Is there yet time to shuffle my 2001 Ten Best Films list? I’m desperate to create room at the top, up there with Waking Life, for the remarkable Donnie Darko, a dystopic sci-fi teen movie set in the American suburban ’80s: Back to the Future meets Rebel Without a Cause. This 2001 latecomer to Boston plays —grab some tickets! — just this one weekend, January 25-27, at the Brattle Theatre. I second the rave review of my Village Voice colleague J. Hoberman, who in October called it "certainly the most original and venturesome American indie I’ve seen this year."
For me, this precociously accomplished first feature by 26-year-old USC film-school grad Richard Kelly succeeds well beyond Mullholland Drive, which cleaned up on Best Picture awards from the New York, Boston, and National Society of Film Critics. Donnie Darko has more than a pinch of Lynch-style surrealism in its conception: cheery middle-class America reconfigured as a rotted, demonic dreamscape. If its maelström of swirling nightmares-within-nightmares is as dense as the one in Lynch’s picture, at least there’s a payoff. Whereas Mulholland Drive swerves off the lost highway with its frustratingly impenetrable third act, Donnie Darko —more moving, even creepier — is capable of being cracked. Maybe. At least after several intense, head-scratching viewings!
It’s fall 1988, and 16-year-old Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) lives at home in the snug middle-class town of Middlesex, where his Republican parents (Mary McDonnell, Holmes Osborne) argue over the dinner table about the upcoming presidential election. Donnie’s haughty Harvard-bound sister, Elizabeth (Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jake’s sister), favors Michael Dukakis; the parents swear by George Bush. But Donnie is locked in a deeper struggle as he tries to get through each anguished day, with the aid of an attentive therapist (Katharine Ross) and with ever-increasing medication. (It’s the laissez-faire Reaganite ’80s, when mood-altering drugs were administered freely.)
The pill popping backfires. Donnie, droopy-eyed and increasingly anti-social, is plagued by disquieting visions. He’s beckoned out of his bed by a shivery apparition: a suit-wearing six-foot talking rabbit with a skull face and a mouthful of carnivore teeth. This frightful bunny is called Frank, and he claims to be from outer space and the future. He’s come to inform Donnie that the world will end soon, in November 1988. In Dr. Caligari fashion, Frank pushes a somnambulist Donnie into destructive tasks: flooding the high school Donnie attends, burning down the mansion of a devious self-help guru (Patrick Swayze), axing the statue of the school mascot.
Might Frank be Donnie’s projection, the sly invention of an angry schizoid talking to himself? Why else would the big rabbit order him to perform perilous acts so consistent with his own nihilist desires? But rationalists who crave logical explanations and closure are thrown a bone. Eventually, Frank’s being is tied to a real person in the film, and to a suppressed violent memory of Donnie’s from the non-sci-fi world: What Happened That Fateful Halloween. But each perhaps-answered question in Donnie Darko leaves further enigmas. Other meta-mysteries include perplexing objects dropping from the sky, a wild-haired old lady, Grandma Death, checking her mailbox incessantly for a missive of mystical import, and a narrative seemingly shuttling backward and forward in time, in line with the thinking of cosmologist Stephen Hawking, whose theories Donnie has been contemplating.
Rebel Without a Cause was the movie that first took seriously the pain and torment of being a sensitive American teenager. Rebel’s James Dean time-travels into Donnie Darko and into Jake Gyllenhaal’s heartfelt, heart-heavy performance. Is it going too far to see Jake’s Donnie as a kind of teenage American Jesus who takes upon himself — think Bresson here — the sadness and solitude and estrangement of those whose paths he crosses? (All of us?) Such a spiritual reading of Donnie Darko could help one to fathom the sacrificial downer ending, the fatalist working-through of writer/director Kelly’s most profound line: "I think some people are born with tragedy in their blood."
RIP: DIRECTOR TED DEMME, who was just 38, died of a heart attack in LA after collapsing during a charity basketball game. He was a competent filmmaker (Beautiful Girls, Blow) who made one gem starring his collaborator and friend Denis Leary: the Charlestown-set Monument Ave. (1998), the best Boston movie in years and years.
