The debut feature of Richard Kelly, made when he was 25, Donnie Darko is a weird and wacky take on the psycho boy
outsider genre. Donnie, played with great assurance by the young- looking Jake Gyllenhaal, has strange habits like staying out all night
and spending long periods staring at himself in the bathroom mirror. He's on medication and seeing a shrink, and soon he meets a 6 ft tall rabbit called Frank who tells him the world is going to end in 28 days.
But the weirdness isn't just inside Donnie's head, for one morning he returns home after sleeping out on a golf course to discover that a jet engine has broken free from a
plane and crashed into his house. At Frank's behest he floods his school and starts a fire, but still remains grounded enough to begin a
romance with the similarly alienated Gretchen.
Donnie Darko is light-hearted and cartoonish in places, but altogether darker
and serious in others, as it uncomfortably traces the contours of the edge of madness. It skips between genres and moods, and often
intrigues us as to what kind of movie it actually is. Along the way there are some great scenes, such as a confrontation at a lecture
given by self-help guru Jim Cunningham, played superbly by Patrick Swayze with a showroom dummy quiff. Here a manic, flaky Donnie
challenges Cunningham's bullshit doctrines, and in turn is held up as just the kind of sad case we must be careful not to become.
With the end of the world closing in fast, Donnie becomes a sleuth in search of the secrets of time.
He discovers that a neighbourhood figure-of-fun, the senile 'Grandma Death', once wrote a book about time travel, and he pursues her for answers.
In his hallucinations the space-time continuum becomes increasingly wobbly, and at the climax the movie pivots towards a more straight sf rationale, part Brief History of
Time, part Back to the Future, both of which are mentioned within the action.
It is clearly a young man's movie, wearing its influences on its sleeve, and its mixing of two modes - the cracking-up story
and sf time travel - doesn't totally succeed. The climax, with its speeded-up footage and retrospective fast cutting, reminiscent of the
end of Don't Look Now, is hardly ground-breaking stuff, and the twist ending seems familiar. Nonetheless it has a refreshingly
wayward overall feel, and it demonstrates huge promise coming from a writer-director of such an age. It's likely we're going to hear a
lot more from the talented Mr Kelly, and if he's not too careful he could become the next Tim Burton.
© Roger Keen 2001
