Good movie

Rating: 7/10 (18 November 2010)

I became interested in this movie after seeing a clip on YouTube. I rented the Director's Cut DVD. I thought it was a good movie, but it didn't have the impact on me that others have said it had on them. It's a good concept, though.
The movie starts with Donnie lying on a mountain road, with his bike off to one side. He wakes up as if from a good night's sleep, and bikes home. One is left to ponder right away, "What an odd thing." A while later, while sleeping in his room, Donnie hears a command by an ethereal voice to "Wake up." He wanders outside, and meets a man in a macabre bunny suit, named Frank. He is told that the world will end in 28 days. While this is going on, a jet engine falls from the sky and crashes into his bedroom. His life is spared. His sister tells him later, "They don't know where it came from."
A girl named Gretchen wanders into his English class. She and Donnie hit it off. They both have tragedy in their lives (hers from a broken home), and this becomes a bond between them. They "go with" each other. She acts as a comforting and stabilizing force in his life. As their relationship grows, he becomes that for her. They are both self- aware, and share a value of honesty.
A theme of the movie is that destruction can be creative. Donnie is commanded by Frank to go and destroy certain things associated with his high school. What I saw in the story is that these incidents Donnie creates cause divergence, events that would otherwise not happen. There's nothing that is absolute, or fits within the neat confines of the limited mind, though the adults, and many of his fellow students typically see things in that limited way.
I got this sense as the movie progressed that maybe there was a reason the world was going to come to an end that one could see in the character of the people in Donnie's school; that there was a falseness, shallowness to it all that would collapse under its own weight. There's a sense that this mundanity is oppressive to the few who are self- aware, because they are a threat to it. They exist outside of it, and so easily penetrate it. Whereas to everyone else, the mundane is all they know, and it is their only comfort zone. Jim Cunningham, an inspirational speaker, exploits this comfort zone for his own gain. What people like about him is he doesn't upset the applecart. He validates it. He seems benign, but his influence in the school leads to a subtle corruption, which infects everything, pushing out anything of substance.
The one good teacher Donnie has is his English teacher. She seems to buck the trend in the school, presenting a full and heartfelt sense of her subject, and she communicates the value of it to her students. Donnie's destiny is strongly tied to the narratives that come out of his English class. His teacher is struck by the lack of perception in the staff and students at the school, as Donnie is a lot of the time. Even though Donnie is supposed to be the crazy one, the one who is always in a confused stupor, I was often surprised by his unwillingness to go along to get along in the mediocrity, and his tenacity in speaking his mind with such clarity, to confront the people around him. It was refreshing to see.
One of the things that struck me is how the movie was set in the 1980s, even though it came out in 2001. Everything was very true to the time. Of course there was 80s music throughout. The musical scenes were really enjoyable. They lent a dreamlike quality to the movie, yet the music felt relevant to what the movie was about.
It's a movie one is left to interpret. It is somewhat cerebral, though not technical. You have to think about what you are seeing. It doesn't have an obvious point to it, and that may disappoint viewers. Each viewer can take away something different. As I watched it, I saw that there was something disturbed about Donnie. One could chalk this up to schizophrenia, but as the movie kept going, an aspect of time travel was becoming more obvious, and I began to wonder if Donnie wasn't hallucinating, but rather was experiencing a very real alternate reality. In this way it was like the movie "The Devil's Advocate". It had the same theme of events and destinies happening in different timelines (and making one wonder whether the main character's wife is more vividly experiencing a real alternate reality, or is just hallucinating because of schizophrenia), though while "Devil's Advocate" made these realities hinge on choice, "Darko" seems to make it hinge on fate. The ending makes you wonder again, though, was time travel even involved, or was it all something else? The movie becomes clearer if you watch it more than once.
The take-away I got from it is that we each interpret our experience. We come up with our own models for it. None of the models we form to interpret our experience is necessarily more correct than any other, though depending on which we form and choose for ourselves, it has a profound impact on how we see ourselves in that experience, and how we react to it. I saw some commentary on the extras disc that provided some clarity to the intent of the movie, but I feel like I'd spoil it if I divulged that here. Just a note to those who end up feeling mystified by the movie.