By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to 2001’s Donnie Darko, Richard Kelly’s mind-bending debut film starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a disgruntled, vision-plagued teen.
If you’re a filmmaker, there’s a very easy way to create an instant “cult classic”: make a movie that doesn’t make sense. Take, for instance, Stanley Kubrick’s interminable sci-fi mess 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film that pretentious critics like to refer to as “enigmatic” and “challenging.” In their heart of hearts, however, they know that it’s really just a monumental deep space wank. Likewise, David Lynch’s “LA noir” Mulholland Dr., an inexplicably Oscar nominated turd that was just an excuse for the director to get Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Haring involved in a bit of tongue-and-groove.
If you want the classic hey-it-doesn’t-make-sense-so-it-must-be-cool film, however, you can’t go past Donnie Darko, the big screen debut of once feted director Richard Kelly, who has since basically disappeared after proving himself a master of clunky, poorly executed plotting with Southland Tales and The Box.
Released in 2001, Donnie Darko revolves around Jake Gyllenhaal’s tit(ular) annoying teen, who is “angry at the world” and “marches to the beat of his own drum.” Basically, he’s just a bit of a tool. Donnie baits his teachers at school, antagonises his fellow students, and has bizarre dream visions about the end of the world, in which he converses with a human-sized rabbit. Wow, how trippy. Then a jet engine falls on his family home. As the youth of today would (maybe…we think) intone, “That’s, like, so random.”
Donnie Darko is full of such randomness, drawing in never-fully-explored subplots involving time travel, paedophilia and teen romance. Then there are the Tarantino-style pop cultural dissertations (the sexuality of The Smurfs? Gimme a break! Watership Down? Come on!), the stunt casting of the late Patrick Swayze, and Donnie’s droning discussions with his psychiatrist (played by Katherine Ross, obviously a childhood crush of Kelly’s), which point to a writer/director who’s obviously spent way too much time talking about philosophy in trendy cafes.
Okay, it might be uncool to make a film with something as “obvious” as a beginning, a middle and an end, but with Donnie Darko, Richard Kelly proves that all the uber-hip posturing in the cinematic world is no match for that dog-eared old favourite: a good story that actually makes sense. That would just be too easy though, wouldn’t it?
Want to read more from The Butcher? Check out his angry missives against Psycho, 12 Years A Slave, Red Dog, The Wolf Of Wall Street, Breathless, Elizabeth, Miracle On 34th Street, The Full Monty, There Will Be Blood, Les Miserables, The King’s Speech, Picnic At Hanging Rock, The Magnificent Seven, Gone With The Wind, The Right Stuff, 81/2, Pulp Fiction, Easy Rider, The Shawshank Redemption, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Wizard Of Oz, Jaws, Black Swan, Gladiator, Chopper, I’m Not There, Interstellar, Marvel Studios and Citizen Kane.
