director/screenwriter
Richard Kelly
producers
Sean McKittrick
Nancy Juvonen
Adam Fields
cinematographer
Steven Poster
music
Michael Andrews
editors
Sam Bauer
Eric Strand
cast
Jake Gyllenhaal (Donnie Darko)
Jena Malone (Gretchen Ross)
Mary McDonnell (Rose Darko)
Holmes Osborne (Eddie Darko)
Maggie Gyllenhaal (Elizabeth Darko)
James Duval (Frank)
Daveigh Chase (Samantha Darko)
Beth Grant (Kitty Farmer)
Noah Wyle (Dr. Monnitoff)
Drew Barrymore (Karen Pomeroy)
Katharine Ross (Dr. Lilian Thurman)
Patience Cleveland (Roberta Sparrow)
Patrick Swayze (Jim Cunningham)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 113m
u.s.
release: October 26,
2001
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
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"Don't worry. You got
away with it," says an eerie voice to the titular hero of
Donnie Darko. Those might also have been first-time writer-director
Richard Kelly's words to himself on the set every day: Of the
many varied and rich mysteries in Donnie Darko, perhaps
none are so compelling as the mystery of how this mesmeric, contemplative
whatsit got made in the first place. But it did -- Kelly got
away with it -- and it's enough to give one hope for the future
of movies as a medium still capable of enchantment and surprise.
Having gotten a weak, token release in theaters, the movie is
now strongly and happily on its way to cult status, one of those
oddities that neatly polarizes viewers into the get-its and don't-get-its.
Me, I've seen it four times as I write this (probably more as
you read this), so take the following as a bit of preaching from
the converted.
Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal, dusting
himself off after the indignity of Bubble Boy) is sixteen
and one of the brighter students at the Middlesex Catholic private
school he attends. As Gyllenhaal plays him, Donnie isn't a dorky
outsize freak of virtuosity like Max Fischer of Rushmore
(interestingly, Kelly's original choice for Donnie was Jason
Schwartzman); he wears his intellect lightly, engaging his science
teacher (Noah Wyle) in an effortless-sounding conversation on
physics during which the teacher seems excited, if a bit nonplussed,
at the prospect of having to keep up with one of his own
students in science-geek chat (Wyle does quiet, affecting work
in his scenes with Gyllenhaal). Donnie has the air of a kid who's
spent a lot of time on his own reading and thinking. Oh, and
receiving nocturnal visions of "Frank," which appears
to be a man in a bunny suit topped with a ghastly metallic insectoid
mask. "Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit?"
chortles Donnie (who seldom seems afraid of, or even surprised
by, his visitor); Frank's rejoinder is chilling in its ping-pong
logic: "Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?"
The story, which unfolds in
the autumn of 1988 (as we learn so economically from the movie's
first line of dialogue: "I'm voting for Dukakis"),
involves time travel, tangent universes, portals -- the usual
metaphysical jazz. Those so inclined can, and probably will,
spend weeks deconstructing the temporal riffing, the snake-eating-its-tail
circularity of the plot. I'm not so inclined; the time-travel
aspect is, to me, the least interesting thing about Donnie
Darko. I'm more taken with it as a diary of a mood, a moment;
Kelly was thirteen in 1988, and though several '80s tunesmiths
(Echo and the -- ha! -- Bunnymen, Tears for Fears, Joy Division,
Duran Duran) figure prominently on the soundtrack, the movie
doesn't turn them into a jokey K-Tel Super Sounds of the '80s,
as The Wedding Singer did. If you were anywhere near high
school between 1984 and 1989, the movie will, on some level,
feel like your biography, and not just because of the cultural
references. Kelly catches the depressive but unbowed mood of
a nation after eight years of Reagan, faced with the choice of
two lavishly uninspiring presidential candidates. The great fantasist
was on his way back to California; God knew what the '90s would
bring. Kids in school back then grew up post-Vietnam, absorbed
the Iran-Contra affair through dinner-table osmosis; we (I graduated
from high school in '88) were perhaps the first generation to
be completely steeped in cynicism about our government almost
from birth.
That all makes Donnie Darko
sound vastly more political than I mean it to; all of that is
simply background buzz, the reason its mopey milieu feels so
dead-on. I wouldn't dream of giving away the myriad twists and
turns, particularly the one on which the whole quivering apparatus
is founded; though this isn't an a-ha!, the-main-character-is-really-[fill
in the blank] thriller in the mold of The
Sixth Sense, it really should be experienced as virginally
as possible. Which leaves me with damned little to praise, except
in the vaguest terms (wholly befitting the obscurantist movie
itself). My mind keeps flitting back to Sparkle Motion, an adolescent-girl
dance team including Donnie's younger sister Samantha (Daveigh
Chase), which performs at the school talent show and gets wild
cheers from everyone except unsmiling hipster English teacher
Karen Pomeroy (Drew Barrymore, also one of the film's executive
producers), who is earlier seen applauding the ungainly interpretive
dance "Autumn Angel" by an eternally harassed Chinese
student, who appears to have a crush on Donnie, who when not
communicating with Frank has eyes only for new student Gretchen
(not her given name) Ross (Jena Malone), whose guileless charms
move Donnie to near-masturbation during a hypnotherapy session
with psychiatrist Lilian Thurman (Katharine Ross), who privately
shares the progress of said sessions with Donnie's parents (Mary
McDonnell and Holmes Osborne), who dote on Donnie as well as
Samantha and older sister Elizabeth (Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jake's
sister in our world, too), who is bound for Harvard and can't
resist tweaking Dad at the table with her liberal leanings, which
are definitely not shared by tight-lipped fundamentalist
Kitty Farmer (Beth Grant), school gym teacher, Sparkle Motion
coach, and acolyte of the self-help wisdom of motivational guru
Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze), who thinks that everything boils
down to fear or love, which, in this movie, everything sort of
does.
This mad tumble of characters
and incident Kelly shepherds as smoothly and organically as you
could want; it's like Magnolia
foreshortened, given a patina of the uncanny, and whetted down
to an edge. My favorite moment changes with each viewing; currently
it's the genteel cattiness of the scene between Kitty and Donnie's
mom Rose, wherein Kitty beseeches Rose to take Sparkle Motion
to their destiny at Star Search even though Kitty knows she's
the one who should be doing it, and Mary McDonnell coats her
line with exquisite subtle malice: "And you can't go. Hmm."
Previously, the favorite moment was the meeting of Donnie and
Frank in a movie theater (showing The Evil Dead) as Gorecki-esque
music groans and keens underneath Frank's instructions to Donnie.
Kelly shoots widescreen and dead center, indulging in Kubrickian
static shots and drawing out the paranoid trance of the movie's
world. There's a geek-worthy shot early on, scored to the synth
and hop of Tears for Fears' "Head Over Heels," that
takes us from a sideways view of a schoolbus through a bustling
school hallway, introducing several characters wordlessly and
fixing them for us visually so strongly that their later words
and actions seem preordained -- that was my favorite the second
time through; and the moment that officially handed my heart
to the movie during my first date with it comes late in the timeline,
when Donnie asks Rose, "How's it feel to have a wacko for
a son?" and she pauses and, with every ounce of love and
honesty this currently-underused great actress can work up, gives
a three-word answer that just speaks volumes, and just flat kills
me.
Donnie Darko will inspire some of its fans to geek
out over its paradoxes (are they intentional or not?); I prefer
to track the emotional throughline of it -- to narrow the film
and its hero down to psychological or scientific architecture
is to diminish it, to draw an X on a simplistic chalkline between
fear and love. Kelly has come in for some criticism for what's
assumed to be his sarcastic, superior handling of Kitty Farmer
and her self-help savior Jim Cunningham, but I think Kelly loves
everyone he takes the trouble to put on the screen -- even Jim,
who's destined for a Dickensian fate as cosmic payback for his
presumptuous mastery of his universe, is a fascinating specimen,
and I don't believe he belongs in another movie, as some have
charged. Kelly isn't after anything so simple as taking the piss
out of fatuous video-hucksters selling the One True Way to Personal
Fulfillment (a goal already accomplished in many other films);
if anything he's pointing up the folly of being that sure
of anything -- including oneself -- in this (as we're
reminded by the movie's closing tune) "mad world."
Aside from that, the drowsy
surrealism and elaborate inconclusiveness of Donnie Darko
will simultaneously guarantee it a rabid cult and put it way
off limits to the don't-get-its. It shares with David Lynch's
Eraserhead a stubbornly-what-it-is unhipness that ensures
inadvertent, and possibly perennial, hipness. I don't understand
some of it -- the brooding talk of wormholes and destiny zips
right over my head -- and many of the characters are so deftly
written and delicately played that I can't help wanting more
than Kelly allows me to see of them. (The movie does escape the
too-many-characters dilemma -- also known as the Paul Thomas
Anderson Syndrome -- by zeroing in on Donnie and his quest.)
But the flaws, if you find them to be so, are merely grit in
the texture. As with any richly woven work of art, if you're
attuned to it, you take what you need from Donnie Darko
at each given viewing, and you take something different every
time.
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