dir. Richard Kelly
Opens Wed June 2.
After a big local press conference and a sold-out screening at SIFF, the director's cut of Donnie Darko, one of the only legitimate cult films of the past 15 years, opens this week. The occasion is cause for celebration among the film's hardcore devotees, especially because the additional 20 minutes of footage in the new edition doesn't particularly change anything about the movie itself.
But before I get too much into the director's cut, I'd like to offer a brief word of apology to the original. When Donnie Darko was first released in 2001, I was the film editor of this paper, and rapidly hurtling toward a burnout that led me to take a yearlong leave of absence, leaving the job in the capable hands of Mr. Bradley Steinbacher. I wasn't sick of movies, I was just sick of screenings, publicists, festivals, film societies, and fellow critics; and of writing, assigning, editing, and, above all, of reading reviews. And as a result, Donnie Darko went right by me. I gave a cursory look at the synopsis, figured it was either a dumb teen comedy or a dumb teen thriller, handed it off to a freelancer, who wrote a (glowing) 100-word capsule for the calendar, and that was that. Two weeks later, the film was gone.
Even though the freelancer (nice work, Tamara Paris) praised the film to the skies, I couldn't muster the interest to go see it for myself until the last Thursday of its run at the Uptown. As soon as I'd seen it, however, I knew I'd blown a chance to bring attention to a genuinely original, genre-bending work. Donnie Darko wasn't the only movie I lost in the lights during my tenure as film editor, it's just my personal favorite, and the only one I felt especially guilty about having blown. But, as it happens, it's also the only one about to receive a re-release--and by a studio (Newmarket) that could stand to do a little atonement of its own after inflicting the pornographic The Passion of the Christ on the world.
Donnie Darko is the best kind of mess: a sprawling hallucination of suburban despair, comic-book angst, film-school ambition, and genuine human sadness, all set to a score of recontextualized '80s pop. The film's science-fiction elements are both confused and confusing, but like all good sci-fi, they're merely around to justify an essentially metaphorical exploration of the dark corners of the psyche. For those who haven't seen the film: Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a deeply troubled suburban teenager who narrowly averts a random catastrophe by entering a parallel reality (or "tangent universe") for 28 days, during which he finds and loses love, liberates and destroys his schoolmates and family, indulges and despises his darkest impulses, and has a series of discussions with a demonic, six-foot-tall bunny rabbit. You could, of course, see the film several times and still think this summary has nothing whatsoever to do with it, which--at the risk of copping out--is both Donnie Darko's greatest strength and its greatest weakness.
What the movie is about, in terms of story, remains a mystery, which is obviously a point of pride and intention for the filmmakers. It also guarantees that the picture fails in as many areas as it succeeds. As satire, it's funny (though unsubtle); as sci-fi it's intriguing (though halfhearted); as genre deconstruction it's novel (though incomplete). Having studied it carefully a few times, I still can't tell if the plot's weird calculus--what actually happens, to whom, and where, and when--actually adds up to anything more than a semi-random sequence of related but unconnected events. What I can say, however, is that the film resonates with a uniquely American kind of sadness. The characters who are unknowingly caught up in the mindfuck of the story are suffering from a disconnectedness that lives in their disconsolate faces and half-awake dialogue. Donnie's life is so painful that the only way it can register is as a hallucination, which is one of the most interesting sci-fi conceits I can remember.
For those who have seen the film, the new cut offers only one or two brand-new scenes, none of which alter or smooth out the incomprehensibly byzantine plot. By and large, the bonus materials are cosmetic--new graphics, transitional animation, spit-shined CGI effects--and will only be noticeable to the hardest of hardcore fans. The rest of us can just appreciate the thing itself, which may not be perfect, but deserves at least another look.
