Viking Night: Donnie Darko
By Bruce Hall
April 12, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
I was in fifth grade, and the teacher was trying to teach her class something about idiom using the “glass half full, glass half empty” thing. After explaining what it meant she began to go around the class, asking each child whether they were a “glass half full” or “glass half empty” person. To this day I have trouble understanding people who think something as complex as the human emotional palette can be reduced to a slogan. So when the question on the table came around to me, I gave the very practical answer that I preferred to consider things on a case by case basis, and that whether the glass was half full or empty depended on whether you were filling it or drinking out of it.
Responses like this were the reason for me spending more than several hours a week in detention that year. For me, it was an early exposure to the concept of blind conformity and how you react to those kinds of lessons goes a long way in determining how well you fit in with other people.
Yes, I’m sort of a grumbling misfit. Always have been. This probably explains why I can’t stand American Idol but I really do love Donnie Darko. It plays like half John Hughes spoof, half psychological thriller and half Doctor Who episode.
If that seems like too many halves, it’s because the film is overly ambitious and digs more holes in two hours than it can fill. Yet it’s impossible to look away from and even if you’ve never taken antidepressants or been friends with an evil giant rabbit, you’ve probably been a teenager before. So despite its incomprehensible plot and dreary tone, it also has an emotional sub context that should be uplifting to the disaffected high school kid in us all. When your movie can wander across so much thematic ground and still manage to convey something so universal, that’s a good thing.
It’s also a good thing Jake Gyllenhaal was in it, because it earns him a pass from me on that unfortunate Jerry Bruckheimer collaboration last year. As Donnie Darko, Gyllenhaal captures the character’s volatile complexity perfectly and he bears the entire weight of the film on his shoulders. Donnie is a bright but conflicted 16-year-old who is tormented by violent mood swings, hallucinations and fits of sleepwalking. In fact, the movie starts with Donnie asleep in the middle of the road with his bicycle next to him. When he returns home, it looks like the rest of his family is used to this behavior as he strolls right past them without a word. They seem to exist in separate worlds and without Donnie around, the Darko family seems much like any other.
Donnie’s antagonistic older sister is a wide eyed, politically conscious know it all who sneaks out at night to meet her boyfriend. His precocious younger sister innocently repeats the dirty words she hears when her siblings fight. Their bewildered parents do the best they can, sending Donnie to a therapist when his problems become too big for the house.
But Donnie’s issues might be too big for the good doctor, as well. One night he is awakened by a voice, commanding him to leave the house. While outside, he meets a boy named Frank dressed in a hideous rabbit suit. Frank tells Donnie that the world is coming to an end in 28 days, but he implies that there is a solution that involves Donnie. In an eerie coincidence, while he’s out, an engine from a damaged airliner falls from the sky and lands in Donnie’s bedroom. The boy relays these things to his therapist who promptly turns white, writes him a prescription and sends him back to school. Donnie has friends there but distances himself from most of the other kids and shows open contempt for his teachers and all other forms of authority. His only kinship is with a pair of eccentric teachers and a beautiful young girl named Gretchen, who seems almost as detached as he is.
But as Donnie continues to see visions of Frank, the man in the creepy bunny suit begins making demands, and in an attempt to fulfill them, Donnie runs afoul of the law and gets himself expelled from school. As the 28 days come to a close, Donnie starts to uncover the truth behind what’s been happening to him. He comes to believe that the world really may be doomed, there might really be a reason a chunk of airplane landed in his bed and maybe the giant evil bunny knows what he’s talking about after all.
If you’ve seen this movie before, you’re nodding your head right now either because you loved it or because you came away so confused you couldn’t remember your own name. If you haven’t seen it yet, you probably think I’m making this up. I’m not, and please don’t feel bad because even Gyllenhaal said he didn’t know what any of it means. Most people seem to consider it a study on teen angst and loneliness, via the context of a young man whose sense of isolation is slowly driving him mad. I could accept that if there was a payoff at the end of the story. When viewed as a surreal trip into paranoid schizophrenia, the narrative flows well until the end, when it disintegrates into dust. Since the film’s release, writer/director Richard Kelly has provided canonical context to the story, and its all available at the film’s website, as well as on the Director’s Cut DVD release.
I’m not going to spoil it for you but if you do ever happen to read any of it, you’ll know what I meant earlier when I made that Doctor Who crack. The writer’s interpretation of his story almost makes it a little easier to just go with “Donnie is Crazy”.
Despite all this confusion, what’s amazing to me is how much I enjoy the movie anyway. The story is dense and confounding and there’s no narrative reward at the end, unless you are going with the Doctor Who interpretation. There’s no question that upon first viewing, Donnie Darko is captivating yet frustrating, powerful yet somehow pointless. But the tone of the film maintains a perfect symmetry of humor and sadness, keeping you off balance but never making you feel reluctant to watch. The pacing is deliberate but meaningful, so although the film feels a little long, you never feel bored. And as I mentioned before, the success or failure of the whole thing depends on Gyllenhaal, who is in almost every scene. His character is the axis around which everything and everyone in the film revolves and long story short, The future Prince of Persia pretty much owns it. Many actors do not emote well, so the ones who do tend to stand out from their peers.
Gyllenhaal manages Darko’s fear, vulnerability, confusion and anger so well you have to wonder whether of not he was acting at all. Without question the reason this baffling film works so well is because you buy into what Donnie is going through, even if you don’t understand it.
I realize that I sound conflicted about this movie. I really do like it. The problem is that it’s so hard to define or classify that it's hard to say definitively whether it succeeds or fails. It’s not a horror movie, although it maintains a persistent drumbeat of foreboding even during light moments. It’s not a teen comedy, although the funniest parts of the film are Donnie’s disillusionment with conformity and his awkward attempts at young love. And it isn’t exactly a science fiction film, although the official interpretation of the story’s events sounds like something out of a sub par Star Trek episode. But however you choose to look at it, and whichever aspect of it appeals to you (or doesn’t), it’s hard to come away from Donnie Darko completely empty.
The unusual ending might leave you perplexed but you can’t help but feel that somehow everything turned out as it was meant to. Donnie seems to find a purpose, and the people around him discover truth and closure in their own ways. Both the first time I saw this movie ten years ago and the last time I watched it last night, I walked away feeling that in Donnie Darko’s case, the glass is half full. Somewhere out there is a 60-year-old woman, pulling her teacher’s pension check out of the mailbox and smiling. But she’s not smiling at the amount of the check, she’s smiling because many hundreds of miles away, her most troublesome student has finally mastered the dubious art of intellectual reduction. Thanks for the memories, Mrs. Karnes.