Posted: 11/21/2001

Donnie Darko

(2001)

by Joe Steiff

It’s a horror film. No, really.

So, you’ve just been talked into seeing On the Line, and you need something to wash the taste out of your mouth (puke just didn’t do it). Or your new boyfriend/girlfriend/pet rented Never Been Kissed yet again, and you wonder if being a teenager is always funnier in hindsight or whether your happy ending is just around the corner (waiting on the local ball diamond).

Drew Barrymore feels your pain. No. Seriously. Don’t laugh. She does. Or maybe she feels the need to atone for all the fluff she has put out (enjoyable, watchable fluff, but fluff none the less). Or maybe she’s more savvy than any of us give her credit for. Or — it doesn’t matter. What matters is that her production company had the foresight and the guts to bring us Donnie Darko — one hell of a creepy snapshot of adolescence.

That’s not to say that first-time writer/director Richard Kelly’s film will strike most people as realistic by any stretch of the imagination. Unless you believe that the title character of Donnie Darko is what his therapist and family fear — a young man whose schizophrenia-like perceptions are leading him to further isolation and increasingly destructive acts.

The storyline teeters between horror and science fiction, as Donnie marks off the days on his calendar till the end of the world, apparently only a few weeks away. Jake Gyllenhaal (the sweet misunderstood hero of October Sky, the wacky misunderstood hero of Bubble Boy) makes Donnie one of the most disturbing protagonists I can think of, alternating the picture of normalcy with images of demonic intensity.

To his parents (Mary McDonnell and Holmes Osborne) and therapist (Katherine Ross), Donnie seems to be spiraling into a darker and darker internal world, triggered in part by his new friend, Frank, whom only he (and the audience) can see. Donnie’s eccentric behavior moves into the realm of being disturbed, and not in a good way.

Stop reading here if you want to see the film with as little forewarning as possible. I’ll just say that it is well worth seeing. But if my comments about some of the plot developments won’t ruin the film for you, read on.

Much like K-Pax wants to keep you guessing as to the true nature of the protagonist (is he mentally ill or a visitor from another planet), the teenaged Donnie could be either dangerously mentally ill or privy to information from the future, delivered by a giant shiny rabbit. Your father’s Harvey, this ain’t.

For all the kudos being lauded upon Kevin Spacey’s K-Paxian prot, it is Jake Gyllenhaal’s Donnie who is the bleaker and more painful vision of mental illness and therefore the more real, because his internal world threatens the safety of all those in his external world, including himself. A superb performance.

Redemption, or at least a slowing of the decent into madness, seems possible when Donnie makes a real friend, the kind that other people can see, Gretchen Ross (Jena Malone, Life as a House). Normalcy intercedes for a brief moment before their slowly developing relationship intensifies Frank’s presence in Donnie’s life. Soon Frank is telling Donnie to commit destructive acts, setting into motion a series of events that indeed may bring about the end of the world, as he knows it. That these acts uncover an even darker layer to Donnie’s external world does little to diminish their negative impact on Donnie.

Donnie Darko joins the rank of horror films that owe more to atmosphere than gore - films that explore a realm of gothic storytelling, relying on the slow build of details rather than the jack-in-the-box kind of jump-out-your-seat-and-spill-your-popcorn scares. Kelly would argue that his film is more science fiction than horror, but in fact, it is an easy companion to a number of recent atmospheric films that would include The Sixth Sense, The Others and The Devil’s Backbone. Films often not even labeled as “horror,” but rather as “mysteries.” Perhaps this owes to our late 20th Century film notion that horror has to involve some sort of maniacal slasher, but even the slasher genre has been reworked into the atmospheric mystery of From Hell. Not without some struggle if one is to believe the Hughes Brothers’ interviews in which they talk about how hard it was to restrain their desire to splash gore on the screen. Their so-called “maturing aesthetic” is simply what many filmmakers and most gothic storytellers have known for a long time: the imagination creates a far scarier image than the camera.

Hence, as one might expect, Donnie Darko is most powerful before the science fiction-type explanation for what is happening. The atmosphere and set up are so strong that the apparent denouement is a bit anti-climactic. Yet there is the nagging possibility that what we have watched really is simply the inner world of a disturbed adolescent.

Either way, in watching Donnie’s world turn upside down, we become scared for and of him. If we were not privy to his inner world, we would concur that he is disturbed. But because Kelly takes us inside Donnie’s head, our perception of reality is thrown into doubt. And for good effect. Two of the most powerful scenes in the film are when Donnie confronts Frank in his bathroom and when Frank interrupts one of Donnie’s therapy sessions.

The fact that the story is placed in the late 80s creates an interesting tension for the audience (since we know that the world didn’t end), though there’s no clear reason why the film has to be a period piece. Unless writer/director Richard Kelly just wanted to use that cool mix-tape of favorite tunes from his early adolescence. In a recent disillusioning interview with him and the editor, they revealed that the manipulation of shot speeds had more to do with timing the shots so that specific lyrics would overlay certain images than for any deeper meaning or reflection of the role of time in the story. So a mix tape rationale wouldn’t surprise me at this point.

Ultimately, Donnie Darko is a more pessimistic take on the kind of story that lies at the heart of Happy Accidents. Whatever the reason, fate seems to be at work and with tragic consequences. Even when Donnie makes things right, it’s hard to say that we’re happy about it. In light of recent events, it may be that the film is too dark, too tragic. Certainly, some of the specifics of the recent American Airlines crash in NYC echo so closely to an event in the film that I wouldn’t be surprised if Donnie Darko has been pulled from theaters.

Which would be a shame. Because this is one of the films that really took me someplace unexpected. Not necessarily someplace I would have thought to go, but someplace I’ve not easily forgotten. I’m glad I went.

Joe Steiff teaches film at Columbia College in Chicago and tries not to listen to his imaginary friends, especially the ones with long floppy ears.

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