A Eulogy for Wasted Lives

Rating: 10/10 (5 September 2005)

A friend of mine brought the DVD round to have with tortilla chips and a home made salsa - and to ask me what I thought it was about. At first viewing I loved it for the sound track, but thought it was weird and didn't really understand it at all. A year later, at second viewing I thought that maybe I did. Perhaps not all of it, but the important thing for me behind it all.
Donny's lesson is the effect that one life can have on all those around them, or at least could have done. What you see is a good deal of happiness and enlightenment and a justice which is anarchic yet poetic is brought into the lives of others by this obviously somewhat ill young man.
Yes, he's ill, that much is very clear. That night he goes to his room, having been teased by his sisters and nagged about his medication, feeling sad, his mum does try to help. Then the fuselage lands, and the crossroads has been reached. Only then do we get a glimpse of life with Donny and without him; the first, full of weirdness admittedly, but a great deal of humour and touching ordinary life stuff with love and parties and good stuff, and the second showing the people who never had the chance to have those good times either with or because of him.
I have become sure that the falling fuselage is a metaphor. I am surprised to hear this called a comedy, for to me it is far from it. Yes, it has humour, but its primary purpose is to make us think, to ponder a life, a death, not to make us laugh. The second time I saw it, I cried when I realised. As a depressive, or perhaps even a schizophrenic, Donny felt under unbearable pressure as represented by the fuselage. That half of his family were aboard the plane was the irony, and almost certainly part of the metaphor for the pressure he was under.
Donny, I think, killed himself; the film is telling us how much of a waste that is. I'm sure we know that much already, but that's what it said to me. And weird though he was, which of us didn't think Donny was a hero? Yet he felt himself worthless and couldn't bear his own life any more.
But it's still a fantastic soundtrack.
lazylaurablue