Thanks, I Hate It: Donnie Darko

There are things to like about Donnie Darko. Much of the camera work is solid and patient. The science fiction plot is small and neatly executed, if conceptually thin. Jena Malone is there and punching well above the movie's weight class. The elements of a solid independent thriller are all present, including just-skilled-enough and adventurous direction, but the film's tone is insufferably self-satisfied, its protagonist, played by a young Jake Gylenhaal, mishandled by a script with too much investment in his half-baked teenage misanthropy. Gylenhaal himself is unimpressive, selling his character's burnout dysfunction a little too hard no matter what's going on around him. That the film's central conceit amounts to little more than "huh, weird" doesn't help.

Time travel on its own is not a story. Donnie Darko relies far too heavily on its big reveal, leaning on it as though it possesses an emotional weight it never earns. We see Donnie's life -- an undercooked hodgepodge of teenage romance, sibling rivalry, and rebellious rage -- and then we see it vanish. It's like if It's A Wonderful Life followed Jimmy Stewart on a night of binge drinking and then revealed that actually he died on the toilet of a massive aneurysm the day before. The final flourish has nothing to do with the story that came before it. It cheapens the rest of the movie through this departure. Perhaps, as with the appearance of the flying saucer near the end of the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There, writer-director Richard Kelly is attempting to invoke the sublime by risking the absurd, but the effort lacks even a spectacular degree of failure. It's just nothing at all.

The film's women are another weak point. Maggie Gylenhaal, Beth Grant, and Jena Malone are easy matches for Patrick Swayze as high-point performances in the movie, but none of them amounts to much more than something for Donnie to snipe at or masturbate near. The shocking death of Malone's character near the climax of the movie is one of the cheapest attempts I've seen to ratchet up tension, a garish Wes Anderson-esque emotional upset wiped away moments later by the resolution of the time travel plot. Her painful backstory is discarded as well, along with the question of whether or not her abusive father will kidnap or murder her mother. What appears at first glance to be a keyhole glimpse of her suffering turns out to be a crass attempt to make her sadder. More pitiful. 

The final nail in Donnie Darko's coffin isn't its cynical plotting or lifeless twist, but its insistence that it matters. Every word of dialogue spat out by the rabbit-suited Frank sounds like something out of some infuriating Alice in Wonderland for grownups schlock. Every snapshot of Kitty blindly defending a pedophile is full of the kind of nihilistic self-satisfaction you can find in any dorm room discussion of current events. The movie's contempt for humanity is artless and trivial, divorced from any real exploration of the failures of society and wasting its time instead on sneering at ridiculous people for no other end than because it's easy to do so.