Over-hyped, Faux Intellectual Guff (With some nice moments)

Rating: 5/10 (29 March 2005)

I tried to like this movie. I really did. No one can deny "Donnie Darko's" unerring popularity, especially among teenagers; the impact of many of its images; the valiant effort of a first time writer director attempting to do something a bit different. These are noble aspirations for a new auteur, attempting to be original; and many newbies fail even to reach these giddy heights. But these, alone, are not enough to render this movie a classic. Indeed, Donnie Darko fails to come together on any satisfactory level.
In discussing this movie, I will try not to spoil, for fear of incurring the wrath of the Mods, so those of you who have seen the film can work out which bits I am talking about.
First, the story. Donnie Darko is a modern filmwork par excellence. It is all impact and without lasting aesthetic merit. Think to the power of the opening images: DD with the axe; the Rabbit; the Greene quote; the Old Woman looking for the letter. This cacophony of high impact "visual bites" are blasted at us one after the other. But they are simply not examined: not rigorously taken apart - in an aesthetic sense. Those film works which endure are those which go for quality over quantity, enable us to see things in a new light by recreating the familiar anew; by deconstructing a few visual ideas: not machine gunning us with poster images.
The Master of the Best Way, ironically, is one Robert Rodriguez. At 23, he begins a shootout with a Police dude throwing a bag of food at his colleague and switching on the TV. At 27 he's beginning a story about a dead whore in a hotel room with a Dad trying to comb his son's uncombable hair. You want enduring aesthetic brilliance? Look no further. You see, Rodriguez works because he understands that the story is a conveyance for the images. Donnie Darko neglects this essentially important fact. Its images stand alone, pulled together only by their own strength, not by the action reflecting the image, as if it were a prism. By the end of Donnie Darko, I was waiting for the payoff that would pull together all these vaguely interesting but increasingly tiresome little vignettes. And it never came. The ending, I have to say, was pretty lame.
I could go on, but I can't be bothered. That's one facet of the movie. It's an amateurish work - but then it was made by a newbie. FOR A NEWBIE, it's very good. Excellent. FOR A TEEN MOVIE, it's very good. Excellent. But in terms of lasting intellectual or aesthetic merit from the point of view of the great tradition of cinema that we enjoy - hell, even from the point of view of sheer entertainment - I really wanted my two hours back by the end. And don't get me started on the dialog... :-)