DONNIE DARKO @ 20

One of the 2000's definitive films was a one hit wonder. Stepping up for the under-thirties, Richard Kelly gave us a film of strong ideas, great compassion, perfect casting, was easy on the eye, whose CGI effects still work effortlessly, broke a future A-lister and balanced on a tightrope of genre tropes that do not always knot easily: teen movies, psychiatric condition stories, Tim Burton style candy gothic, accents of sci-fi and more all form part of a smooth pattern that brings in a three act story on time and with great craft. Since then there have been a quirky epic that was universally reviled, and a retelling of an old Twilight Zone episode which was ok. Ok.

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.

Perfect first time? We can fix that: Director's cuts

Charles Darwin kept adding to the title of later editions of his seminal work The Origin of Species to accommodate various criticism he’d endured since the first one. The joke was that it should have been called: The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and All Sorts of Other Things. Then again Brian Wilson finally finished his epic Smile decades after it had been ruptured by his record company, the rest of the band and his own mental fragility. I’m glad he did and I loved my only hearing of it. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong about a redraft, it’s just that so many seem like completely different works emerging from the carcasses of the originals like fatal parasites. Here’s a few from the world o’ cinema to get started on.

THE EXORCIST

This really would be better thought of as a writer’s cut as the changes were pretty much William Peter Blatty’s rather than William Friedkin who had left the film in its happy state for decades without feeling the lack. A look at the BBC documentary The Fear of God: 25 years of the Exorcist, hosted by the redoubtable Mark Kermode reveals a fair bit about Blatty’s ideas of the film.

What was done? Reinstatement of a number of offcuts to smooth the transitions from the prologue in Iraq to Washington DC, a great slab of medical tests and consultations with doctors about Regan’s condition featuring various fruitless treatments. The Spider Walk scene where Regan rushes downstairs upsidedown on all fours. The Casablanca ending with Father Dyer walking off trading wisecracks with Detective Kinderman. A number of digital superimpositions of demonic figures on household surfaces.

Any of it work? None. The abrupt change from Iraq to America is from exotica to home, from ominous to normal. It works. Now it’s overstated with a warm sequence of an autumn evening in the street, in case you hadn’t quite got the connection. The extra medical scenes serve solely to drag the film into quicksand. One interview between a doctor and Chris seems to have made it in because of the mention of Ritalin, a drug in the news at the time being prescribed for ADHD sufferers. It’s a giggle but just a giggle and out of sorts with the tension the original sequence had. The spider walk sequence shown untreated in the BBC documentary was clearly misjudged and more ridiculous than bizarre. Restored it just looks try hard. The original ending with Father Dyer walking off carries the tension that the rest of the original film delivers in spades. Now it’s warm and chummy. As for the ghostly images of the demonic figures on the fridge, walls and over canopy they are as scary as Bert Newton in a Dracula costume. Errrgh!

I saw this new cut when it was released and every one of the above changes elicited laughter. I sank into my seat. In the cinema and on dvd this was called The Version You’ve Never Seen. Sadly, as the original cut’s early local deletion was to prove, this travesty would be the Only Version You’re Likely to See. I think the bluray will change that but the damage is done, now.

APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX

Once upon a time there was a movie I made my dad go and see because I knew he’d love it. It had left the cinema circuit by then so we had to go to the drive-in. This was in Townsville in December. A light muggy drizzle fell throughout the entire film which only helped the immersion of this intense and hyper epic of war and the compulsion to it. From then I was given a mission to make everyone I could find sit in front of it at a cinema. When it even left the rep cinemas I was still flushed from the effort. It remains a favourite and when I do things like Facebook lists it’s always there in the ten if not the five. And then this thing came along.

I’ll admit I was eager for it. As the film is less plotty than expressionistic I welcomed the promise of new material. I went to the Astor (Melbourne’s huge deco movie palace) with a fellow fan-for-life. It was so long it was shown with an intermission. Through this I was rapt right up until the French plantaion sequence which unravelled the lot and dragged even the joyful effect of the beautiful new print and big sound.

Why? Well, it’s not a bad scene as such. None of them are bad as such but all the additions alter the original film (which Coppola had been happy to present at Cannes and then the rest of the world for the better part of two decades). For starters Capt. Willard is a different person. The wide-eyed boyish intensity Martin Sheen maintained through the unsmiling totality of his screen time (almost all the film) was now diluted with his participation in the goofy theft of  Col. Kilgore’s surfboard. He also gets it awn with the beautiful frail daughter of the French planter household. He’s now not just one of the guys where he had been a nervewracking alien presence on the boat before, he’s livin’ the dream.

He is? They all are. The scene at the filling station is mostly atmospheric and welcome for it but the crew get to go the playboy bunnies. Well not entirely but the dry unsexuality that left the original so worryingly unrelieved has now gone. Strike two to its power. The end of the scene comes out of nowhere or a completely different film. Kurtz not only appears during the day, coming out of the obscuring columns of light and darkness where he only seems to exist. Now he looks like anyone else. Willard loses his intensity and Kurtz his mystique. Not bad going for a film that depends on the intensity of Willard and the mystique of Kurtz.

Every one of these scenes would have been better as a well restored dvd extra. I always find the misjudged outtakes as intriguing as the good ones that got away. The special dvd edition of Apocalypse Now contains a seamless branching feature which will allow the viewing of either cut. It’s over two discs but it’s a good solution.

AMADEUS

A glorious lavish fable of earthly mediocrity vs divine inspiration, Amadeus was a rare treasure trove from the days when a mega budget could be used well to the last cent. Everything about this production worked, the locations, the music, the adaptation from the stage into what could only be called a liberation, and the mighty casting from Jeffery Jones as the Emperor (my sister called him an axylotl), Tom Hulce as Mozart and the deserving best actor Oscar of that year, F. Murrary Abraham as Salieri whose recollection twisted by self hatred and violent resentment gave this story its ground (and should have warned any pedantic twit that they weren’t about to see a biopic about Mozart). It was long but filled with such life and seriousness in just the right doses that it was also completely compelling. Probably the exact length it needed to be. Well, definitely, actually.

The director’s cut on dvd seems to lengthen the film by about a fortnight, adding everything that could be found and, barring only failed takes, shoving it in like a railway cop stuffing commuters into a Tokyo peak hour train.

What’s new? Subplots. The musical courtiers do more scheming. Salieri tries it on coercively with Mozart’s wife. A drunk and penniless Mozart tries to extract patronage from a former patron. Etc. Not only does this bloat the film and distract from Salieri’s madman’s tale but there’s a very nasty cut in favour of this “new” fluff. Older Salieri, gets to a part of his confession that shocks his confessor with its darkness. Salieri breaks his rock like sternness and breaks into an indulgent grin. It’s about a second long but it says more about his character and puts the veracity of his account into perspective in that little time. Now it’s gone, swept under some courtier’s buckled shoes. The original cut was not included in any release on optical medium after the deletion of the initial release. Can’t get it now. Amadeus is still a great film. It just could be a greater one with the judgement that made the cinematic release such an exhilaration.

DONNIE DARKO

In 2002 this film shone like a beacon. It was indy and inventive with great dialogue, an assured helming by writer Richard Kelly and bullseye casting. The concept was strong as an ox as well, was Donnie a time traveller or just mentally ill? The circular nature of the narrative sealed the question without ever needing to resolve it. It was a kind of moebius strip movie.

What’s new? A commitment to one of the two interpretations mentioned in the first paragraph. Everything that could cause doubt as to one of them was removed or disambiguated. The creator of one of the most original and enjoyable films of the 2000s turned his masterpiece into a literalistic mediocrity. I haven’t seen the hated Southland Tales nor the better considered The Box but I’m not inclined to after his self travesty. Did he really not know how fine his original work was? Director’s cuts usually arrive decades after the original. This one came about two years afterward. Rather than replace old with new in this case there is an accessible release of this film which contains both cuts. Finally!

Where are the director's cuts of Taxi Driver,  Annie Hall, Videodrome or Blue Velvet? I'll tell you one thing I know. When David Lynch released his personally overseen remastered dvd of Eraserhead he did something very interesting with some deleted footage he was able to recover. Lynch owns Eraserhead holus bolus, he doesn't have to answer to anyone about its presentation. Instead of reinserting the scene he put it on his website and made it accessible only to those who could supply a code number on the content of the dvd. I saw it during a trial free access period. I'm glad I saw it. I understand why it wasn't in the film. I don't care if I never see it again. Eraserhead has been allowed to continue airing its odd universe without a syllable's worth of extrapolation or a frame more than it needs on screen. Now that's protection of legacy.

Do any director's cuts work? There have been too many recuts of Blade Runner for me to bother with but I do like the second one that omitted the obvious narration by Harrison Ford and the goofy happy ending. But that was a case of the director restoring his intentions rather than milking an old cow for champagne. Peter Weir's recut of Picnic at Hanging Rock shortened its length (the only instance of this in history?) as he felt it could do with a little less melodrama. So, yeah, they can work if their creators care about them.

Any further expamples? Counter examples? This list can't be exhaustive.