“Don’t Worry, Darling.” Okay, I won’t.

I really wanted this movie to be good. Olivia Wilde’s first film, “Booksmart”, was fun and witty. It was a fleet coming-of-age tale told with just the right amount of restraint and at the right time, lack thereof. This is not that.

“Don’t Worry, Darling” is a melange of not bad ideas, haphazardly executed. It doesn’t quite know what to do with its allusions, its influences, and aside from Florence Pugh and Chris Pine, its actors or the characters they portray.

It is a beautifully shot film; there isn’t a sloppily executed scene in it. However, it takes more than that to make a movie work. There are moments that are absolutely riveting; a plane that arcs across the sky to crash beyond mountains in the desert is an exercise in silent wonder. There is the overhead shot of Harry Styles going down on Pugh and it’s as artful as anything else in cinema, perhaps directly borrowing from a similar sequence in “Emmanuelle”. 

But the problems that bedevil the film are many and probably avoidable. A cleaner script and less confusion about trying to say something would have gone a long way to a tighter, tenser movie. 

The gist is that Alice and Jack Chambers have moved to an ideal suburb along with Jack’s job at the Victory Project, a vaguely defined (okay, not at all defined) company with its own town. The men all go off to work, the women remain at home, clean, attend classes, chat, prepare dinner for their husbands. The sequences where the men leave in the morning is beautifully synchronized and the setting itself is reminiscent of the suburbia in Tim Burton’s “Edward Scissorhands”; all day-glo and pastels, bright colors like a postcard from the late 1950s/early 1960s, the period during which the film takes place.

It doesn’t take long before we have stepped into Stepford Wives territory and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing; Wilde and her screenwriters are playing with the trope enough to give hope of going in a different direction. They do, for the most part. However, it isn’t long before we - along with Alice - see the cracks in the utopia. She is aware that there is something “off”; a friend loses her child after walking into the desert, she sees a neighbor commit suicide, and before that, the plane crash from a trolley that is immediately denied by the trolley driver.

This is the pivotal moment for Alice as she exits the trolley at the end of the line to see if she can find any survivors. Ultimately, she discovers what is the headquarters of Victory and when she touches the wraparound glass windows, has a sequence of disturbing dreams/visions.

Of course, all the wives have been told to not ask questions about Victory or what their husbands do for the company, so Alice is in deep violation and it’s at this point that the movie scores its singular conceit and you wish that it had continued a little more in this vein. 

While the film is framed in a past era when women were expected to stay home and tend to domesticity (and just be attractive and don’t pester the menfolk with questions), and is obviously a signifier of how little things have changed, it wants to go further thematically. This is understandable; nothing new has been brought to the table with this, except for Alice’s hallucination which brings us into M. Night Shyamalan Land. I apologize for bringing up influences and references, but it almost feels as though Wilde is going out of her way to point them out.

This is reminiscent of Brian De Palma’s callbacks to Hitchcock, except that De Palm repurposed his references in ways that were compelling; also, De Palma is a more disciplined storyteller (well, sometimes; he can waffle a lot, too). Nevertheless, by the time we meet Frank, Chris Pine turning in a wonderfully smarmy performance, we know he knows that Alice knows that something’s up. When she challenges Frank at the dinner table, he welcomes the challenge as she asks him pointedly about the aim of the Victory Project. When she presses further and tries to expose him, he gaslights her and this description doesn’t do justice for what Pine and Pugh are doing with their characters. This should have been a chilling moment of reckoning for us, but by now, so many cards have been laid out and the narrative sped along at such a clip, that it’s hard to feel too engaged. 

Through all this, poor Harry Styles as Jack has been left playing a sketch of a character that exists more or less as a straw dog or a piñata. How outclassed he is sharing a scene with Florence’s Alice just felt unfair. On reflection, though, it may not be Styles’ fault; because his character is as underserved as all the others, the blame may be laid at the script’s feet. Whatever the case, after the dinner, Alice impresses on Jack that they have to leave, that Victory is a dangerous place and Frank is not to be trusted. 

They bone (this is a refreshingly horny movie, in the sense that the sex is emblematic of what constitutes an American utopia - sixty years ago or not - and oddly, the scenes are not without affection; nothing on the order of Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in “Don’t Look Now” - which also feels referenced in these sequences, but really not bad). But the next day? Alice is taken by agents of Victory and subject to electroshock therapy. Hold that thought.

I’m telling this out of order because frankly, it’s been awhile since I saw the film and wasn’t really sure if I wanted to review it. I’ve almost elided (but not, because I’m going to blab a little more about this stuff) that Alice found Margaret’s body but is taken by men in red jumpsuits (Agents of Victory…can I get a series made called this?) and the first round of dismissal/gaslighting comes from Jack himself. The town’s physician gives her meds but naturally, Alice becomes more paranoid about Victory. A little later, Frank gives Jack a promotion and Alice freaks out at the party where it’s announced. She grabs Bunny (Olivia Wilde giving herself a good part; she’s good, really) and tells her everything and Bunny tells Alice she’s being selfish (which just read as goofy in context, though we find out later there’s a reason for that). 

To get back to Alice’s plight at the hands of Victory’s medical team, she is brought back to Jack and continues to have nightmares which are actually memories of a time when she was a doctor and Jack was a kind of shiftless loser. Turns out Victory is - gasp! - a simulation (how does this work with the available technology of the time is never shown) of an ideal world and Jack signed them up because, he says, Alice was miserable in her job. Well, this is patent bullshit and Alice calls him out on it and they have a knockdown drag-out fight. Does he know he’s fighting Yelena Bulova? Okay, snark aside, Alice kills Jack and tells Bunny the whole story which Bunny already knows! Bunny chose this because she can keep her children (who aren’t real…”WandaVision” parallels abound, but this is one area where the timeline doesn’t allow for homage)

While Bunny resolves to stay in Victory, she tells Alice to flee to headquarters and that there’s a portal there she can use to escape the simulation. As she nears the headquarters, pursued by Victory’s men in jumpsuits (because word’s got out!) Shelly (an grossly underused Gemma Chan), Frank’s wife comes to her senses and stabs Frank. The movie closes with Alice making it to the headquarters’ windows and after placing her forehead on one, the screen goes black as we hear her gasp (for air? I guess?). I think we are supposed to conclude that Alice made it out. 

So the metaphors have rained down and hard. Suffocation by patriarchy, a possible critique of cinema’s treatment of women as a metaphor of society’s, the framing of extreme measures as symbolic of the extreme lengths women need to go to simply be heard; all of this is important and does deserve cinematic treatment, but this is not the film to accomplish it. The pacing and the metaphorical weight drag the movie, not quite down, but these conflicts require more urgency than they’re given. The characters are sketched out, for the most part, and while the script is full of turns (not really twists) that should draw us in more, the constant run of cinematic allusion retards the effort. 

We are in potentially rich Margaret Atwood terrain here, but it’s not that smart. The film suffers from too much emphasis on meaning. I couldn’t help but feel that the filmmakers really wanted to say, “see this? Get it?”

Aronofsky’s cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, brings a gorgeous palette and some of the most striking compositions to grace a film; but I wish it had been a better film his cinematography was gracing. 

The script began as a spec script by Dick Van Dyke’s grandsons Shane and Casey and Katie Silberman was brought on to do the rewrite that became the film we have on hand. It may be better than I make it out to be; however, if that’s the case, then the clunky foreshadowing and the marginalization of much of the cast falls on Olivia Wilde’s shoulders. 

Films like this are frustrating because they aren’t bad films; just a few - or many - measures short of achieving what they seem to put before us. I don’t think it’s a total waste of time, but given what a hot property it was (and the previews did rope me in…let’s hear it for trailers?), I can’t help but feel disappointed.

On a plus side, though, I need another match up of Pugh and Pine. They are ridiculously good in scenes where they can flex their chops. In some ways, it’s like watching an acting clinic in how to elevate a flabby script or bring some electricity to a film that is overstaying its welcome.