vert2712

There are good films that failed at the box-office upon release because they couldn't find an audience or because they came out at the wrong time or because they were butchered by clueless producers or distributors into an incoherent form, and then get rediscovered when they are rescued from obscurity years later and re-released in a restored director's cut, and finally get appreciated for having been ahead of their time.

This is not one of those movies.

It was bad when it came out in 1991 and it's still terrible 33 years later. The so-called director's cut that has recently been re-released does nothing to improve on this unfunny, excruciatingly dull so-called comedy. If anything, the film is an even worse experience now because it looks terribly dated. Bowie is miscast (i love him as a musician, but let's face it: he wasn't that great an actor and he was especially bad as a comedian) and he and Rosanna Arquette have zero chemistry together. The actors did what they could but not even a cast packed with Oscar winners could have saved this unholy mess of a script.

This is a train wreck, pure and simple. It's worth a watch only in a "what were they thinking?" kind of way, but other than that it represents nothing more than a footnote in any discussion of David Bowie's body of work.

Did you know that if you rearrange the letters of the title "Don't Worry Darling" you get "shaggy dog story"? No? Well, that's because it's not true. But it should be, because I can't think of a better way to define the meaning of that expression than watching this impeccably well-made but deadly boring misfire.

I suppose it's still possible to get a good laugh at a long, meandering joke even if you already know the punchline, but it takes a great comedian with a lot of panache and storytelling talent to pull that off. Unfortunately "Don't Worry Darling" lacks both (not to mention the the fact that it's not even a comedy: it tries to be a very serious thriller with some deep meaning behind it).

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past several months and managed not to see the trailer or read about all the behind-the-scenes drama that accompanied the film's release, you probably know that the film is about Alice, a homemaker living what seems to be a perfect life with her handsome husband Jack in the kind of suburban 1950s community that would make even Norman Rockwell gag because of how stereotypical and unrealistic it looks.

Of course, there's something lurking under the surface of this slice of idyllic of Americana. And therein likes the film's biggest problem: any audience member who hasn't suffered from brain damage or has lived in cryogenic stasis for the past 50 years will immediately realize that something is totally off. But the film goes on and on for what seems like an eternity trying to build tension by slowly giving hints that something is not quite right to an audience that became aware of it before the main credits were over.

Is this a Westworld-inspired remake of The Stepford Wives, where all the compliant and docile housewives have been replaced by robots? Or is it all a dream? Are there aliens involved? What's the deal with the mysterious factory where all the men go to work every day while the ladies stay home making pot roasts or go gossip around the pool? After about half an hour, you will be ready to yell at the screen a resounding "Who cares? Get on with the plot already!"

You get the impression that director Olivia Wilde feels like she has a big urgent message to deliver to audiences about the patriarchy and about how men long for women to be subservient to men just as they were supposed to be 70 years ago even though they are more sexually liberated/adventurous.

Unfortunately for her, the same message has already been driven home multiple times (and more effectively) by countless pop cultural specimens: any random joke in your average episode of The Simpsons has more cultural relevance and bite than the entirety of this muddled, slow-moving film. She is like Paul Revere, trying to warn that the English are coming but arriving a week too late because she walked instead of riding a horse.

Wilde shares the blame with a bloated self-important screenplay that might have had a chance of success it it had been adapted into a short Black Mirror episode instead of a 123 minutes feature film.

It's too bad, because the film looks great and the cast puts in a decent effort: Florence Pugh brings new meaning to the phrase "rising above the material" -- she's carries the film by herself and is the only reason why I kept watching the whole thing. Everyone else earns their paychecks, with varying degrees of success. Chris Pine is supposed to be this Svengali-like mysterious cult leader but he comes across more like the kind of platitude-spewing motivational speaker that your HR department might parade in front of your company once a year; Harry Styles is a pretty face who is only asked to look handsome.

It's probably unfair to compare a film with an idealized version of it, but it's impossible not to wonder what someone like David Lynch or John Waters would have done with the same story. We'll never know, but I'm pretty sure their take would not have been as pedestrian and unimaginative as the one we got from Olivia Wilde.

"Don't Worry Darling" is highly recommended only to fans of mid-century architecture and style: during the scene when Jack and Alice have a decidedly non-1950s sexual encounter in their dining room, my blood pressure went up only because I was lusting after their Scandinavian design table and chair set rather than because of what Harry Styles was doing to pleasure Florence Pugh.