USA, R, 113 m, 2001
Directed by Richard Kelly. Stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Drew Barrymore, Patrick Swayze, et al.

First-time writer/director Richard Kelly’s frustrating Donnie Darko oscillates between the inspired and the banal. Whenever it begins to diverge into startlingly irregular territory, it wimps out and retreats into the language of stock horror flicks. Kelly doesn’t have much of a voice; he follows M. Night Shyamalan’s austere mise en scène and ponderous cutting, yet he also drifts towards the slacker-style buffoonery of Kevin Smith. (I refer you to the movie’s winking dissertation on the sex life of Smurfs.) There are some admittedly rousing ideas pointed to now and again in Donnie Darko, but they wind up fizzling out, and this rudely spoils the film’s portentous buildup. Despite the varying caliber of last-minute twists Shyamalan customarily springs on his audience, credit the director for at least making good on his promise to deliver the goods. Kelly whets our appetite in a like manner, but the exegetic bone he tosses us in the final reel is woefully sans meat. Donnie Darko plays like a bent riff on Harvey, but it’s too obvious and amateurishly assembled to tap the breed of subversion it grasps for. 

The action is set in 1988, just as the presidential race between Bush and Dukakis draws to a close. The picture’s title character (Tobey Maguire-lookalike Jake Gyllenhaal) is a schizophrenic high school student who communicates regularly with the dark specter of a masked, oversized bunny named Frank. I whooped at the first sight of this demonic hare; his patchwork, dime store getup wouldn’t make the grade at a Delta House Halloween kegger. (In the history of bad cinema, Frank’s ensemble may be the most ludicrous since that of the helmeted alien gorilla in Phil Tucker’s Robot Monster.) After informing Donnie that the world will end in 28 days, Frank directs him to perform wanton acts of vandalism in his sleep, such as driving an axe into the head of a revered school sculpture. Not surprisingly, Donnie visits a therapist regularly, but the meds he’s been prescribed seem to be failing abysmally. It’s kept ambiguous, though, until the movie’s puzzling finale if Frank is an actual presence from another dimension or simply the delusion of a batty teenager. 

The odd complexion of Donnie Darko has bamboozled (young) audiences into ascribing deep meaning to plot points that really don’t deserve analysis. The screenplay is offbeat in a very self-conscious way—it’s peculiar for the sake of parting from the herd, but its queer flourishes don’t amount to a pile of rabbit droppings. (Like many green filmmakers, Kelly mistakes cosmetics for content.) Things get off to a groaningly bad start when the suburban Darko family sits down for dinner. As they dutifully choke down the evening’s colorless entree, a political exchange between Donnie and his sister Elizabeth (played by Gyllenhaal’s very own plain Jane sis, Maggie) degenerates into a clash of irksome vulgarities. Elizabeth calls Donnie a “fuck-ass,” and the equally eloquent Donnie tells her to go “suck a fuck.” This insipid dialogue (made even more aggravating by the bungling players and flat, soggy camera work) had me wondering what in the name of God all the critics were crowing about after they screened this bummer at Sundance. If Kelly is the next big thing in Hollywood (as many in the press would lead us to believe) then the movies are doomed. 

Striving laboriously to keep his audience off balance, Kelly dresses up Donnie Darko with lots of transparent whimsy, but his sardonic depiction of Reagan-era suburbia lacks the surreal luster that David Lynch gave us in Blue Velvet. Kelly’s off-kilter milieu rings false because it’s painfully affected, and there’s no zip (or humor) in the pictures he frames. To cite an instance, after an evening of sleepwalking into a neighborhood golf course, Donnie returns home to find that an airline engine has crashed through his bedroom ceiling. (It’s never figured out to which airliner the engine actually belonged.) The inexplicable character of this happening recalls the tempest of frogs in Magnolia, but that off-the-wall setpiece in P.T. Anderson’s tangled epic at least felt thematically correct. In Donnie Darko, the engine gag comes off as a doltish subterfuge. (It also reminded me of one of the opening passages in The World According to Garp, but Kelly is no George Roy Hill.) 

Everything but the kitchen sink is tossed into this unholy mess. At a party, watery worms (which look like they were lifted directly from James Cameron’s The Abyss) spring from the kids’ chests. There’s also a disgraceful subplot involving a phony motivational speaker, Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze), that Donnie inadvertently reveals to be a child molester. Of course, any character that espouses Scriptural morays in Donnie Darko is depicted as a hypocrite or sleazeball. (Or, to quote Lizzy, a “fuck-ass.”) There’s also a thread of ageism that I found off-putting. For example, Donnie’s younger teachers are depicted as hip and receptive (Drew Barrymore, who also produced this debacle, inserts herself into one of these roles), but the seasoned educators are cheaply mocked for their old-line approach to schooling Donnie and his snotty little classmates. As a veteran instructor named Kitty Farmer who embraces and promotes Cunningham’s ideologies, Beth Grant is reduced to a repressed, book-burning shrill. It’s a low, tedious stereotype that makes you feel like a jerk for laughing. 

What’s worse is that the character of Donnie is a total drip, and you’ll probably lose interest in him long before the halfway mark. If the character had an agreeable visage or a smidgen of wit, we might find him more accessible and feel for his plight, but Donnie has the personality of a wet dishrag. By the closing credits, I regretted that Frank had not taken that axe and buried it in Donnie’s skull. But by the time this thing had wrapped, I felt as if Kelly had taken an axe to my skull. 

All in all, Donnie Darko is little more than a cycle of incomprehensible episodes that consist of laughable dialogue like this: 

Donnie: Why do you wear that stupid bunny suit?

Frank: Why do you wear that stupid man suit? 

Why do I wear this stupid critic’s suit that obligates me to sit through this kind of baloney? 

January 6, 2002

© Copyright 2007 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.