All is forgiven, Olivia

For some time now I have been trying to figure out how to write about the whole fracas involving Olivia Wilde that we have known about for a couple years, which has just gotten more intense with the press leading up to the release of Don't Worry Darling.

The narrative that I probably all too easily believed was that Wilde had cheated on poor Jason Sudeikis with Harry Styles, a crime I considered all the worse because I did not consider Styles a person of substance. Yes pop stars can graduate into beloved movie stars -- for me the obvious example is Justin Timberlake -- but I wasn't ready to believe that about Styles yet. Instead I believed that he was a frivolous homewrecker. At one point I wanted to write a post about how annoyed I was when I first heard his song "As It Was," which was introduced by him on the local radio station, in a prerecorded spot, as "my new hit single." If a single is new, how do you even know it's going to be a hit? (Well, now the song is breaking records for weeks at #1 on the charts, so I guess the joke is on me.)

That seemed like a safer approach than the dangerous tack of criticizing Wilde, since it's very easy for this sort of thing to cross over into the (unintentional) appearance of misogyny. We've just come off a major he said/she said event involving Johnny Depp and Amber Heard in which Heard was the clear loser. I never got so deep into that one to figure out if this was the just outcome, but I did find myself again too easily believing the negative actions and motivations ascribed to her. I think they're probably both just assholes.

Is Olivia Wilde that kind of asshole? She might be. But just because she prompted Sudeikis to pour out his heartbreak in Ted Lasso, which became one of the biggest TV hits of the past few years, doesn't make it so. In fact, more recent revelations -- or revelations I learned of more recently, anyway -- that Sudeikis served her while she was speaking on a panel make it seem like no, maybe he's the asshole, and maybe he's the only asshole in that former relationship. I also learned that maybe the timelines didn't line up and Wilde actually got together with Styles after she ended things with Sudeikis.

But then all the terrible press about Don't Worry Darling started to come out. I learned of it sort of belatedly. I don't need to rehash it here, but involves alleged screaming matches, a desperate phone call to Shia LaBeouf recorded on video, and what we now know of as Spitgate -- another black mark against Styles.

This made it easier to believe that no, maybe indeed Wilde was the trainwreck, and maybe indeed she had made an epic misfire that would have us all laughing in a sort of rich schadenfreude. The first review I heard quoted about this movie was that it said something along the lines of "Worry, darling."

And then I saw the movie last night.

Wow. Just wow.

That's a good wow. That's an amazing wow. The movie floored me. 

I could have written a review twice this length with all the things I wanted to say about it, but I had already exceeded by nearly 200 words my rough guideline of sticking to around 1,000. And because I have other things to do today, I won't give you a sort of second review of it using slightly different words. Instead I will just link the review. You can find it here. 

I'm not sure if artistic success excuses bad behavior, but then again, I'm not even sure now that Olivia Wilde was guilty of bad behavior. I tend to only get the gist of these stories before forming conclusions. I should probably research them more deeply, especially if my conclusions are going to be aired out in a public forum like a blog, but I'm not the kind who follows my prurient interests down big rabbit holes. It's too close to being a consumer of tabloid newspapers in the old days, and I have my standards.

But even if I never actually raked Olivia Wilde -- or Harry Styles, who's very good in the film -- over the coals on this blog, I can certainly forgive them on it. I can forgive them for the things I thought about them, even if some of them are true, when they make a movie like this. 

And yes, I'm ready for a period of several months leading up to the end of the year in which I find myself defending a movie other people seem to hate. I can't pretend to understand those people any more than I can pretend to understand what really went on with Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudeikis and Harry Styles ... and Florence Pugh and Shia LaBeouf and Chris Pine while we're at it. I can only understand what's in my own mind, which I said in my review:

This might just be a masterpiece.

Favorite words, favorite actresses

When you can't watch the third episode of The Stand because your AppleTV remote is broken, and when you can't watch An American Pickle because your wife walks into the room two minutes in and requests to save it for a time you can both watch it together, why not watch a film whose title is one of your favorite words, especially if it stars one of your favorite actresses?

If this poster were what I'd seen when scrolling through the Netflix options, it might have been clearer sooner that Florence Pugh was the star of Malevolent. It had already passed the test of having a short running time of only 88 minutes, but I clicked into the details to differentiate it from other contenders that were about the same length. Seeing that Pugh was the star did that plenty well.

(Despite the short running time and despite the presence of Pugh, I still fell asleep early on after my third white russian of the evening, a Tuesday night lockdown treat because I was taking Wednesday off for my son's 11th birthday. I didn't wake up from that "nap" until after 12:30, but still doggedly finished it up, afforded the luxury by not having to work the next day.)

You may recall that Pugh was one of my breakout discoveries of 2019, when I named her among "three who had a good year" in my year-end wrap-up post for her performances in Fighting With My Family, Midsommar and Little Women. After that diverse trio of roles, I knew there was nothing she couldn't do.

But then I had to wait for my next dose, as the delay of the release of Black Widow meant that Pugh followed up her dynamite 2019 with zero new releases in 2020. Black Widow took another half-year into 2021 to finally come out, and when it did, it was a disappointment -- both the movie in general and its use of Pugh.

So when I saw Pugh's name on Malevolent, there was a funny surge of urgency as I clicked on the play button. I want as much Pugh as I can get.

She did not disappoint here. I would not say this is a superior film -- I gave it a 3 out of 5 stars on Letterboxd -- but as you might expect, Pugh is a pro. She doesn't exceed the requirements of a film like this, but as was the case in her three films of 2019, she has a keen idea of the emotions each scene dictates. If you've got the kind of craft Pugh has, you elevate everything you are in. (To be fair, the film gave me chills a number of times, and I really liked its score. It also has a few creepy gestures toward the malevolence of its title. The idea of charlatan ghost hunters finding themselves involved in a real haunting has been done before, lots of times, but Malevolent managed to distinguish itself enough to warrant a recommendation.)

And regarding that malevolence, that brings me to the other "favorite" in the title of this post. I love the word "malevolent," and I use it in a fair amount of my reviews of films involving evil in some way, shape or form. Doing a search of that word in my reviews stored on my computer, I found it appearing in ten different reviews -- including, quite interestingly, Lady Macbeth, which is the first place I ever saw Pugh. (And in my review for the Macbeth proper starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, so I guess the word describes the Macbeths pretty well.) I suspect the word actually appears in more reviews than that, but some of them are stored on my work computer.

If we were going for least favorites, I don't know, maybe a movie called Plethora, starring Vicky Krieps? (I won't go into why I don't like either of these at the moment ... sometimes I like to leave you wondering. Though this post would give you a clue on the latter.)