Revisiting Donnie Darko

The first time I saw Donnie Darko was when it first came out on VHS. A couple of DVD's were around at that time but the technology was just emerging and certainly too expensive for my family to invest in at that point, which was fine was me and I am generally not well receptive to change. I had no idea what the movie was at the time other than that I had seen a preview for it on some other VHS' I had recently rented and thought it looked alright. That of course was the sweet summer between grade 10 and 11 when I would watch anything that had a cool enough video box regardless of whether it was released theatrically or straight-to-video. I had already gotten into writing reviews at this time and had made the decision that one day I would be a professional critic (I think my original review still exists on IMDB somewhere, spelling mistakes and all).

What played before me, at the time, I considered an act of absolute brilliance. Of course, back then, when you're young and think you know something about something, Donnie Darko was just the thing I needed to floor my mind. Here I was, 16 or somewhere there around, working the film out over and over in my head, connecting the dots, making huge, brilliant discoveries about life and love and fear and death. I thought I had seen a masterpiece.

Soon after I got a DVD player and slowly started collecting them (up until that point owning a movie had seemed a strange concept to me because they were expensive and you could just rent it whenever you needed to see it). Donnie Darko was one of my first purchases. I intended to watch it over and over and over again in my lifetime.

I just watched Donnie Darko for the second time tonight, Saturday February 27, 2010. I watched it because I want to sell off some DVDs and thought it might be one of them. Over the span on those years I've grown. I now hold a major in Film Studies, I've had reviews published and presented at a prestigious film conference, I've even gotten an e mail from Roger Ebert complimenting my writing, and, most importantly, I've watched some of the greatest films ever made.

Needless to say I don't feel the same about Donnie Darko. One of us apparently hasn't aged well. I can admire the craft of it's making, the professionalism of it's performances, but now I've learned that ideas are not what makes a film great or not, it's how it goes about presenting them (Roger Ebert once said, "It's not what a film is about that makes it good or not. It's how it's about it."), and an over-emphasis on film style doesn't impress me nearly as much as it once did.

In reality, Donnie Darko is one of those stepping stone pictures. Like Fight Club, The Boondock Saints or The Usual Suspects, to name a few, young people discover them and latch on to them because they are like nothing they have ever seen before. Every independent thinking, individualistic teenager wants to have something that they can hold above everyone else; something that speaks to them in volumes that their brainless colleagues could never comprehend, until they grow up, see more movies, better movies and finally realize that those films are no more than empty-headed and empty-hearted excursions into style, with shallow philosophies that serve only themselves, not the stories.

That was Donnie Darko to me. I'm glad I got out of that stage. Some people never do. I think Kevin Smith said it best on one of his Evening With... DVDs when he made that comment that not even writer/director Richard Kelly knows what Donnie Darko is about. The comment was in jest but that basically sums it up. Kelly has no overarching approach to this material. He has no one specific thing he is trying to say, so he says them all and hopes maybe one or two stick.

I know, I know there's all this contradictory imagery that shows the duality of the human psyche, and I get that, but so what? Does that automatically make the movie good? What does it have to do with time travel? By the time the movie rolls around into it's third act and starts looping back upon time and upon itself and we are treated to a conclusion that is more ironic than anything, you finally see what Kelly's point was: to try to hold this thing together for just under 2 hours. That he does it is commendable. But it still doesn't make the movie a success.

To put imagery in a movie and assume it speaks for itself isn't enough. The golden rule of style is that form must equal function. You cannot separate the story from the style. As Godard once said, they create each other. That's the mistake Donnie Darko makes: it doesn't provide an adequate story to back up it's symbolism. I can see why a lot of kids would connect with Donnie Darko. He's a depressed, dissatisfied youth, wandering through life just trying to find something meaningful. I obviously connected with that once upon a time myself. Now though, his journey just seems in vein because Kelly doesn't allow him to find that meaning. At the end, Darko isn't a kid on the verge of grand epiphany, he's just some character in some minor, hip indie flick that goes through the motions of being some character in some minor, hip indie flick, and that's about it really.

P.S.- It's also strange, all these years later, to see that Seth Rogen actually had a small part in this film (that's him in the back row). The part is so small I don't even think his character is ever given a name, but it was his first film role after starring in Judd Apatow's cult TV show Freaks and Geeks

Update- I found that original Donnie Darko review on IMDB and, despite how embarrassingly amateur and nonsensical it is (I clearly have no idea what I am talking about), have decided to post it in all of it's original, unedited glory:

What would happen if M. Night Shyamalan had let sam Ramai direct The Sixth Sense? You would probably get something like Donnie Darko. This film is so psycholigically complex I don't even know where to begin. The film is simply brilliant in that it has so many different issues weaven together to create on huge ball of irony, that one finds blinking may take your eyes off the screen for much to long. From the very beginning you get the feeling that this film has more to it than meets the eye. At first glance one may write it off as a modern day attempt at Poltergiest. After veiwing the trailer you may even want to consider it a brainless slasher movie but nothing could be further from the truth.

What we have here is the tale of a teenager who's name is Donnie Darko. But Donnie isn't your average teen, see he finds himself drawn at night to a myseterious force named Frank. Frank is a bunny who teels Donnie that in 28 days , on Halloween, the world will end. We also have Donnie's girlfreidn who had to move away because her step-father stabbed her mom in the chest four times and seems to be living a life of torment and personal angst all fueled by fear. Fear is a hard topic in the movie, infact I would say that that one world "fear" us the basis for everything to come.

We also have Jim Cunningham, a motivational speaker that teaches that fear and love are the two strongest emotions that a human has and learn to live your life in the love spectrum of life and avoid the fear. Then we have Grandma Death, an old lady who may just be the most important piece of this huge puzzel. She stands in the middle of the road all day, occasionlly walking to her mailbox to always be greeted by nothing inside. One day after Donnie's father almost runs her over she wispers in his ear "Everyone dies alone." Donnie later finds out that in the past she was a teacher and wrote a book on time travel (but to understand that without giving away the plot you must see the film).

This comment comes up at Donnie's therepy and along with stories of Frank the bunny his shrink believes that Donnie is afraid to connect with reality due to a great fear of what may come from it. It pains me to say this but the climax of the matches, if not surpasses that of The Sixth Sense as everything finally starts to make sense. This will not only leave you wide-eyed, it will probably take your breathe away as well. The acting is all top notch including as cast of Drew Barrymore, Patrick Swazey and the gripping Jake Gyllenhaal as Donnie in his most mature role yet.

The love/fear topic is present throughout the entire film and you can look for hidden signs of this scattered all over the film. One example of this is the billing of Evil Dead and The Last Temptation of Christ as a double feature at the theater. The film is horrifying and edgy without becoming cliched or unoriginal, making it not on;t the best, if you will, horror movie I've seen since The Sixth Sense, it is hands down the best movie of the year so far.

James Cameron

James Cameron is a great filmmaker, but he still kind of annoys me. I liked him better back in the 90s where he was proceeded by a reputation as being some sadistic, perfectionist tyrant on set of his movies and wasn't afraid to rip the people around him new ones. I can admire that. I like people who have a vision that is so determined and singular that they aren't afraid to call out the people around them who are hindering them on their journey to creating something great.

However, now that it seems Cameron has cooled down with age (or maybe it's because he got rid of the facial hair), he's still kind of pompous in that goofy Canadian way and tends to come off as the guy who says stupid things in public before thinking them out fully (announcing he needs to pee while accepting best director at the Golden Globes, like come on).

I say this because today Deadline Hollywood has posted four different videos of Cameron (three from MTV and one with Charlie Rose). In the first one, with Rose, his ego is on full display as he says he hopes Avatar wins best picture but he wants Kathryn Bigelow to win best director for The Hurt Locker, not because she deserves it, but because he doesn't need another best director award. I don't know if he is being sincere, is saying this because he knows the Director's Guild award usually determines the Oscar winner and that one went to Bigelow, or if he's just saying, "Ya, our film is the best of the year, but give my poor little ex-wife an honour because she's not as big a star as me."

Then Cameron is asked about any advice he'd give to Marc Webb for directing Spider-Man in 3D which gets Cameron talking about the rebooted Batman movies, which he liked so much better than the first four which he couldn't stomach. Of course, nice guy that he is, says he doesn't want to "throw anyone under the bus" immediately after calling out Tim Burton on being responsible for the first Batman movies. Sorry Jim, I think the Burton Batman movies sucked too, but once you call someone out, you can't take it back. I hope Burton catches this and responds like he did with the whole debate about how he stole the end of Planet of the Apes from Kevin Smith's Chasing Dogma comic book.

Then Cameron talks about how he is done with the Terminator series and has no comment on the plans for a fifth and sixth movie in the series other than he's glad someone else can make some money off it like he did, right before getting into information on an Avatar sequel. This whole Avatar sequel talk bothers me because it seems opinions on it change by the week. First Cameron says that it will probably be a long time before a sequel because he won't make one until he knows he has a great script. Then Rupert Murdoch came out saying that he wants another Avatar movie as soon as possible. Now here Cameron is saying he's been thinking about new projects and Avatar is definitely a strong possibility.

Personally, I could live without another Avatar film. It was a complete, self-sufficient story and I feel to continue it would simply be like the second and third Matrix films. They were good, but at the same time they felt like unneeded continuations of a singular film that still stands on its own without them and apart from them. Also, unlike Cameron's Terminator 2 which was the big sequel to a minor film, Avatar 2 would need to be the ultra-major sequel to a major film. Expectations would probably kill it on arrival.

John Hughes

I just finished watching Don't you Forget About Me a documentary about a group of Canadian filmmakers who head for Chicago in order to snag a rare interview from iconic but reclusive filmmaker John Hughes who more or less disappeared from filmmaking in the late 90s and wasn't heard from again until his unexpected death last year.

The documentary itself isn't a great one; it really has no background on Hughes as a person or a filmmaker, it only focuses on his 80s teen comedy work neglecting his best film Planes, Trains and Automobiles or his later, lesser quality screenwriting efforts under a pseudonym, and of course, ends in anti-climax as Hughes does not accept to be interviewed.

However, one thing about the film struck me. The weight of the material comes from a combination of interviews with some of his actors (though Molly Ringwald is understandably absent), some other filmmakers who he inspired (Kevin Smith, Jason Reitman), critic and fellow Chicagonians Roger Ebert and Richard Reoper and a bunch of high school kinds in an effort to show that contemporary teenage comedies are vapid and shallow and don't reflect what it is really like to be a teenager. "I've never had sex with a pie," one kid says. "But I've defiantly skipped class before."

Smith, Reitman and Howard Deutch (who directed Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful) along with all the kids interviewed throw the term realism around a lot in relation to Hughes' work. They say that Hughes was so influential because you could go to his movies on a Friday night and see yourself projected up on that screen. Some people claim they knew and were friends kids like the ones in Hughes' movies, and no one has ever gotten that formula quite right again.

I'll agree with the second point: no one indeed has ever gotten it quite right again (although I think there is may be more truth to some of the more tender moments in American Pie than the kid in question is letting on). Indeed, teenage comedies over the years have become shallow, juvenile, gross and stupid and do not reflect what it is truly like to be a teenager in the midst of growing up. There aren't movies about kids just hanging out anymore, having fun, wandering aimlessly, trying to find themselves when they can muster up the energy to do so, and so on. That was Hughes at his best within those teen films. A lot of people in the documentary say things like The Breakfast Club could never have been made today or people like Molly Ringwald could never be stars: it was too talky, too boring and she was too average, too ordinary; he persona didn't come with enough baggage to be flaunted in public. They are probably right.

All that is fine and dandy and, most of all, true. But I wonder just how much closer John Hughes actually got to reality than any other filmmaker ever does. My high school experience never mimicked anything like what is depicted in those films and this brings me to my reservations about using the word reality in regards to film.

Simply put, realism in movies doesn't exist. Critics talk about it all the time. Andre Bazin constantly touted realism in film and dismissed anything that came with even the slightest hint of artificiality (Jim Emerson posted a good article on this topic over at Scanners earlier today).

However, the realism that Andre Bazin and other critics talk about is not the realism of the everyday. It is cinematic realism. It's about finding something realistic within the context of a given film. Is the story plausible? Do the characters act in the ways we believe they would act in such a situation? I didn't believe a moment of The Dark Knight as creating a plausible, realistic world, but the film creates the aura that these people would genuinely exist in such a world and act in the exact manner in which they were acting up until the point when Batman and The Joker become real people. That's cinematic realism.

This brings me to a question that was posed to me in a grade 11 Media Studies class and I just found an answer to a few years ago. The question was whether art imitates life or life imitates art. It seems like one of those impossible questions with no right answer like what came first, the chicken or the egg? But then it becomes clear. The answer is that it's a two way street: each are a reflection of the other. In other words, we'd like to think we talk and act like they do in the movies and the movies would like to think they talk and act like we do in real life.

There's no doubt that, in those teen films, John Hughes was channelling people and places from his life and his youth, using something real as the template to cast his film against. However, are the films realistic in any sort of every day sense? I don't think so. Yet, the reason they are so affecting and people connect with them, enabling them to continue to live on these 20 years later, is because they offered an ideal portrait of what we wished out lives were like. To be as unique and innocent as Molly Ringwald, to be as hopelessly in love as Ducky, to be as rebellious...and so on.

John Hughes' method was then to create characters that represented types. They weren't typical teen characters: they were amalgamations of every kind of teenage archetype there was, and then put them into situations in which any teenager could possibly be confronted with: love, heartbreak, detention, an irate teacher, etc. However these things represented the ideals: the love was sweeter and more innocent than real life might be, the heartbreak more searing, the friendships more long lasting, whatever you will. These kids were the people we wanted to be, the friendships we wanted to have, the lives we wanted to lead.

John Hughes' films didn't so much create a portrait of reality because, let's face it, if the movies really presented accurate visions of reality we would never go to them. We go to them to see things as better than they are, funnier, more exciting, more tragic, more anything other than what we know in the day to day. John Hughes just so happened to present those things within a world that didn't feel as if it was completely unattainable; that it just existed outside the grasp of human possibility. That's what Hughes did at his best. That's what made him special. That's true cinematic realism.