Donnie Darko (2001)

Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Holmes Osborne, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Mary McDonnell, James Duval, Daveigh Chase

First, the Lowdown: A teenage boy starts hallucinating about a man in a bunny costume. And then it gets weird.

Fall 1988. America finds itself saying goodbye to the Reagan Administration, and finds itself not yet ready to let go. Meanwhile, in the Darko household, the dinner conversation takes an uncomfortable turn as the eldest sister, Elizabeth, announces to her Republican-leaning parents that she's voting for Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis. (Personal aside, despite finding Dukakis a less-than-evil choice to Bush, Sr., I find it difficult to see how anyone would vote for a person whose name has “cock” in the middle of it.) The resulting debate ends with Elizabeth being excoriated for her choice, and thusly steering the conversation to a more immediate concern: the fact that Donnie has stopped taking his medicine.

Donnie has been diagnosed with unspecified emotional problems and is a chronic sleepwalker. One evening during one such bout of somnambulism, a figure in a disturbing rabbit costume named Frank appears to Donnie and tells him that the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds. That same evening a jet engine detaches from its plane and plummets into Donnie's room. If he had not been sleepwalking, he would have been killed.

The next day, the FAA come to the Darko family and offer to house them in a hotel whilst they repair their house. As further incentive, they give the Darkos a substantial settlement for their inconvenience, provided that they family signs a non-disclosure waiver preventing them from talking about the incident to anyone. Curiously enough, the feds are having difficulty identifying the engine, as there were no flights within the vicinity of their area, and the serial numbers that would tell them what plane it came from are burnt away.

On the way to his therapist, his dad nearly hits an elderly recluse that the town's children have dubbed “Grandma Death.” They swerve out of the way, and as Donnie escorts her back to her house, the old woman whispers something in his ear that disturbs him. That evening, Donnie dreams about walking into the boiler room of his high school and flooding it. Waking up the next day he finds out that indeed someone has chopped open the water main of his school, buried the hatchet used into the head of the school mascot (the “Mongrel”), and spray painted “they made me do it” underneath.

Later on, Donnie meets Gretchen, a new girl at the school with problems of her own. It seems that her stepfather tried stabbing her mother to death, now the two of them have moved to a new city under a new name to prevent any further problems. Gretchen is intrigued by Donnie's quirky intelligence and the two of them begin dating in earnest. Donnie's lashing out to authority figures (the high-strung gym teacher, the confidence counselor during a presentation) only endears her more to him.

Donnie Darko is certainly a bizarre flick, which is surprising that it is as accessible as is to most people. The fact that Donnie is in high school (at the same time period as much of the movie's audience) is probably the major factor. I admire the fact that the Darko family has its rough edges, but the filmmakers don't take the “let's put the fun in dysfunctional” tactic. It's been too easy a cop-out for writers to say “oh, the main character isn't craze, it's his family that's making him crazy.” As the film explores Donnie's interactions with the adults in his life, it's easy to see how difficult it is to find a common ground with an emotionally troubled teen. Donnie's parents, especially his mother, are somewhat distant towards him, but in a way that shows they're scared of upsetting him further.

Another intriguing aspect is the “maybe crazy people see the world differently” angle the movie takes. People have often tried making a comparison between Frank in this movie and Harvey with Jimmy Stewart. Unfortunately what they don't realize is there is nothing whimsical about Frank (at most he gets enigmatic, which is not quite the same thing.) Where Harvey is a symptom of empowerment through imagination, Frank is most certainly a symptom of Donnie's illness (and not always an empowering one). Combine that with a time-travel subplot (just stick with me here) and you've got one weird flick.

Line of the Movie: “The children have to save themselves these days because the parents have no clue.”

Four stars. Avocado is the new black.