Donnie Darko
Richard Kelly (2001)
The Donnie Darko story – what happens in the film and what happened to the film – has strong 9/11 connections. Writer-director Richard Kelly’s debut feature was shown at Sundance in January 2001 and opened in American cinemas nine months later. The seminal event in the plot – a jet engine crashes into a suburban house – was a mortal blow to Donnie Darko’s commercial prospects when the film opened (the crash had also featured in the trailer). But Kelly’s extraordinary genre mash-up – a time-travel-mystery-cum-existential-horror-thriller-cum-social-satire – anticipates more expansively, and unnervingly, the psychic state of the nation in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In suburban Middlesex, Virginia, where the action takes place, the time is out of joint in more ways than one. Apocalypse is predicted. The soundtrack’s signature song is a cover version of Tears for Fears’ ‘Mad World’.
That cover version – by Michael Andrews, who also wrote original music for the film, and Gary Jules, who did the Mad World vocals – was part of Donnie Darko’s vigorous afterlife beyond its first theatrical release, which ended in April 2002. By then, the film, which cost $4.5m to make, had recouped only just over $500k at the box office. It had, though, built up a fan base. The Pioneer Theatre in New York City began midnight screenings in spring 2002 that continued for twenty-eight months; by October 2002, when the film opened in this country, it was acquiring cult status. Donnie Darko made the sterling equivalent of $2.5m in the UK and grossed $7.6m worldwide. ‘Mad World’ is a fine song though not a festive one: the Andrews-Jules cover nevertheless became the UK’s Christmas No 1 in 2003.
Released when George Bush Jr was in the White House, Donnie Darko is set very precisely in the month before the presidential election that his father won in November 1988. A dinner-table dispute – focused on Michael Dukakis, Bush Sr’s Democrat opponent in that election – introduces the voices of the five members of the Darko family. Nineteen-year-old Elizabeth (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who’ll be voting for the first time, is pro-Dukakis, to the chagrin of her Republican parents, Rose (Mary McDonnell) and Eddie (Holmes Osborne). The Darkos’ two younger children aren’t old enough to vote but sixteen-year-old Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) is an expert stirrer; as he winds Elizabeth up, they exchange expletives that ten-year-old Samantha (Daveigh Chase) is curious to understand. Rose pulls the plug on this war of bad words but not before we’ve learned from it that Donnie is in therapy and, according to Elizabeth, has recently not been taking his medication. Prior to this scene, we’ve seen Donnie waking up on the edge of a cliff above the village of Middlesex, dressed in nightwear but with his bike beside him. He then pedals downhill and home, where his parents and siblings are all to be seen in the garden. Perhaps inspired by the opening sequence of Blue Velvet (1986), Richard Kelly presents a suburban idyll that instantly looks vulnerable. As in David Lynch’s film, there’s a clear blue sky (as there also was in New York City on the morning of 9/11 – the sort of detail not lost on Donnie Darko cult followers). A garden hose is central to the start of Blue Velvet; Eddie Darko brandishes a powered leaf vacuum which he jokily turns on Elizabeth. Samantha is jumping on a trampoline. Rose is reading a book. But DP Steven Poster ensures that early morning shadows give the tree-lined garden a sombre quality, despite the fine weather. Rose’s paperback is Stephen King’s horror story It.
We also see Donnie’s extreme sleepwalking come to his rescue on 2 October 1988. He wakes from a dream, just before 1am, and a weird voice tells him to get up. He goes outside to encounter a six-foot figure in a grotesque rabbit costume and head (James Duval is the actor inside). This is Frank, who tells Donnie that the world will end in exactly 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds. Donnie wanders off down the street and wakes up on one of the greens of a local golf course. He returns from there to find a crowd gathered outside his home; police cars, fire engines, a news van in the garden; a crane lifting a huge jet engine from the demolished top of the house. The engine crashed into what was Donnie’s bedroom. In the days that follow, he experiences further visions of Frank, which Donnie’s psychotherapist (Katharine Ross) interprets as a hallucinatory symptom of paranoid schizophrenia. After Frank asks if he believes in time travel, Donnie refers the question to his science teacher (Noah Wyle) who, by way of response, passes Donnie a book on the subject, written by one Roberta Sparrow, an ex-teacher at the school. Roberta (Patience Cleveland) still lives in the area; she’s now very old, apparently senile and nicknamed ‘Grandma Death’ by the local teenagers. She’s always looking to see if there’s mail in her mailbox but there never is. Other kids deride Grandma but Donnie is an exception. He’s astounded to discover who she used to be.
This is the set-up of Donnie Darko. For the benefit of the few people who read this note and aren’t already familiar with the film, I won’t say much about the denouement. I will say a bit more about the collection of supporting roles in the story – to give a flavour of Richard Kelly’s ambition in trying to blend social comment and comedy into the various other things that his film tries to be. There’s ‘Gretchen Ross’ (Jena Malone), the new girl at Donnie’s high school, with whom he gets friendly: she and her mother have just moved into the neighbourhood under assumed names, to escape Gretchen’s violently aggressive stepfather. There’s upright, uptight Kitty Farmer (Beth Grant), who branches out from teaching gym to giving Donnie’s peer group ‘attitude lessons’ and their parents, Rose Darko especially, censorious advice; Kitty’s also the coach of Sparkle Motion, a junior dance group whose members include her own daughter (Tiler Peck), as well as Samantha. The attitude lessons are based on the ‘positive energy’ credo of motivational speaker Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze), a local quasi-celebrity. There’s English teacher Karen Pomeroy (Drew Barrymore), who has Donnie’s class read Graham Greene’s short story The Destructors – to Kitty Farmer’s fury. It’s this ‘filth’ that, as Kitty tells the PTA, has caused an act of vandalism on school grounds – damage to a water main, which floods the place: the young gang in Greene’s story does the same, and more, to an old man’s house. The high-school flood is also inspired, however, by Frank, who has directed Donnie to vandalise the water main during one of his somnambular episodes. Donnie is throughout the story the chief adversary of its morally self-righteous characters; again abetted by Frank, he’s also, in due course, Jim Cunningham’s nemesis.
Jake Gyllenhaal is remarkable in the title role – which was also his breakthrough role. Gyllenhaal was nineteen when the film was shot but easily passes as three years younger. Brokeback Mountain was in production just four years later but Gyllenhaal changed from a boy to a man in the meantime. His face in Donnie Darko is fuller than it soon became – the strong jawline isn’t yet in evidence. Gyllenhaal’s humour and sheer affability are, though. When Gretchen tells him about her stepfather’s ‘emotional problems’ Donnie brightly replies, ‘Oh, I have those, too! What kind of problems does your dad have?’ (After a pause, Gretchen responds, less brightly, with the information that he stabbed her mother.) Maggie Gyllenhaal, also playing a few years less than her actual age and credibly, is particularly good in the opening dinner-table spat: the real-life sister and brother act very easily with each other – no one else in the cast is quite in their league. Drew Barrymore overacts as Karen Pomeroy but Mary McDonnell gives Rose a nice blend of conventional poise and anxiety. Patrick Swayze likeably sends up his own charismatic nice-guy persona.
As the countdown to doomsday gathers pace, Kelly looks to be steering Donnie Darko into Halloween horror territory (also reflected in the film’s release date, on both sides of the Atlantic): a Halloween party at the Darkos’ (quickly repaired) house is a major, gruesome set piece but the plotting to make it happen is strenuously contrived. It’s not very convincing that, when a stash of child pornography is discovered in Jim Cunningham’s possession and he’s placed under arrest, his rabid disciple Kitty stands by him – and consequently can’t chaperone Sparkle Motion to a competition in Los Angeles; or that she asks Rose to deputise for her on the LA trip; or that it’s Donnie, when Elizabeth learns she’s got a place at Harvard, who’s eager that, in their parents’ absence (Eddie is away on business), they throw an impromptu party. The mayhem that ensues there is really a bridge to Kelly’s big finish, in which the existential nightmare thread returns to centre stage – in a blaze of spectacular visual effects.
Although the world in autumn 2023 is hardly a happier place than it was in autumn 2001, it’s good to be able to view Donnie Darko now through a lens other than 9/11 – and to get a sense of what it seemed to promise for the man who made it when still in his mid-twenties. During the more than two decades since, Kelly has released a director’s cut of Donnie Darko (in 2004), written a Tony Scott crime movie called Domino (2005) and been writer-director on just two further pictures, Southland Tales (2006) and The Box (2009). None of the last three-named films was a hit, either with critics or audiences. I’ve no idea why there’s been nothing since The Box but Kelly’s long fallow period almost adds to Donnie Darko’s mystique. He tries lots of things in the film and some don’t work but the surfeit of ideas is part of what makes it exciting to watch. In retrospect, it seems to make sense that Richard Kelly put all his eggs in one basket.
28 October 2023