Review: Donnie Darko

OK, I’ll do my best...Set in 1988, teenager Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) goes sleepwalking one night and is visited by a giant rabbit named Frank who tells Donnie (who is on some kind of medication…apparently) that the end of the world is soon coming. While he’s out, an aeroplane has crashed into Donnie’s bedroom. Thankfully, his loving and sensible but ultimately clueless parents (Mary McDonnell and Holmes Osborne), younger sister (Daveigh Chase), and snarky older sister (Maggie Gyllenhaal) are all unharmed. Meanwhile, Donnie becomes obsessed with time-travel and wormholes. Other events occurring at this time include the arrival of a nice new girl named Gretchen (Jena Malone), and a liberal literature teacher (Drew Barrymore) earns the ire of the repressed and conservative gym teacher/parent Kitty Farmer (Beth Grant). Miss Farmer, a religious yet new-agey zealot also brings to school a hippy-dippy motivational speaker named Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze), whom the snarky Donnie sees right through. Katharine Ross plays Donnie’s shrink, who seems somewhat unsettled by him (And not without cause. The kid’s being told to commit anarchic deeds by a giant demonic bunny rabbit for fuck’s sake). Noah Wyle plays Donnie’s well-meaning science teacher, and Seth Rogen plays a young douchebag.

 

I won’t claim to have understood absolutely everything even on my second viewing (and the supposedly more coherent “Director’s Cut” no less), but I managed to follow this 2001 Richard Kelly flick well-enough on both of my viewings to highly enjoy it. I don’t think it’s that opaque. More importantly, I feel like I really ‘got’ the film’s vibe. Kelly has found it difficult to follow up this one with the awful “Southland Tales” and the mediocre “The Box”, but here in his debut he gave us something well and truly unique. Frankly, for a first film it’s fucking ballsy. It was made in the 00s (Columbine happened during production), set in the late 80s, but boy does this film feel like it’s made during, about, and for those of us who were teens in the 90s ‘Grunge’ era. I know the 80s gave us films like “The River’s Edge” and “Permanent Record”, but when I think about disaffected youth, I think about the 90s, probably largely because that’s when I was a teenager myself. And boy did I see a lot of ‘disaffected youth’ in the title character of this film. The best way I can describe the film is a mixture of David Lynch, Tim Hunter’s “The River’s Edge”, and Kurt Cobain, but set in the 80s and involving time-travel. Yeah, I think you’re just gonna have to see it and experience it for yourself.

 

Jake Gyllenhaal for me is one of the best actors of his generation, and his Donnie is the post-child for depressed, pre-Emo, disaffected (and probably over-medicated) youth. It’s a testament to his talent that he manages to make us both scared of and somewhat sympathetic towards this troubled misfit. Meanwhile, it’s probably no coincidence that Donnie is occasionally shot in glowering, malevolent Stanley Kubrick fashion, and it wouldn’t be the biggest stretch in the world to compare this film to “A Clockwork Orange”.

 

There’s humour throughout the film, but it’s dark, snarky humour. Some of the funniest moments involve the interplay between Gyllenhaal and his sister Maggie, playing his on-screen sister here as they insult each other with frankly moronic profanities: ‘You’re such a fuck ass’, ‘You can go suck a fuck’ may just be my favourite exchange of dialogue of its year. I also loved the discussion between Donnie and some of his friends about the sexual promiscuity of Smurfette. However, the absolute comic highlight of the film is the performance by the late Patrick Swayze as a douchebag, phony, quasi-religious  motivational speaker. He’s hilarious as the completely useless self-help guru, and choosing Swayze (who, let’s face it, could be a tad self-serious at times on screen) to play such a part was a great idea. The ‘Attitudinal beliefs’ poster at the poster while Swayze speaks says everything. Like most of the other adults in the film, this guy is a clueless square and a hypocrite to boot. Even Mary McDonnell as Donnie’s mother, as much as she loves her children dearly, has no real clue what is going on with her potentially paranoid schizophrenic child.

 

Easily the squarest character in the film and also the easiest to hate, is Beth Grant’s stridently humourless, repressed PE teacher and neighbourhood mother Kitty Farmer. In a performance that nearly eclipses Gyllenhaal’s excellent work, Grant is outstanding as essentially the opposite of Drew Barrymore’s ‘cool’, liberal literature teacher. If there’s an emotion that isn’t somewhere on the spectrum between love and fear (as Donnie tries to explain the narrowmindedness of such pigeonholing), this woman doesn’t understand it and will deny its existence. Former 90s ‘bad girl’ Barrymore is exact casting (against type), and might remind you of teachers you yourself have had over the years. Or wanted to have. Jena Malone, meanwhile is really likeable as Donnie’s girlfriend Gretchen, I’ve always liked her as an actress.

 

In some ways I think the issue of time-travel and wormholes complicates the film just a tad too much, but at the same time it kinda fits. The soundtrack is full of songs that were out several years before the film’s setting. “Evil Dead” is showing in a theatre in the late 80s (Hilariously on a double-bill with “The Last Temptation of Christ”). I’ve already said that the film has a 90s Cobain-era vibe about it. And the most 00s thing about the film is its dealing with mental health issues. So it’s kind of fitting that a film that involves potential time-travel should at various times evoke the 80s, 90s, and 00s. In that sense, I like the time-travel issue, it just makes the narrative just a tad opaque, much as I wouldn’t call it incoherent. Multiple viewings here are a must, and a cluttered narrative is somehow poetically right for a character who may be a paranoid schizophrenic, so perhaps it had to be this way.

Daring, inventive, well-acted, darkly funny, and a brilliant depiction of post-Cobain disaffected, medicated youth (with a revenge-fantasy bent), albeit set in the late 80s. To the degree that I understood this film, I really liked it and I identified with quite a bit of it. Whatever you may think of it, you’ll never forget it.

 

Rating: B