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Donnie Darko

2001, Movie, R, 113 mins

Donnie Darko: Review

DONNIE DARKO
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October 2, 1988: Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) is having a rough trip through adolescence. Sandwiched between two well-adjusted, outgoing sisters — Elizabeth (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who's about to start college, and little Samantha (Daveigh Chase), part of the school's "Sparkle Motion" dance squad — Donnie feels awkward, misunderstood and alienated from the rituals and routines of high-school life. He doesn't have a girlfriend, but he's got a shrink (Katharine Ross), a medicine cabinet filled with unwanted psychotropic drugs and an imaginary friend called Frank (James Duval), who looks like a guy in a malevolent bunny suit. And then fate delivers a mind-boggling kick in the teeth: A jet engine crashes through Donnie's bedroom ceiling, and the only reason he isn't squashed is that he's out sleepwalking. Already plagued by existential angst, Donnie is deeply shaken by his brush with death, made stranger by the fact that no one can figure out where the engine came from — no crippled plane turns up anywhere, and the FAA is baffled. Donnie begins seeing Frank behind the bathroom mirror, warning that the world will end in 28 days: Frank knows, he says, because he's from the future. A string of odd coincidences suggests Frank may be telling the truth, and Donnie becomes obsessed with time travel. He also begins having visions of energy streaming from people's bodies, apparently reaching out for... something. Meanwhile, the school is vandalized — could the culprit be Donnie, sleepwalking under Frank's influence? — and the town falls under the spell of a silver-tongued motivational speaker (Patrick Swayze). The bright spot in Donnie's increasingly dark days is his budding relationship with transfer student Gretchen Ross (Jena Malone), who's on the run from her own demons. This exercise in "or is it?" paranoia gets off to a shaky start but gradually pulls together into a genuinely haunting parable of teenage alienation. Kelly's observations about materialism and crackpot pop philosophizing are trite and hardly unique to the era, but his missteps are minor by comparison to his achievements: He slowly weaves a meticulously crafted web of peculiarity around Donnie, and by the time the movie shows its hand, every piece of the puzzle has slipped neatly (but not glibly) into place.

Although it tanked on original theatrical release, earning less than $5,000,000, the film found such a passionate following on video and DVD that it was re-released in 2004 with 20 minutes of restored footage that had been trimmed to reduce the running time. Though many director's cuts are pointless variations on mediocre material, this version of DONNIE DARKO dramatically improves on the original. It's simultaneously more vivid and more elusive, a delicious fever dream whose highlights include the most disturbing jack o' lantern ever... suffice it to say that Frank the bunny looks seriously disturbing as a pumpkin. At 133 minutes, the film doesn't feel longer, just deeper and more richly textured. The Big '80s soundtrack (to which Kelly added songs and shifted others around) feels more eerily ominous than ever, an incongruously bouncy counterpoint to Donnie's increasingly menacing visions of Frank. The bulk of the restored scenes involve Donnie's English teacher, Miss Pomeroy (Drew Barrymore, whose Flower Films produced), lecturing about the novel Watership Down; other, shorter added scenes expand on and enrich Donnie's relationship with his family. Kelly also beefed up the special visual effects (though not to the point of intrusiveness); they now include superimposed pages from Roberta Sparrow's "Philosophy of Time Travel" that appear to explain Donnie's dilemma. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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