the philosophy of time travel ...

Rating: 9/10 (22 February 2002)

"So do you believe in God now?" his therapist asks him. "Not if everyone dies alone," replies Donnie.
Is each person ultimately alone? This movie takes you into the mind and heart of a person who has realized he's alone. Most movies take you to the other place, to the place where people are not alone, where the hero, facing dangers with courage, strong in the knowledge that in the end he will defeat the enemy and win the girl and be taken into the bosom of the community and loved and cared for and never be alone again. That's the fantasy we pay for, because real life is the opposite. In real life we are not the hero, we do not win true love, and the world does not take us into its bosom and care for us.
Comments on the movie suggest this is about a schizophrenic teenager, but that is not actually what the movie says. His therapist says that, but as things unfold it is not clear whether Donnie is halucinating or seeing a deeper reality. In fact his visions seem to come when he takes his medicine (which he's being hounded to do), so maybe it's his medicine that's making him see things. But is it madness or something else? Quantum physics maybe?

Well, that's a detail. Really it's the mystery of human existence: no one is inside our skin but us; reality is how we perceive it, human mythologies and science notwithstanding. How did that happen? Of all the horrors perpetrated upon living beings by God or the cosmos or whatever, what could be more horrible than to condemn each being to its own reality? Then again ... would could be more beautiful? When it's *your* time to die, do you want to be surrounded by those you love, by their pity and fear, be forced to comfort them as they contemplate their own inevitable end? Again in a session with his psychiatrist, Donnie tells her what happened with his pet dog. "It crawled under the porch," he says. "To die," states the therapist. "To be alone," says Donnie.

The creation of a movie about that (at least that's what I thought it was about) seems very ambitious. Yet there are no vagaries, no discontinuities, no flashbacks or other trickery, and the story unfolds quite logically, at times with Donnie appearing demonic, at other times humorously, but always with an assortment of interesting characters that each fit into the plot like pieces of a puzzle. Wonderful acting by all the cast. Just think how far Drew Barrymore has come since ET. That's weird too.