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.