Remarkably overrated

Rating: 5/10 (9 April 2011)

I have long known of the high reputation of this film but, for one reason or another, had failed to see it until last night. I was surprised by how ordinary the film is; perhaps the original audiences were right when they made this a box office flop. In fact, only the reputation of this film kept me watching till the end. Otherwise I would have bailed out much earlier.
The story is rather too thin to hang a 105 minute film on, yet despite the length and lack of plot, character development is minimal. In particular the self-help guru (Patrick Swayze, in a walk-on part) is poorly drawn. We neither care nor not care when his house is burned down by Donnie or when he is then revealed to be a paedophile. This latter revelation appears more to make us more sympathetic to Donnie, in what would otherwise be an appalling act of vandalism.
Swayze's sidekick Joanie is equally unsympathetically drawn as an big mouthed ignoramus. She appears, when the necessity of the story dictates, as a cartoon villainess, although sometimes to advance what little plot there is, as when she gets Donnie's mother to go in her place to supervise a dance troupe. Another couple of cardboard cut-outs are the school bullies. Its saying something when Nelson Muntz from the Simpsons is a more flesh and blood creation. I guess it helps us sympathise with Donnie that he has these one-dimensional hypocrites to fight against, but it can hardly be said to be good writing.
The other characters in Donnie's life are more sympathetic but equally one-dimensional. His family are, at best, sketched in. In keeping with Hollywood's modern mythology women=good, men=bad, Donnie's mother, his female councillor, his female teacher (Drew Barrymore) and his girlfriend are shown in the most kindly light, but hardly well drawn. Mary Mcdonnell makes the most of her slender part as his mother and is the stand out here.
A major problem is the unsubtleness of the script. The writers should learn the old dictum "show not tell". So when a new cute girl is introduced she says "hi I've just been transferred here." banal enough but then the teacher invites her to sit next to the boy she likes and she chooses Donnie. Next we see him asking her to go out with him, which she agrees to, even after he's told her (in their first conversation) that he's burnt down a house. Donnie's got such a great seduction technique.
Other story strands go nowhere. Barrymore is sacked late on for being too caring (Oh dear! Another gentle soul crushed by the repressive system), we must take this statement on trust, since we have not seen her methods apart from the above: allowing a new girl to pick her own seat, which incidentally requires another girl to be curtly told to move. That's OK though, she wasn't so cute.
How can we then explain the reputation of this? The self consciously cool soundtrack, inappropriate yet designed to make the audience think "hey I remember that song". Set as it is just over a decade before it was released, when its target audience would have been becoming self aware, this built-in nostalgia is a comfort to them even as they delude themselves that the music might be in some way 'edgy'.
Likewise, the sudden unexplained cuts and story strands left dangling will delude many that they are clever because they can get it while their supposed intellectual inferiors cannot. I personally have no problem with the unexplained time travel denouement, believing that mystery does have a place in story telling, but I do not think that Donnie Darko earned the right to such a device.
The film certainly looks good, with several images which will stay with me, such as the scenes with Donnie prodding the rabbit's eye. For this reason I have rated it a 5.