I finally decided to watch the cult hit Donnie Darko as I was perusing the new releases on Hulu Plus one night, after years of intentionally avoiding it for no clear reason. One of my good friends always quoted it and seemed amazed at the fact that I had not yet seen the movie, urging that it was one that I would enjoy. But alas, I fell into another ridiculous period of avoidance of a friend’s recommendation, and after finally giving in realized that I did indeed appreciate this film. This conclusion wasn’t reached easily, however, as the movie started off with a slow moving, bland, and confusing plotline headlined by some of my least favored actors. Though after reaching the excellent ending and pondering the overall meaning of Donnie Darko for a night, I was able to put aside my initial misgivings and notch the film as one that I thoroughly enjoyed and left me with exciting thoughts of psychology and fate.
At the beginning of the movie we see the unconscious protagonist Donnie Darko sprawled out in the middle of some mountainside road and awake in a daze to ride back to his suburban home. Here we meet his family, which is headlined by Donnie himself played by Jake Gyllenhaal and his sister Elizabeth, played by his real life sister Maggie Gyllenhaal. Here I must mention that I am not a fan of the Gyllenhaal acting family, and Donnie Darko didn’t much change my perceptions of them, with Jake channeling aloofness and confused facial expressions and Maggie bringing her usual smugness and annoying bitchiness to the table. If anything Jake Gyllenhaal probably fits best in Donnie’s role with his unappealing acting prowess, and I did find myself connecting to his character and the stress of loneliness he feels throughout the film.
Donnie is a troubled character, and we find out early on that he is seeing a psychiatrist because of his troubled past and is given some kind of medication. However this medication seems to be working in almost an opposing way to his psychological problems, for when we first see him take the pills we encounter his first vision of the recognizable bunny man named Frank. With his unsettling mask and echoing, almost gloomy voice, Frank warns Donnie of the upcoming “end of the world” and delivers cryptic messages of time travel and future events. During Donnie’s first vision, he is led from his home to wake up confused in the middle of a golf course, only to find out that in the night an inexplicable airplane engine crashed into his house that would have killed him if he had been in his room.
Over the course of Donnie Darko we are led through the twenty-eight days between Donnie’s initial vision and Frank’s predicted date of the end of the world, which follows Donnie and the effects some of his actions have on the citizens of Middlesex, his hometown. More visions ensue, one showing Donnie chopping at a water mane with an axe, which leads to the actual flooding of his private school. While Donnie appeared to have gotten away with it, this initiates a few different events to come into action: Donnie meets his love interest, Gretchen Ross, has one of his teacher’s (played with similar aloofness by Drew Barrymore) coursework scrutinized, as the book she assigns has an event eerily similar plotline to what happens at the school, and initiates a visit to the school by the local motivational speaker, Jim Cunningham.
At the same time we observe Donnie trying to sort out the visions and messages Frank keeps sending him and battle with his inner turmoil and fear of loneliness. One of the odd parts of the movie is how Donnie is increasingly becoming more withdrawn and sporadic because of his psychological breakdown, yet the people around him seem strangely oblivious to it. His parents ignore his pattern of “sleepwalking” and increasing misconduct in school, and his new girlfriend Gretchen also seems unfazed by his delinquency and periods of detachment. In fact, after he initially asks her out we don’t see them interact again for some time, and then we are just thrown back into their relationship as if nothing was amiss. In addition, he shows visible signs of his breakdown in front of her, but she doesn’t seem worried by it at all, even to the extent of accepting his quirks. It is hard to find attachment with any of these supporting characters if they are going to be stupidly ignorant of these obvious examples of destructiveness in our protagonist.
Donnie also forms some kind of a connection with a senile member of the community, nicknamed Grandmother Death, during his search for information about Frank’s messages and visions, realizing that she used to teach at his school and published a book on the philosophy of time travel. She also, in the only physical interaction between the two of them, instructs Donnie with the grim advice that “every living creature on Earth dies alone”. This connection opens up a lot of potential interesting plotlines; however it also is not developed at all after the initial conversation. Yes, she wrote a book that eerily explains some of the things Donnie has been seeing, and the overall theme of time travel hinges on his reading of her book, however it goes no further to advance the plotline, even creating a sequence that leads to some of the tragedy in Donnie’s life where he inexplicitly brings his friends to her house one night, only to run into a situation that leads to the death of Gretchen and the real world Frank, whom Donnie shoots.
Overall the plot of Donnie Darko has various holes and odd dead ends, and some of the events can be quite confusing up until the fantastic ending. Donnie drives off with the lifeless body of Gretchen as Frank’s countdown comes to a close, and he watches a wormhole form in the sky, engulfing an airplane with his mother and younger sister aboard, tearing it apart and sending one of the engines back in time. As we follow the engines journey, we return back to the scene where it crashes into Donnie’s house, but this time he is in his room. He smiles and laughs as the engine explodes through his roof and kills him. The movie ends with his body being taken away, surrounded by grieving family members, and Gretchen rides up to see what the commotion is about. When a local boy tells her of what happened and asks if she knew Donnie, we are left with the eerily delivered response of “No”, as she stares at his mother with a look of confused recognition in her face.
After the ending of Donnie Darko, I laid in my bed, contemplating the outcome of Donnie’s sacrifice. A troubled youth that seemed to be a burden to his loved ones and himself, Donnie seemed happy only once in the film, when he was facing his death. Thinking back to the sequence of events that happened when he initially avoided death, I realized that those around him largely benefited from his untimely (or is it timely?) demise. At least four people would live, more directly Gretchen and Frank, and indirectly his mother and sister, who wouldn’t have been on that plane if Donnie hadn’t burnt down Jim Cunningham’s house, revealing him as a child pornographer and leads the woman who would have taken the trip to stay in Middlesex to plead Jim’s innocence. He would have never flooded the school, eliminating the need to reassess his teacher’s coursework that eventually led to her getting fired. It’s less obvious, but he convinced his older sister to throw a party at their house after she was accepted to Harvard, and the next morning before he travels back in time we see cop cars pulling up to their house, which could have meant trouble for his sister.
Was it Donnie’s fate to die that day, crushed by an airplane engine? Was he purposely given visions and interactions to lead him to accept his fate, in order to benefit his loved ones? The ending of Donnie Darko brings up many questions in my mind on the ideas of fate and personal sacrifice. Donnie was largely troubled throughout most of the movie, even though he had good friends, a loving family, and a girlfriend that connected with him. Once he realized that his visions of Frank were preparing him to make this sacrifice, Donnie finally exhibits happiness. It’s chilling to think of how anyone might react to this type of encounter. Would we all be able to selflessly make a similar sacrifice after we are shown how much good it creates, as Donnie was able to? I mean, there was still some evil left in the world; without Donnie, Jim Cunningham wouldn’t have been revealed as a pedophile and the school thugs that ambush them at Grandmother Death’s house, leading to Gretchen’s death, still live unpunished. It’s hard to contemplate if I could make such a sacrifice myself, a “superhero” without recognition, a sacrifice unheralded, a living creature that despite my best efforts, still would die alone. But, as in Donnie’s case, not unloved.
One final note, and in relation to the title of my review, I was pleasantly surprised by a scene in Donnie Darko where Donnie is describing a section of the Graham Greene story about a group of boys who vandalize and destroy an elder man’s house, but do not rob him, even though they find a large amount of money in a mattress. He explains that “…the fact that they burn the money is ironic. They just want to see what happens when they tear the world apart. They want to change things.” This immediately reminded me of the quote from one of my favorite movies, The Dark Knight, where Alfred explains how “some men just want to watch the world burn”, in relation to the terrorisms of the Joker. This connection made me like Donnie Darko that much more, and I would like to think that it is a sort of shout out by Christopher Nolan in his film and that he used this movie as inspiration for his own.
Awesome review!
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