After being bugged by my friends ad nauseam to watch this movie, I finally rented it the other night, and so far I’ve watched it twice, and I still haven’t unraveled the whole thing. It’s that good.
Basically, it’s an odd combination of American Beauty, Magnolia and 12 Monkeys. Yes, you read that right. It uses approaches from several different genres, but doesn’t neatly fit in any.
Donnie Darko is a troubled (possibly schizophrenic) teenager attending an upper-class Catholic school in upscale Fairfax. He comes from a nice Republican nuclear family. He’s in therapy. See where this is going? No, you don’t.
One night, Donnie is woken by the apparition of a shadowy character who resembles a death’s-head bunny rabbit. The rabbit informs him that the world will end in 28 days. While this is happening, a jet engine falls out of the sky and lands on Donnie’s house, falling directly into the bedroom where he should have been sleeping.
What follows (I think) is a splintering of Donnie’s reality into an alternate timeline. It begins to appear that Donnie was in bed and did die, but for some reason, he’s living out a tangenital existence for the next 28 days. Over the next month, several things happen to Donnie, and he performs several acte gratuite at Frank’s behest. A mysterious old woman who appears to be senile or insane tells Donnie that “every living creature dies alone,” which leads him to seek love with an equally troubled girl named Gretchen.
But it’s not a teen-love story, either. Turns out the old woman once wrote a book called The Philosophy of Time Travel, which becomes a sort of guidebook for Donnie. His physics professor tells him how time travel and alternate realities are possible, but has to cut off the conversation just as Donnie realizes that he has a choice between God’s plan and his own.
It all builds into a very confusing but oddly fulfilling climax in which events roll back in time to the beginning and everything turns out the way it was intended to in the first place. Am I giving it all away here? Don’t bet on it.
What makes this film so amazing is the fact that it balances all of these elements so perfectly. You care what happens to these people, and the setting (like American Beauty) is so well fleshed-out that it feels lived-in. The characters aren’t what they seem at first, and it’s wonderful how much character development the director achieves with just a few well-placed lines of dialogue. In one scene, Donnie asks his socialite mother “what it feels like to have a wacko for a son,” and her response is a teary, “it feels wonderful.” Likewise, when a hysterical teacher informs his parents that he told her to “forcibly insert the Lifeline Excercise Manual into my anus,” his father has to stifle a laugh. In these moments, you come to love and respect these people, and the acting is up to the script.
It’s also worth mentioning that Drew Barrymore and Patrick Swayze are in this movie, and that their roles are amazing, and not what you’d expect.
If I could compare the movie to anything, it would be a Japanese series called Serial Experiments: Lain, in which the lead character finds that she can control reality but that she can’t manage the effects, so realizing this, she effectively edits herself out of the continuum. In the end, Donnie makes much the same choice. He could have lived to see the world end, but at the price of watching others suffer, and instead we see him lay down to sleep for the last time, laughing because he finally knows happiness.
The incidental music is excellent, composed of simple, haunting motifs interspersed with several extremely well-chosen ’80s songs. No, this isn’t an ’80s movie, but it does take place in 1988 (“Vote Dukakis!”), giving it a nice nostalgic feel. As with the rest of the movie, specific songs are chosen that fit perfectly with the plot.
For example, during the opening credits, Echo and the Bunnymen’s “Killing Moon,” with its theme of free-will/fate conflict plays, while “Under the Milky Way,” which is about psychological disarray and therapy plays during a party scene. As Donnie and Gretchen come to the turning point in their relationship, we know that only six hours remain for them, and their coming together, which is already tinged with tragedy, becomes even more poignant over the tune of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” a beautiful and inescapably tragic song of isolation in the midst of love sung by the doomed Ian Curtis. The final montage of the movie plays out over a wonderful reworking of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World.”
It’s sad that this film barely saw any time in theaters. It was realeased shortly after 9/11, and like Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, it never got a chance in the mainstream, but it developed a fanatic cult following, of which I count myself as a member. By all means, rent it, but give yourself the time to watch it a few times through.
(Rumor has it that, in response to the film’s success on DVD, there will be a theatrical re-release later this year, and that it will include material the directory originally had to cut out to manage the running-time. In the meantime, there are countless sites out there that debate the possible meanings of the film, as well as the enigmatic official site.)