Ambitious, Interesting... and Utterly Insubstantial

Rating: 4/10 (20 June 2010)

This movie contains a lot of interesting stuff, without actually being interesting in itself. It's a confused collection of often-clever scenes, but no kind of masterpiece taken as a whole.
True, the 'asides' are frequently entertaining... discussions of literature, weird confrontations that don't play out the way you expect, nice bits of characterization... (Bizarrely, I found Drew Barrymore's character the most interesting and likable.) And, in fairness, the acting is uniformly good.
But overall, the movie just doesn't add up to anything. The ending is a kind of Twilight Zone cop-out - trite if you take it literally, offensively meaningless otherwise. Is Donnie nuts, or is he not? By the end, who cares? The schizoid behavior becomes almost random after a while. The giant rabbit starts out sinister, then becomes laughable through repetition, eventually ends up just plain uninteresting.
This sort of material can work, but it's not enough to just be weird for weirdness' sake. If you want to be surreal on a story level, you really should have something to say on a philosophical level. This movie has nothing on either level. You get the strong suspicion its creators couldn't quite think of a brilliant statement to make, so they just muddied the waters in the hopes that the audience would read in some brilliance on its own.
Sorry: 'murky' is NOT the same as 'deep' (except to those who really don't GET 'deep.') And 'artsy' is NOT the same as 'artistic.' By all means, see this film if you're curious and have time to waste - but otherwise, don't feel you've missed anything important.