Is it camp?
Is Donnie Darko camp? There’s such a mixture of tones, and it’s unclear (to this viewer at least) which of them represent a match between intention and impact. There are elements which are pitched as eerie, but which perpetually teeter on the brink of laughable. If you love it, you love it.
You Had To Be There?
The emo vibes are beautifully rendered in widescreen anamorphic glory. The portrayal of earnest teenage angst nails that awkward mixture of blossoming insight and normal dumb kid stuff. The best moments are between Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his mother Rose (Mary McDonnell, whose performance singularly provides some of the film’s most powerful beats). These are all balanced with more cynical and satirical elements (“I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion”, and the bravery of Patrick Swayze in playing such an ultimately despicable character), many of which still land pretty amazingly.
Producing and acting in the film, Drew Barrymore perhaps best represents the film’s competing characteristics. On the one hand, she produced the film and by reports was largely responsible for getting 26-year-old writer-director Richard Kelly‘s debut made, and she clearly understood that it captured something of the zeitgeist. On the other, some of her character moments are simply ridiculous (what kind of teacher puts a new female student on the spot by making her choose the cutest boy in the class to sit next to – and then shushes the other students?).
The mood of Donnie Darko is so specific – not detached enough not to be self-serious, but containing enough intentional humour and self-awareness to encourage you to stick with it long enough to get to wherever it’s ultimately going.
There are many parts to this that simply shouldn’t work, yet somehow, mystifyingly, they do. At the same time, if someone told me the film failed entirely to resonate with them, I’d have no trouble in seeing why.
Aside from its relatively rapidly-accrued cult status, Donnie Darko was also (in)famous for its very of-its-time, turn-of-the-millennium crossmedia release. The time travel mechanic is not clearly explained in the film, so excerpts of Roberta Sparrow’s ‘The Philosophy of Time Travel’, the fictional book Donnie reads in the movie, were “published” on a dedicated website (and then the book itself was actually published) as part of the film’s promotion, for fans to pore over and piece together to help make sense of the film. There is the argument that a film needing supplemental material to help its audience make sense of its story has failed as a standalone text. There is the corrective that certain stories are designed to be told across different formats – and Richard Kelly continued to explore such storytelling after this (more on that later). In any case: the seeds were sewn for a version of the film which was more self-contained.
The Director’s Cut
Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut was released three years after the theatrical cut. The original film’s vibes-versus-clunkiness balance is definitely tipped into disappointing pretentiousness, and the more the director’s cut added, the less the resultant film actually said. Expanding and reshuffling the ’80s New Wave needle drops (I guess the music licensing budget was bigger the second time around) was dangerous enough, given how vital they are to establishing the mood that propels the film’s action, and how the already-precarious-but-somehow-just-right balance the original choices and placement of music cues had felt in the original.
But more egregious is the way the Director’s Cut attempts to over-explain the time travel mechanic. It introduces very digital-looking, omniscient POV sequences, in which some overseeing eye manipulates Donnie and certain elements in his world to facilitate the wormhole that prompts the events of the story. I vaguely recall an interview, or perhaps even the DVD commentary, in which Richard Kelly stated definitively that aliens were overseeing and/or manipulating the events of the film, which… sigh. Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut is an example, post-Star Wars: Special Editions (which had been released just a few years prior), of how sometimes giving the director subsequent bites at their own apple can erode the mystery and ineffable magic of their own work.
The Director’s Other Cuts
Richard Kelly’s follow-up to Donnie Darko, Southland Tales (2006), quadrupled-down on his interest in crossmedia storytelling and satire. A series of graphic novels provided further context for the world of the story, and the movie’s casting hinged on subverting the cultural cache of its stars: beloved turn-of-the-millennium stars such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s Sarah Michelle Gellar and American Pie‘s and Dude Where’s My Car?‘s Sean William Scott, alongside the first forays into acting from pro-wrestler Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson and former-boy-band-turned-solo-pop-star Justin Timberlake.
It’s debatable just how intentional the cringe factor is in some of the set pieces (for example: is Justin Timberlake singing “I got soul but i’m not a soldier”, while playing a literal soldier, embarrassing because the song has aged poorly, or because it was always a stupid lyric in a bad song, and a baffling choice for the film?).
To my mind at least, Southland Tales was the third point on the graph which confirmed Kelly’s decisive trend toward the more cerebral: increasingly, what we had now were potentially interesting ideas rendered with messily over-intellectual pretense; the pure vibes that buoyed the original Donnie Darko seemed increasingly like a fluke, and were at the very least now a thing of the past.
Of course, none of the writer-director’s later efforts should affect the experience of viewing this film. I mention them only as part of my attempt to understand my own response to the film, and to tally how many of the feelings it evokes in me align with the intentions of its creator. There are many parts to Donnie Darko that simply shouldn’t work, yet somehow, mystifyingly, they do – at least for me; if someone told me the film failed entirely to resonate with them, I’d have no trouble in seeing why. Perhaps, ultimately, you just had to be there.
Further Viewing
Donnie Darko: Production Diary (with writer-director Richard Kelly and director of photography Steven Poster, ASC):
Renegade Cut compares the different versions of Donnie Darko:
Patrick H. Willems on the use of needle drops, or already-released songs and music, to score or soundtrack films (video essay begins at 4:00)…
… which is part of our look at the various types of film scores and soundtracks: