and their toys will be broken.
Except that’s not exactly what happens. Don’t Worry Darling is full of flaws, but many you only realise once you’re trying to articulate exactly what went so wrong in this good-looking, entertaining, expensive film to leave you with more answers than you went in with. It’s once you’re in the pub, or on the walk home. While watching, it’s just fun to enjoy the movie.
There are some good things to be gleaned from this kind of experience. Olivia Wilde, making her sophomore feature as director after the joyous Booksmart, benefits from a jump from $6 million to somewhere between $20 and 35 million to make this film. It’s pretty unheard of for many female filmmakers to make a second feature at all, let alone one with such an enormous budget jump, allowing for a starry cast, gorgeous costume and production design, a pretty rousing score and beautiful cinematography.
Money can’t buy you a good script (we don’t have time to get into those salaries), but it can certainly do a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to aesthetics. Actors and musicians whose faces you’ve seen everywhere and for good reason simply get paid more, your costumes can be more lavish, music performed by more talented players, more expensive cameras, and so on and so forth. Women have made a lot of good films, but it’s rare that female directors are given this much money to make a film that’s so much of a movie.
I think if Styles had started discussing how strong he thinks the script is when it comes to the challenging of patriarchal structures and female emancipation, that would have been more ridiculous, because it’s just not true. Wilde speaks beautifully about her intentions with the film and just how feminist she thinks it all is, but I disagree. It’s a shame, because her aims are admirable, but Don’t Worry Darling just about saves itself from sinking in its expensive, glittering spectacle. It’s only when you leave the movie and think about the implications of the story that things start to get sticky.
One of the greatest pleasures of an enormous, expensive, exhilarating movie is just how quickly you can forget it. It’s just not the kind of thing you’ll rewatch at home in bed when need in 90 minutes of comfort. You remember the experience of going to see a movie perhaps more than the film’s detail itself, more willing to brush over issues of plot if the pacing keeps you gripped. Darling is pretty breathtaking in its final stretch, Wilde orchestrating a flaming car chase across the desert which really does earn its theatricality and demand to be viewed on a big screen.
I’m not saying to fully ignore every problem in the slightest, rather, to consider the unquestionable talent that costs so much money, that it feels quite thrilling to have been given to a different kind of filmmaker. It might not be the $100 million of Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story remake, but it’s a hell of a lot more than Best Picture winner Nomadland’s $5 million, directed by Chloé Zhao. Imagine what could have been made with four times that.
It’s hindsight that fails Don’t Worry Darling, but when thinking about the power of immersive cinema and the genuine art of making a popcorn movie, there is something to celebrate, however fleeting. It’s still genuine. Visual beauty is the stuff dreams are made of, and it’s still so inaccessible to countless micro-budget filmmakers forced to make do until they’re trusted well enough to spend money like this wisely. Olivia Wilde isn’t the only worthy female filmmaker capable of rising to the challenge to make a movie. She made a fair amount of mistakes – on-screen and off – but then how many male filmmakers haven’t?
There is worth in this movie, that comes from something that should be a no-brainer suddenly seeming like a miracle. Trust more women with more money. More films will be given the chance to become great movies.
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