I have never met anyone who has seen Donnie Darko who had a negative review of it. I have heard it was confusing, but excellent. Everyone who sees it seems to have an affinity for it and that always intrigued me. Until now though, I hadn't really had a desire to see it. A few years ago I caught about 15 minutes of the middle of the movie and wasn't impressed, so I never thought about checking it out. However, after mid-terms last week I had some down time and decided to finally give Donnie Darko a shot.
Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhall) is not your typical teenager- he sleep walks, sees a shrink, oh and he is seeing a 6ft tall bunny rabbit. His sleep walking and following the giant bunny lead Donnie out one night and it turns out to be lucky because that night the engine dropped out of an airplane and the engine dropped through his roof and on to his bed. It would have killed him. Because he was spared, he thought he should start listening to the giant bunny who tells Donnie that the world is going to end soon unless he does the things the bunny tell him to do. The things he is supposed to do involve, arson, wielding axes and things like that. Darko is often picked on, but he finds respite from it all in the form of Gretchen Ross(Jena Malone). Gretchen is a girl with a bad family history and the two make an odd pair but they work because of their oddities. Donnie becomes sure that the giant bunny is from the future and he becomes interested in time travel and his science teacher Kenneth Monnitoff(Noah Wyle) gives him a book called The Philosophy of TIme Travel and soon the screen is lit up with passages from the book trying to explain the significance of each character and what needs to happen to keep the world from exploding. In a side plot, Jim Cunningham(Patrick Swayse) is a motivational speaker who believes all human emotion boils down to only two things- love and fear. His story comes to a fairly obvious, but bad ending.
When this movie was over I was very confused, but I was drawn to it. A day later I was still confused, but I was thinking about it. It is now five days later and I am still interested in the movie. I want to discuss it endlessly with anyone who has seen it and has a better working knowledge of it. I want to delve into it and figure it all out, but I don't have the time. Instead I have my own conjectures about what was really going on. Then, I go on-line and realize everyone has conjectures and maybe that is the point. Director Richard Kelly created a very surreal, disturbing, dark, scary, sometimes funny, pseudo intellectual world with possible time travel and possible fourth dimensions. There are little things that may or may not be important later in the movie and everything appears connected, but you have to really have time to figure it all out. If you don't have the time you get to just sit and wonder in the back of your mind if the world really ended in the world of Donnie Darko.
I am not going to bore anyone with my theory on what is going on in Donnie Darko, but I will say that it is a very interesting and entertaining movie. There are some remarkable visuals (Donnie trying to hit the bunny through the mirror for starters) and there is a lot of philosophizing about good and evil and the role of fate in life. There is also a lot of nonsense and thing sin there that seem to be there just so the director can smirk about how clever he is. The acting is fairly strong all the way around but this movie lives or dies by Gyllenhall and he keeps the movie alive with a dark, brooding, tortured, layered, some times funny performance of the ultimate emo kid.
I cannot recommend this movie to anyone, but I can recommend it to anyone who enjoys mind bending movies or just dark deep movies. I am sure subsequent viewings will enhance my pleasure as I start to pick up the littler things, or maybe more viewings will turn me off to it. I do not know, but I know it is still with me and I like that. I like that with as many movies as I watch, there are still movies that keep me wondering; movies that keep me guessing. Richard Kelly is definitely one to watch.
Final Grade- A-
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