The Other Roger is a Dream Machine Site The Dream Machine --- The Imagination of the World Wide Web

Richard Kelly's mind bending Indie enters young Darko's troubled mind, through the twenty-eight days before Halloween, in a small Californian suburb. In our first glimpse, Donnie is lying unconscious by the side of a lonely back country road. He wakes up, seemingly in a daze; gazes at his surroundings, apparently not concerned in the least on how he got there; and simply shrugs it off, without a second thought. It's in this very first scene, we get the feeling that something isn't quite right about ol' Donnie. In fact, he's had more than one of these wandering spells, as we soon find out.

Donnie has been having hallucinations as well. Disturbing ones at that! A freakish looking six-foot rabbit (think Harvey after being sent through a nuclear reactor) makes frequent visits, warning him of a coming holocaust. Over the course of the month, he is shown by the Demon Bunny signs of the possibility of the rapture. And in ways totally unexpected.

First off, an airplane's jet engine crashes into Donnie's bedroom. Nobody seems to know where it came from, since no plane has reported losing an engine in mid-air without crashing. Fortunately, Donnie isn't in the room at the time, yet the incident leaves him (rightly) disturbed. Then he begins to see strange watery tendrils emanate from various people, seemingly connecting them to other dimensions. As the visions become more vivid, Donnie begins a quest to try and uncover how this connects, leading him to avenues of space and time he never could have conceived. In the process, he uncovers some dirty secrets of the social elite in his bur. In particular, he notes the disturbing tendencies of a new-age motivational speaker (a sublimely cast 80's icon, Patrick Swayze). Yet, Donnie's journey of discovery appears to be causing further instability, both in his social life and family life.

It's in these passages of the story that offer the most intrigue, and offer a more realistic respite from the more outlandish aspects of the film. His parents (Mary McDonnell and Holmes Osborne) and sisters (Daveigh Chase and Jake's real-life sister Maggie) are not portrayed as dim, incompetent authority figures or insensitive bullies respectively. They are well-rounded individuals, who are deeply concerned for Donnie, and trying desperately to connect with him. And Donnie knows this too. However, his emotional state concerning his family is conflicted. He fears that if he lets his parents into his world, they'll think he's deranged and become more afraid of him.

As the central character, Gyllenhaal is utterly mesmerizing. There are so many ways he could have botched this portrayal. He could have gone over-the-top in his depiction of madness, as many actors have done, playing him as a teenage Dennis Hopper clone. But by playing it low-key, he manages to let a wide range of emotions come through. He's at times vulnerable, charismatic, morose, calm, playful, depressed and even a bit menacing, often at the turn of an eyelid. If anything, he comes across like a teenage Christopher Walken. Giving an intelligent, richly complex performance that flies in the face of what his somewhat prettier peers are doing, Gyllenhaal is a young Hoffman in training.

First-time director Kelly is also a diamond in the Hollywood rough to watch out for. Working within a limited budget, he is able to create a surreal, imaginative vision of 80's suburbia, without indulging in nostalgic cliches or overblown special effects. He's basically twisting that long ago decade's John-Hughes-coming-of-age formula, into an expose of the era's not-so-innocent underbelly (a la David Lynch's Blue Velvet). His choice of tracks by some of the more moody, melodic 80's groups (Tears for Fears, The Church, Echo and the Bunnymen and Joy Division) have been carefully picked. These aren't overplayed pop nuggets, like the ones you'd find in The Wedding Singer. They actually add a sense to the proceedings that things aren't quite right in Donnie's world.

And yet despite the fact that this is a completely original work, I cannot give this more than three stars. This is because Kelly overplays his cards in the last half hour. If he inspired to reach Lynchian heights, he succeeded in more ways than one. He raises some interesting questions in the first half, about the hold time has on our lives, or the inevitability of death. And like Lynch, you shouldn't expect easy answers. Or for that matter, whether those questions get answered in the first place. It's in this final half hour that things go off the rail and you are left wondering about the previous 90 minutes of screen time. Unlike Lynch, however (who usually has a method to his maddening endings), Kelly comes across as if he wasn't sure how he wanted to finish the product. It's like he spent all his good ideas early and then the well ran dry. It forces the ending to be more convoluted and confusing than it should have been.

I don't care whether he answered the BIG questions. Like whether Donnie's terrifying visions are real or if he's simply gone mad. It's the minor details that bother me. Like that reclusive old woman who wanders around town in a zombiefied state. Is she really senile? A Time traveler? Another messenger, like the rabbit? And was Drew Barrymore's character (a high-school English teacher) really that integral to the overall story arc? Or did her clout as producer of the project expand her role more than necessary?

Despite these flaws, Donnie Darko is still a challenging work, both visually and psychologically. Like a song by Echo and the Bunnymen, it's dark landscapes and psychedelic textures deserve an open mind and a good deal of attention.

My Rating =

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