Donnie Darko
(2001, Richard Kelly; 20th Century Fox disc)
Jake Gyllenhaal plays a high school student in suburban Virginia with an unusual problem: he hallucinates a man in a fur-and-metal rabbit costume who demands that he leave his home at night in a sleepwalking trance and break water mains, commit arson, and worse. But this is offset by several points that seem to be deliberately opposing the tropes of similar stories: he’s got a loving family, plenty of friends, a couple of caring teachers, and a genuinely concerned psychiatrist in whom he can confide; he’s caught the eye of the new girl in class and has no problem getting to know her; and most unexpectedly, he sees his terrifying rabbit when he takes his meds, not when he goes off them. Yes, some of the school personnel are awful, and there’s a pair of bullies who menace him, but the villains (particularly a self-help guru played by Patrick Swayze) are all as cartoonishly flat as if they’d been inked into the film by hand. This dearth of stereotypical problems forces the viewer to really focus on Gyllenhaal’s internal state: he’s being told that the world will end unless he intervenes, and he seems to be following a trail of clues that points to time travel as the final answer.
The actors are committed — the new faces, old hands, and ringers alike (for the honor of using their names, stars like Swayze, Noah Wyle, and Katharine Ross (!) are rewarded with two or three Big Scenes apiece; Drew Barrymore also earns an executive producer credit by having believed enough in the early script to get the movie made). Mary McDonnell as Donnie's mother gives a performance that neatly externalizes the pain and difficulty of raising teenagers, and Holmes Osborne is convincing as a loving and defensive father. Sean Smith and Ronald Fisher as Gyllenhaal’s best friends are bewildered by his sudden odd behavior, and Malone is intrigued and intriguing in turn as his love interest. As for Gyllenhaal, he’s in almost every scene.
Reminds me of:
It’s a lot for one character to carry. Donnie is, annoyingly, that exceptional kid who is too smart for his teachers, who stands up to the bullies and wins the arguments, who confounds adults with his depth, and in the end is the unthanked savior of the universe — all with little to no evident irony. He’s like Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield if Holden were 100% right and everyone else was a “goddam” phony. A key scene has Donnie confront his hallucination with the question “Why do you wear that stupid bunny suit?” To which the rabbit — his name is Frank — replies “Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?” It sounds profound, or at least meaningful, on first viewing, but diminishes the more you think about it. As an example of what troubled teen Donnie might think is profound, it’s gangbusters, but the movie seems to expect us to honestly be wowed.
There are strong echoes of other films. For example, towards the end students in Halloween costumes strike out on bikes for an urgent ride through town; it’s so reminiscent of E.T.: The Extraterrestrial that it can’t be an accident. Scenes of Samantha Darko’s dance troupe Sparkle Motion — serious and earnest, unaware that they are oversexualized for 4th graders — make a similar satirical point as Happy, Texas or the later Little Miss Sunshine, though there’s not much development of the idea here. Closeups of the elderly Roberta Sparrow (suffering from dementia, her neighbors think, but she might be a time traveller!) as her younger self in a group photo are zoomed into like the final photo closeup of Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
Some of these may not be conscious homages to films or genres, but these examples hint at a flaw with Donnie Darko: It wants to be too much —a horror movie, a science-fiction puzzle, a coming-of-age story, but also social commentary, a gloss on the 1980’s, and even a comedy — and it never finds a tone which supports all of these elements at once. For some, myself included, the story works fine (even given the tone shifts) without a full explanation of how the science-fantasy mechanics operate. But Kelly did not create his movie in this form; infamously, he was forced to cut 20-30 minutes from his original festival version. When Donnie was a massive seller on DVD, purchased and watched by a far larger audience than it had in its theatrical run (opening a film about a plane that falls out of the sky a few weeks after 9/11 didn’t help), Kelly was invited to cut a completely new version for another theatrical release in 2004. That version added chapter delineations with interstitial imagery and explanatory text purportedly taken from the book The Philosophy of Time Travel (an imaginary textbook written by the Sparrow character); these snippets make many of the events in the film logical — “logical” in that they support a giant backstory in which beings from the future can implant suggestions in someone’s mind to guide events, and in which a tangled set of physical rules governs the fabric of the universe. The additions, taken at face value, explain the plot; but without the mystery of inexplicable events, the movie can only be as good as its mythos — which does not rise far above that which high-school Donnie might cook up with his buddies between conversations about Smurfs. In the original version, the lack of explanation for the same vaguely fanfic-y rules creates a true tension — how much of what transpires is only happening in Donnie’s mind, whether fueled by madness, drugs, placebos, or reality?
This is arguable, superficial and a little mean, but in my opinion Donnie Darko shares a trait with Forman’s Amadeus: in each case, its director released an extended version which doesn’t play as well as the original. (But there are many, many fans of the director’s cut of Donnie. If you’re one, educate us in the comments for this post, won’t you?)
But then — the guilt!
I loved this film so much when I first watched it; it’s rare for something to fall so far for me on a second viewing. That’s not how rewatching usually works. I remember being very excited for Kelly’s second big feature as writer-director, Southland Tales in 2006. But as the movie’s release approached, the early critical response soured quickly. I never did wind up seeing it and it tanked equally with critics and audiences; his 2009 The Box never even appeared on my radar (though it was slightly better received). I feel bad about it all; maybe I’ll give one of them a spin someday, but I’m booked through 2018 at this point. He’s got a new one in the works too. Maybe I can start fresh. (Defenders of Southland Tales, feel free to join the Donnie director’s cut fans in the comments.)
Pitch:
Donnie’s utterly creepy mirror-stare both at himself and, later, at Frank . . . . Between this and Svankmajer’s Alice, it’s a wonder that anyone can keep a pet rabbit in the house and still sleep at night.
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