Director's Cut

Rating: 9/10 (31 March 2009)

Richard Kelly wrote and directed this opulent modern vision. It comes straight from his own mind and heart, and it doesn't stop coming until it can only be called his. When such a collaborative thing like a movie can converge as predominantly the ideas of an only fraction of the amount of people who contribute to a film's making, whether or not it is great, you have seen the work of a powerful filmmaker. It is definitively original. Even if it were not so inventive a story, Donnie Darko would still be original because it can most certainly be said to have originated from its maker.
It only makes sense for Kelly's story to revolve around a Nietzschean superman in the most close-to-home and identifiable way. A swarthy Jake Gyllenhaal plays the title character, a troubled teen and unassuming madman. Or a superhero. Of course not in the customary mold but nevertheless an individual who makes the ultimate sacrifice to save the world within the view of more recent generations as he shakes the algorithmic fabric of everyday life in his reactions of disgust and vitriol to the hypocrisy of the status quo of his environment.
In its refiguring use of time and its uniquely transcendent effect on a single central character, it is deeply reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. But really, there are different ways to read the fundamental interpretation of the film, though there are many. Kelly is deliberate, though not exactly subtle, in his use of hints through references to Graham Greene's The Destroyers and Richard Adams' Watership Down, the latter apparently new to the Director's Cut. The direct presentation of passages from The Philosophy of Time Travel book give us intermissions to decode the sometimes oddball occurrences in the plot without allowing them approval to go to the extreme and hammer us with infodumps.
But while the speculatively supernatural facets reveal a ambitiously vivid imagination, Donnie Darko affords a parallel in its savvy depiction of the real world, the key to which is how the most motivated forces of Donnie's life propel him towards the references I previously mentioned. Kelly portrays what it feels like to be in high school, no matter where you are. In encapsulating the confusion and suffering of high school, he provides observations what could lead young people to acts of violence against their peers. Aside from the right-wing religious dingbats who rail against Donnie's own personal belief system, not to mention those of the tired and repressed characters around him, Kelly shows the casual cruelty of other kids, the posses, the kids who don't fit in, the snail pace and the occasional inspired points in time.
Gyllenhaal makes Donnie the ultimate onslaught to adults: Brilliant and inquisitive. Gyllenhaal's performance is acidic, sensitive and beneath it all, crushingly sweet. Kelly familiarly relates Donnie's family life. The scenes between Donnie and his sisters, one of them played by Jake's real life sister Maggie, scream their acquaintances with our own observations throughout life. The parents are truly caring but are often at a loss for how to handle their son. The first scene of dialogue is a cleverly subjective way of looking into a fiscally conservative household who doesn't realize how socially liberal they are. One scene, supposedly newly restored to the Director's Cut, with the father who condemns most people for being full of ...it and commends his son for being a challenge to them, is welcome and reveals another dimension to the older character. And alternative dimension is definitely a prevalent theme.
The film ponders the perfect modern query: What if the universe as we know it, not just as we respectively conceptualize it, indeed isn't as we logically perceive it? In making the everyday as complicated as the cosmic, Donnie Darko has the fortitude to endures as a koan to many even in its sensed audience. Kelly headlong facilitates uncensored expression of the universal conscious with broad parody and satire with purposeful psychodrama and reveals action and events no one could foresee but him.