Darling

Julie Christie gives a five-star performance in a two-and-a-half-star film. I decided to split the difference in my rating and give it a three. Christie’s performance is truly stunning as Diana; a woman whose sense of entitlement and willingness to do whatever it takes to get famous is disturbingly current. The rest of the film has aged terribly.

A few attempts at satire of the then-current “Swinging London” crowd are quickly tossed aside in favor of giving us a character portrait. It is in these moments that the film sparkles. The biting satire of her vacuous and gold-digging nature, of that inflated ego, show that behind it and her sense of ambition/boredom there is nothing more. She is a supreme creation of artifice and fame-hungry ambitions without true talent to back it up. You can find the current examples of people like her parading around Andy Cohen in the Real Housewives franchise.

Shame then that the satire is so toothless. The panorama of her jet-setter friends and their lifestyle is pure limp noodle since all of the naughty bits are elliptical or censored. When we follow Diana around from one affair to the next it feels shallow, as if the lusty propulsion and narrative drive are lacking in sufficient tires to really burn skidmarks on the road. We can’t get as dirty and gritty as we would like. Most of the dirty things are alluded to, never really shown.

But there is always Christie’s performance. Diana Scott works a bit as a model, then as an actress, a good deal of her fame is for no reason other than she is the epitome of the “Swinging Londoner.” And Christie excels at playing a woman who is practically all surface. There are cracks when Diana begins to realize that her actions have consequences, but she soon reverts back to her shallowness seemingly never having gained insight or real human emotions.

Darling does have its merits – images are often striking, the costumes are delicious, the cast is well assembled and performs fantastically across the board. At the time this was probably some controversial and dark material, but it comes across as stilted and shallow today. Never sexy enough, never dirty enough, never dark enough, but Christie deservedly won the Oscar for Best Actress.