What a mindtrip

Rating: 7/10 (28 April 2006)

In Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five, the protagonist Billy Pilgrim meets an alien race from Tralfamadore who can see a lifespan in the form of a line moving from the entity's beginning to its end. This view, called the fourth dimension by the Talfamadorians, allows them to piece together every part of a life and know the past, present, and future of all living things.
Director Richard Kelly seems to be a devotee to the Vonnegut story, piecing his first film, Donnie Darko, into a story that defies much of the three-dimensional boundaries set in stone by the modern living. As the film slowly peels away its story of Darko and his suburban milieu, the audience can easily imagine a future that could involve marrying a woman like Valencia Merble and a 1976 demise similar to Billy Pilgrim's. Even the character of Kilgore Trout and his sci-fi writings have been recreated in an absentee old lady called Grandma Death (Cleveland) who wrote a book on time-travel.
Donnie Darko (Gyllenhaal), of course, is not Billy Pilgrim in many ways -- the setting has left World War II and moved into the Reagan era and Valencia Merble has become a more likable youngster named Gretchen Ross (Malone). Darko is a dark young man whose actions have frightened his parents into sending him to a psychiatrist (Ross) and pushing him on medication for his mental condition. Donnie, of course, is distraught by his parents' ineffectualness for his feelings, especially in his mother (McDonnell), who tries desperately to relate to her son.
Set in October 1988 (the Bush-Dukakis election remains a constant background story), the film delves into Donnie's belief that the world has only 28 days left before destruction. A six-foot rabbit with a skeleton mask named Frank has told him this and he is intent on making sure he can understand as much as possible about the world and correct a few problems before the 28th day. This involves everything from a budding romance with Gretchen, an obsessively doting teacher (Grant), and a pretentious local self-help guru (Swayze). There are many Holden Cauffield phonies roaming around this suburban sprawl and it is Donnie Darko's task to put them in their place before the world ends.
Calamity serves as a major device in the film with equal attention set upon time-travel and the Tralfamadorian ability to look across one's life like looking across a timeline in a book. Richard Kelly's film works on many levels to produce a satisfactory tale of sadness and resolve in a misbegotten mind. Rarely do films come along that yearn to not only entertain on a simple level, but also painstakingly pit the characters in worlds not necessarily farcical, but not too realistic either.
The film's dark side will remind many filmgoers of American Beauty, though Kelly's resolve to turn the film to absurdness at times may hearken a little closer to Being John Malkovich. This is a movie where the downtrodden appeal serves a greater service to the surrealism than the melodrama.