"Donnie Darko"

"Rushmore" meets "American Beauty" meets "Back to the Future" in this spectral, funny, amazing first film from writer-director Richard Kelly.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Oct. 30, 2001 | Those of you who, like me, suspect that the world is coming to an end will have to reassess your views after seeing "Donnie Darko," the remarkable debut film of writer-director Richard Kelly: The world actually ended already, in 1988. The more I think about this the more sense it makes; all the tawdry and ridiculous and tragic events of our public and private lives since then are just epiphenomena, clouds of cosmic dust, the shared dreams of our dying consciousness as we lie amid the rubble of so-called civilization. It's a strangely comforting and half-convincing vision, and almost the only thing I don't like about it is that the soundtrack to Kelly' s apocalypse comes courtesy of Tears for Fears and Echo and the Bunnymen, whose songs are now egregiously stuck in my head. You have been warned.

Actually, I'm oversimplifying quite a bit. Although "Donnie Darko" is, among many other things, a movie about tragedy and loss, about a boy fighting a losing battle against madness and darkness, Kelly is much more of an optimist about human life than that suggests. According to this thrilling and peculiar tale of psychosis, time travel and teen romance, the world ended in 1988, but only provisionally or temporarily. So we're stuck with the world we have, whose current deranged condition seems uncannily connected to the disturbing, through-the-looking-glass vision of this film, one of the most original works of recent American cinema.

"Donnie Darko" is a stunning technical accomplishment that virtually bursts with noise, ideas and references, but it's fundamentally a gracefully crafted movie that's about human beings and not images. At its heart is a portrait of an American family -- damaged, yes, but no worse than most -- colored more by compassion and love than cynicism. Kelly himself has suggested that "Donnie Darko" is the story of Holden Caulfield filtered through the paranoid sci-fi consciousness of Philip K. Dick, but frankly he's selling himself short; whatever its flaws, this movie is more soulful and less self-absorbed than those sources might suggest.

On one level, "Donnie Darko" is one of American cinema's oft-told tales, the one about the high school outsider who finds some version of love and acceptance on the fringes of a conformist community. Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a sleepy-eyed, charismatic teenager with arson in his past, pills and therapy in his present, and something frightening and unknown in his future. Or so says the demonic figure that speaks to him at night, a man-sized insect-rabbit who warns him that only weeks remain before the world will end, on Oct. 30, 1988.

His college-bound sister Elizabeth (Gyllenhaal's real-life sister, Maggie Gyllenhaal) has announced her intention to vote for Michael Dukakis, partly to irritate their conservative parents (Mary McDonnell and Holmes Osborne). His younger sister, Samantha (Daveigh Chase), is a member of a preteen dance troupe called Sparkle Motion, presided over by Ms. Farmer (Beth Grant), a hypercontrolled hysteric in the mode of JonBenet's mom. The satire here is a little broad, but Kelly's tonal control is marvelously modulated throughout, and Sparkle Motion's dance routine, when we finally see it, is part of a masterful montage, both comic and moving.

As ominous as Donnie's spectral bunny friend may be, it seems to save his life by luring him out of bed on a night when the Darko family house is partially destroyed by a mysterious calamity. (I'd better not tell you exactly what happens.) Even as Donnie meets Gretchen (Jena Malone), a girl with an equally damaged past whose diffidence can't hide the intensity of her feelings for him, his imaginary companion pushes him into increasingly destructive behavior. Donnie also starts to believe that he can see a brief distance into the future, in the form of ectoplasmic shapes emerging from people's chests (including his own) that indicate what they're about to do.

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