Lost in the Darko

For a while now, I'd been hearing about the movie Donnie Darko. It was supposed to be incredible. It's ranked relatively high on the top 250 list over at IMDB.com. It was loaded with actors I liked in other films. It was supposed to be strange and fascinating.

Now I've seen it, and I have to say I have no idea what all the fuss was about. About 30 minutes into the movie, I felt really untethered and bewildered, and I began to wonder what all those people could have possibly seen in this movie.
Maybe they identified with the title character? A lost and confused misfit, having visions that he may be truly important in ways he never realized? People could maybe respond to that, right? But no... it's not like this Donnie Darko was a particularly likeable character.

I thought it could maybe be the way the film was staged and filmed. There's some truly effective lighting schemes. Things look dark and sinister, and really unsettling in ways that movies trying to horrify don't achieve. There are moments where Donnie looks chillingly evil. But effective visuals alone aren't generally enough to spur the adorations of a cult fan base -- just some nods from movie critics, usually.

Maybe it was this big ending I'd vaguely heard about? But when I got there, I felt sure no, that couldn't be it -- because it made absolutely no sense at all. Up until that point, in fact, I was kind of getting to a place where I thought, "well, if Donnie Darko turns about to be this schizophrenic slowly losing his mind, that might salvage some interest in it for me." Then it turns out to be some sort of predestination time paradox mind screw that left me wondering what the hell I'd just witnessed. And not in a "that was freakin' cool!" 12 Monkeys kind of way.

I was so thrown by the "resolution" of the film that I trolled the web a bit to see just what all those fans seemed to think it all meant. Turns out that the director (in commentaries and writings) had offered up quite a lot on this subject. He wasn't taking the easy "let people see what they want to see in it" way out.

But what he was saying didn't make a lick of sense, either. Suddenly, these bogus terms like Living Receiver, The Artifact, Fourth Dimensional Powers, The Manipulated Dead, and The Tangent Universe are flying at me. Now look, I'm all for having a movie with deeper layers of meanings that aren't necessarily spelled out. But in my view, the movie didn't provide any context for any of this stuff. If it was all supposed to mean this one thing and NOT be open to interpretation, then there was a higher mark that needed to be reached to explain that meaning.

And on that level, the movie was a complete and utter failure.

So, I'm left with awesome visual sensibilities, a few genuinely creepy moments, and laudable performances from several actors (Jake Gyllenhaal most of all) acting their hearts out to try to lend coherence to something arguably less sensible than a Samuel Beckett or Eugéne Ionesco play. It adds up to around a C-, in my book.

And I remain confused as to what all the fuss is about.