Then there was the director's cut, a bloated reprise that lengthened the screen time, messed with the sourced song list and all but fatally extracted the organ that made the original so robust: ambiguity. The swinging door that took the viewer from a time travel movie to a suburban gothic Beautiful Mind was barely noticeable the first time around. Kelly nailed it shut on the sci-fi side and made it feel ordinary. It left me and many others wondering if he knew what he'd done in the first place.
Teenaged Donnie Darko is woken by a weird voice that draws him into one of his sleepwalking episodes. The voice belongs to a human-sized rabbit with an evil grin, who tells him in precise language that Donnie's world will end in less than a month. Weird enough, but when he wakes on the golf course the next day he finds that his house took a hit from the falling engine of a jet airliner, his room is now several flavours of dust. When he tells his psychiatrist that he made a new friend she asks him if it's a real or imaginary one, he says flatly, "imaginary". At this point you know that you are in for a peculiar ride.
But it's peculiar in the best way. From the snapping table talk by the family at dinner to the conversation with Frank the Bunny, to the expansion and compression of time as the kids at school speed up or slow down in their movements, we are looking at a world through the eyes of someone whose every glance or stare is one of wonder. It's not all whimsy and fairy floss, though. Donnie knows that Frank drawing him out of the house that night saved his life. He finds it hard to connect to a world that feels like it's always going at the wrong speed and punishes any attempt to stop it (as his gym teacher does when he opposes the cringeworthy inspirational training she's brought in). If the surrealism of his dreams and day visions introduce a kind of epic beauty his encounter and courtship of Gretchen the new girl has all the awkwardness of genuine adolescent life. This and the stranger territories this film enters are navigated with such a confidently delicate helm that we really only notice after the credits that we've travelled so far.
And two decades have not wearied it. While in Australia it was a good performer for the art house circuit its true entry into the culture was on home video, particularly the then new and wondrous DVD which could offer alternative soundtracks (like a director's commentary), making-ofs or anything that could fit to give a feature film some extra context. An internet that had already fashioned meta-verses from tv shows (The X-Files had rewarded its Usenet fans by mentions or adoptions many times over) met the richness and promise of Donnie Darko with open arms and clinging embraces. This film is as much a part of the popular cinema canon as any classic you want to mention (I'm not going to as it will always leads to life-draining disputes) and will be there as long as we acknowledge the cinema of this century. The presentation I watched to write this article was the extended edition from Arrow in 4K, featuring both cuts and a host of swag. When it was announced I marked the calendar.
Watching it last night for the first time in many years I was again rivetted, watching it without interruption for the whole running time. The jokes work, the tragedy works, the performances impress and the movie bids me welcome the same way it did when I saw it at the Nova those decades ago (it wasn't released in Australia outside of Festivals until 2002, though). While I watched I couldn't help noticing something I didn't give much thought to at first watch.
This film was made in 2001 but set in 1988. At the time I thought of this as a writer/director simply falling back on his own adolescence. Most of the post punk songs sourced as score extenders are from the other end of the decade (from memory only Under the Milky Way would have been recent) but good songs have a way of hanging around. Nevertheless, it comes across to me as more time stretching, not so alien to its setting as to be hauntological but still out of time. The contemporary presidential election between Dukakis and Bush has play in the family discourse and might serve as a reminder of more recent difficult elections like 2000's between the high profile Al Gore and Bush Jnr and how it was down to workers going cross-eyed to work out who the vote was for. It's release and conception put it way out of the loop of fictional commentaries on 911 but if it appeals to any era it's the close of the cacophanous '90s with its grunge and its Gulf War I and its Contragate and mass character assassination by internet post to a time when two rivals had to fall back on public discourse to run their campaigns. The aching wish for time travel to go back and stop it from going wrong was no less potent a thought then than it was when the towers fell and the wars were declared. No one who has lived on Earth for the past two and a bit years would need nudging on what they'd do if they could get in a Tardis.
And then there are the performances: Mary McDonnell brings a range from sharp intelligence, to pain to a crushing acceptance of what the world doles out as Donnie's mother Rose (she would be the centre of gravity in her every scene in the Battlestar Galactica reboot); Drew Barrymore brings the understanding that her acting royalty status and child stardom had given her to the teacher who might never make a difference to the minds she faces daily and the worse ones in school administration; Patrick Swayze's magnanimity in playing the glitzy lifestyle coach after a decade and a half of A-listing turned colourless is impressive; Maggie Gyllenhaal has fewer scenes than her screen and real life brother Jake but owns her young adulthood, holding it somewhere between diehard brattyness and brash incipient growed-up-ness (it's her announcement that she'll vote for Dukakis that starts the family argument at the beginning).
But, of course this film runs on its title character. This was not Jake Gyllenhall's screen debut but it was the role that broke his career so that he has not only never been out of work or the gossip magazines since but he's also a highly regarded member of the craft. He carries Donnie Darko because his intensity leads him to both inspiration and shattered communications and it feels authentic. The scene that really made me take note was Donnie's first real dialogue with Gretchen. He fights back his glee at getting the attention of a beautiful young girl but his enthusiasm keeps chest-bursting, the language variously rolls around his mouth or takes wing. He reminded me of Travis Bickle's early scenes with Betsy in Taxi Driver, the ones where he's too confident to notice how awkward he is being and the way this registers as a weird kind of charm in Betsy's eyes. Travis didn't have the benefit of psychiatry, though, and Donnie's dialogue's with Katherine Ross's Dr Thurman give him the opportunity to discuss the darkness that he fears is his fate. Ross's gentle gravitas contrasts with Gyllenhaal's unmasked pain and the scenes are electrified by the contrast between the pair. It's to Gyllenhaal's credit that lines that might have rested on the adequate shelf by a lesser player are elevated to unforgettable by his delivery and fluid physicality. His keynote is intensity and if this means just plays himself each time it also has allowed him access to big mainstream Oscar bait like Brokeback Mountain, bizarro fable movies like Enemy, a Marvel Comic Universe character and the unforgettably creepy sociopathic human eel in Nightcrawler. All that started here.
So, did Richard Kelly just stumble on to a cult classic only to ruin it by changing his mind? That's a lot of confident and sensitive direction of actors and accomplished visual skill for a stumble. Maybe he just got sick of people coming up to him and telling him the "truth" of what his movie was about. His commentary on the director's cut includes a straight up claim that he only ever wanted to make a sci-fi movie. Maybe, but then why all the philosophy, why the real tragedy in the last act if you just want to do a time travel tale? Although I didn't rewatch the later cut for this article I wasn't inclined to as my memory of it was that the extra material either contributed nothing of genuine interest or only added more mysticism. What happens when you remove the ambiguity from a story like this is the removal of the audience's reason for staying. This happens too often with extended edits. Amadeus is rendered interminable with its extra scenes. Apocalypse Now Redux was worth seeing once (the "Final Cut" isn't much better). The 2000 cut of The Exorcist is still subtitled with "The Version You've Never Seen" even though it's practically the only version anyone can see now, despite the extra material making it drag and the added CGI just makes it look idiotic.
But that's the thing, I guess. The best thing is to offer the choice. Almost every release of Donnie Darko since the Director's Cut has included both. For me this is just a reminder of a movie that was right the first time, one whose continued freshness and power make a new friend of its viewers every time. One hit wonder? So what? I don't have to be in the fan club to like Pop Muzik when I hear it. Same with this.
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