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Donnie Darko (15)

Not a happy bunny

Anthony Quinn
Friday 25 October 2002 00:00 BST
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Even movies as strange as Donnie Darko have antecedents. Like Jimmy Stewart in Harvey, teenage dreamer Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) finds an imaginary companion in a man-sized rabbit, only this one is called Frank, wears a scary devil-mask and says that the world will end in 28 days. Not a happy bunny, in short. Donnie takes news of the coming apocalypse in his stride, but then he barely feels at home in the world as it is. As the film's 27-year-old writer-director Richard Kelly sees it, he is "Holden Caulfield resurrected by the spirit of Philip K Dick" – alienated, articulate, unusually smart and haunted by presentiments of the future.

Of course, it might just be that Donnie hasn't been taking his medication, and is beleaguered by the hallucinations of a paranoid schizophrenic. This relates to the uncertain identity of the picture itself, which mixes and matches different genres with a cavalier swagger. It has one foot in a suburban Lynchland, where Donnie's parents (Mary McDonnell and Holmes Osborne) both seem as giggly and bemused as children, and one foot in the high school where his test scores are "intimidating" and his teachers are nonplussed in the face of the boy's independent thinking. When invited to locate imaginary experiences on a "lifeline" drawn on a blackboard between Fear and Love, Donnie first explains to the teacher that there are greater complexities than fear and love to consider. She insists on an answer, and so Donnie invites her to stick her "lifeline" where the sun doesn't shine.

Then again, the film is also roused by the prospect of time travel and its attendant theory of "portals" and "worm holes" (Donnie is the sort of kid who's probably read Stephen Hawking all the way through). Can it be mere coincidence that the wandering old lady, known in the neighbourhood as Grandma Death, is actually Roberta Sparrow, author of the influential study The Philosophy of Time Travel? There is a more concrete puzzle we are asked to bend our minds to. In the dead of night an engine from a 747 jumbo jet plunges through the roof of the Darko household, yet where it has come from is a mystery. No airline has reported a missing engine from any of its planes. The miracle of it is that Donnie, who would have taken the full blast of its landing, wasn't in his bed at the time – he was sleepwalking on the golf course and missed the whole thing.

Kelly has a knack for making the oddball seem ordinary, and vice versa. When we see a prepubescent dance troupe strutting along to an old Duran Duran hit, it could be the most natural thing in the world, or the weirdest sight since the six-foot rabbit with the devil-mask. Scene by scene the film is engrossing, kept on its toes by Gyllenhaal's performance as the mercurial Donnie. There's no telling from his blandly agreeable expression what he has in mind, one moment coolly denouncing a celebrity motivational speaker (Patrick Swayze), the next confessing to his analyst (Katharine Ross) that he's burnt down his enemy's house, egged on by the voices in his head. At the start of the movie he calls his mother "bitch", but later tacitly asks for her forgiveness. "How does it feel to have a wacko for a son?" he asks her. "It feels wonderful," she replies.

Yet I hope it's not patronising to suggest that Donnie Darko also feels like the work of a first-time film-maker, inasmuch as his ideas outrun his willingness to make them coherent. It has something of the dreamlike quality of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, such as the opening image of Donnie lying asleep in the middle of the road; it has weird tubes of ectoplasm morphing out of people's stomachs; it elevates vandalism to a form of social altruism; it has skewed comedy and philosophical anxiety – "Everyone dies alone". You never quite know where the film will go next, and, less reassuringly, you don't feel convinced that the film-makers know either.

There is, for instance, the question of its period setting in October 1988, signalled early on by the soundtrack (Tears for Fears, Echo and the Bunnymen) and by arguments over the dinner-table about the presidential elections – Donnie's Republican father is appalled that his older daughter intends to vote for Dukakis. According to the film's producer, this Eighties setting underlines "how the family dynamic was really hurt by the quest for material happiness". But there is absolutely no evidence for this. The Darko household seems no more or less enthralled by materialism than any other suburban family we've seen in American cinema. What's more, the film doesn't even feel like it's set in the Eighties, and not just because there's a scarcity of mullets and shoulder pads. There is something dark and chastened in its tone, which feels quite remote from that era's carefree consumption; indeed, it feels closer in mood to the ominous Seventies chill of The Ice Storm, in which personal and political betrayals reflect a cracked image of one another.

There is also the problem with films that conspicuously ask to be "solved". Once you begin to investigate Donnie Darko there seems rather less to it than meets the eye. For all its musings on time bends and the paranormal, is it not just the story of a boy who feels too much in a world that understands too little? Maybe he is the natural heir of Holden Caulfield, with his hatred of "phoneys" and a message of love he only half-comprehends himself. Torn between an instinct to destroy and a yearning to connect, his divided nature seems to resonate in his very name. As new girl Gretchen (Jena Malone) remarks: "What kind of a name is Donnie Darko anyway? Sounds like some kind of superhero." "How do you know I'm not?" he asks. You couldn't fault this boy for ambition, or the film. Richard Kelly shows great potential for a debut film-maker, but he's not quite the full superhero yet.

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