Donnie Darko, which airs Oct. 13, is the fourth installment of a special eight-week cult classics series at The Athena Cinema. Each movie will run on Thursdays at 7 p.m. For a full schedule, click here.
A movie centered around frightening rabbit suits, time travel, comically uptight high school faculty, a mentally ill teenager with an ability to see into the future and an ostensibly pointless overweight man in a red coat should not work — quite conversely, it should fail spectacularly in a heap of self-involved, bloated cringe. Donnie Darko, however, through the borderline irrational confidence of writer and director Richard Kelly, not only succeeds in being a highly entertaining and darkly comedic film but also as a surprisingly thoughtful commentary on the state of society during the late 1980s.
The driving force behind the film’s unlikely success is found in Donnie Darko himself — played masterfully by an unsettlingly emotionless young Jake Gyllenhaal — and Kelly’s ability to center every aspect of his vision around his titular character. Between the incredibly dark and ambiguous color scheme, the manic pacing and style of editing, the over-the-top and unbelievable characterization of the supporting cast, and the difficult-to-follow way in which the plot is presented, every aspect of Kelly’s directorial style reflects Donnie’s troubled state of mind. Without the laser focus on a singular character to keep the movie relatively grounded, the already vague story could have quite easily fell apart and devolved into a terribly incoherent mess.
While much of the film’s appeal is centered around its dark style of humor and unnerving brand of tension that culminates in a brilliantly vague and interpretive conclusion, it also puts forth a smart-yet-amusing commentary on American society in the year which it is set, 1988. Kelly’s portrayal of the public school system as a source of censorship, narrow-mindedness, and comical levels of ignorance can only be described as utterly scathing, and he pulls no punches in exposing the greed and deception that lies in unfettered capitalistic power. On a lighter note, references to the culture of the time period — namely one memorable conversation regarding the sexuality of The Smurfs — are aplenty, as are those dealing with politics and specifically the election of ‘88 between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis. Kelly did not merely set his film in the eighties, but fully embraced the decade and the vast cultural potential that lies within it.
Donnie Darko is, to say the least, a strange piece of art. It’s a film completely disinterested in the idea of pleasing critics, pandering to the emotions and desires of mainstream audiences, or even telling an accessible and straightforward narrative. And it is, as the name of our titular character would suggest, quintessentially dark — aggressively self-aware and steeped in undertones of dread and irony and everything in between. Yet, in spite of its many quirks and a film making vision that in concept borders on laughable cringe, it manages to leave an unmistakable, giant-rabbit-sized imprint on all viewers resolute enough to sit through its nearly two hour runtime. Oddities and all, Richard Kelly puts forth a film that is definitely worth seeing in the theaters (and then several times afterwards, to sort through the ambiguity).
Three and a half stars (out of five).
