Donnie Darko

So I’ve just got back from seeing Donnie Darko at the cinema, and I feel as though I have to put my thoughts down here, in some kind of attempt to get them into shape. One thing is for sure: if it is possible to judge a film by the amount of time you spend after exiting the cinema trying to understand it, then Donnie Darko is a great film.

There’s certainly nothing easy or mainstream about this film, which centres on an eponymous high-school kid with psychological problems: his psychotherapist says that he’s showing advance symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. He hears voices – we hear them too, and they’re very scary and disturbing – which emanate from a hallucinated and extremely frightening rabbit.

At the same time, the director, 25-year-old Richard Kelly, paints a compelling portrait of suburban high-school life circa 1988. He keeps the directorial pyrotechnics to a minimum, although they are there; mostly, he confines himself to a simple skewering of an era most of us are only too happy to consign to memory’s wastebasket. Those who preach fearlessness, we learn, are those with the most to be afraid of; meanwhile, your worst fears really can come true.

The high-school scenes conform to type: there’s the bright but troubled kid, the shrill parent, the ostracised fat girl, the cool teacher who battles the authorities, and so forth. But at the same time we’re being led into a metaphysical conundrum which eventually takes over the whole picture.

The key to the film is not Donnie’s madness, but rather the fact that his rabbit saves his life at the beginning of the film. A jet engine falls, inexplicably, from the sky, and plunges straight into Donnie’s bedroom: were it not for the fact that he had heard voices drawing him outside that night, he would have been killed immediately by the impact. (It’s astonishing how the jet engine appears at almost exactly the same point in the film as the all-but-identical falling boulder in Sexy Beast.)

From then on in – for, essentially, the rest of the film – Donnie is beholden to the rather evil rabbit. Frank (the rabbit’s name) not only gives Donnie’s life meaning, he gives Donnie life. The effect on Donnie is to turn him into a person who is totally unafraid, a person who stands up to bogus authority and suffers no qualms or guilt after performing criminal acts of surprising severity. Living, as he is, only by the grace of a hallucinated rabbit, Donnie eventually finds it relatively easy to give up everything for the sake of saving the girl he’s just fallen for.

What that says about schizophrenia, or 1988, or suburbia, or love, I’m not entirely sure. A lot of the film I’m perfectly happy to say I don’t understand at all. This is one of those films where a first-time director bites off a bit more than he could chew, but shows huge potential: you know that Kelly is going to make better and more accessible films in the future. (I hope, too, to see a lot more of Maggie Gyllenhaal, Donnie’s older sister both in the movie and in real life.) In this it is much better than the equally incomprehensible Planet of the Apes, which was made by someone who really should have known better.

Donnie Darko is a very disturbing and confusing film, and most of the credit for getting it made must surely lie with Drew Barrymore, who co-produced it, stars in it, and almost certainly brought Patrick Swayze and Noah Wyle on board. It falls quite happily under the general heading of good films which did badly in 2001 (see below). If you’re not afraid of being puzzled and disturbed – if you enjoyed Memento, say – I can recommend you go see this.