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MovieMail's Review
Donnie Darko became an instant cult classic last year when its blend of Twin Peaks era Lynchian weirdness and high-school heart won over audiences to become a surprise film of the year.
For the uninitiated, Donnie Darko is an enigmatic tale of time travel, destiny and a big evil-looking bunny called Frank. One night Frank appears to Donnie, a high school student with some mental difficulties, and warns him that the World will end in just over 28 days. Frank begins to issue a series of instructions that grow ever more violent.
The rather difficult plot is strengthened in this Directors cut – a huge number of after-cinema conversations were ignited by the original film's twisted structure and logic. This new cut adds 20 mins of footage that goes someway to explaining the mysteries that lie at the heart of
the film. By the end of things, you would have to a have a hard heart not to be moved by this extraordinary film.
The great cult film of the last few years remains a fascinating puzzle. When Donnie is told by an a sinister giant rabbit that the world will end in a few weeks, an alternately amusing, intriguing and occasionally terrifying chain of events is sparked off. Unconventional films can often appear forced in their attempts to appear eccentric, but this, like the best work of David Lynch, succeeds in exerting a deep emotional impact on the viewer. Great acting, great script, great direction, great film.
A study of a warped imagination, or the product of one? Either way - or perhaps both - Donnie Darko is a curious thing indeed, a film that requires maximum attention a... more >
A study of a warped imagination, or the product of one? Either way - or perhaps both - Donnie Darko is a curious thing indeed, a film that requires maximum attention and perhaps some kind of understanding of the fields of mental illness and time travel. At the very least, the viewer should go into this film with an extremely open mind.
Donnie (a superb Jake Gyllenhaal) is an intelligent but psychologically-troubled teenager, struggling to make sense of the world around him. He cheats death when a plane's engine crashes into his house, having sleepwalked to a nearby golf course, where he 'encounters' a giant rabbit called Frank, who tells him that the world will end in less than a month. Frank becomes a recurring vision to Donnie and starts to exercise a degree of control over the youngster's actions and behaviour.
As the story progresses, numerous loose plot strands appear, sometimes as if from nowhere, and arguably are not all tied up satisfactorily. For instance, when Donnie enquires as to why 'Cellar Door' is scrawled on his teacher's blackboard, she explains to him that a renowned linguist once described them as the most beautiful-sounding words in the English language. Such is the blasé and offhand way in which this is dealt with that it somewhat belittles the fact that the words prove integral to the film's coda. Similarly, the piece of the plane which crashes into Donnie's house is found to have a non-existent serial number, yet it is the same plane his family board later in the same 'dimension'...or is it? The flaws in the storyline may seem apparent, yet still leave a nagging suspicion that one has either misinterpreted something or overlooked some subtle yet critical nuance. Equally, one might be tempted to read too much into things (how relevant is the fact that self-help guru Jim Cunningham's case study is - to Donnie's horror - also called Frank?) Certainly, the film's complexity mirrors the obvious whirlwind of confusion inside young Donnie's mind.
Donnie Darko is a difficult and intense experience, but a largely rewarding one. Clearly, it is going to mean different things to different people at different times, and screams out for repeat watching (and so is, er, perhaps best not reviewed after the first...!). Certainly, it is virtually impossible to sum up in a mere few paragraphs, which is as good a recommendation as any to actually see it...at least once. < less
This thoroughly odd little teen-pic suggests that its writer-director Richard Kelly, while growing up in the late 1980s, never left his bedroom except to see Blue Velv... more >
This thoroughly odd little teen-pic suggests that its writer-director Richard Kelly, while growing up in the late 1980s, never left his bedroom except to see Blue Velvet and maybe rent a couple of John Hughes movies on the long walk back home after dark. And yet somehow, somehow, out of this small, black-painted, permanently-locked, Echo and the Bunnymen-scored room has emerged a film with all the dead-of-night beauty of a Gregory Crewdson photograph, one which continues to nag at the viewer long after the lights have come up and we’re asked to return to normality.
Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a troubled teen with medication in his bathroom cabinet who wakes up on the road outside his leafy, quiet little Virginia town as October 1988 rolls in. Though conversation around the Darko family table is geared towards the upcoming Bush/Dukakis presidential elections, and thus some kind of reality, events take a turn for the weird when a jet engine crashes through the roof of the family abode, and Donnie learns from a seven-foot rabbit that the world will end in twenty-eight days, six hours, forty-two minutes, and twelve seconds. Back at school, Donnie goes about working out his neuroses with shrink Katharine Ross, his relationship with new girl Gretchen (Jena Malone), what to do with oleaginous self-help cretin Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze), and just how someone in high school is supposed to stop the sky from falling.
As another fable about teenagers growing up and finding out that life isn’t as simple as it might have once seemed, Donnie Darko would make a terrific double-bill with Spider-Man. Gyllenhaal bears a marked resemblance to Tobey Maguire, and his achingly fragile relationship with Malone brings back pleasant memories of Peter Parker’s courting of Mary-Jane. Gretchen remarks that Donnie Darko’s name is like that of a superhero; and Donnie, using the special powers granted to him as a borderline schizophrenic to do what he sees as good but what others condemn as evil, comes to resemble, simultaneously, a Christ figure, a hooded angel, and a lone horseman of the Apocalypse. Kelly gives Donnie’s acts a further dimension by setting them against the business of the normal world: when this superhero unleashes flood and fire, everyone around him is sitting through PTA meetings and school talent shows.
The film is unusually and winningly cast (Drew Barrymore and e.r.’s Noah Wyle make a curious, sympathetic double act as teachers who find themselves caught in an open battle with apathy and irony for the hearts and minds of their students), and strikingly bold in its directorial decisions, particularly in its use of music; it has the best 80s soundtrack heard on screen since Grosse Pointe Blank, and Kelly’s deployment of Tears For Fears is a particular joy. Simultaneously set up as a coma dream and a narcotic imagining, this is a film that demands to be seen more than once, one which will keep coming back to you long after the passing of twenty-eight days. < less
