Twenty years ago next month, a surreal, humorous, unsettling, moving coming-of-age film about wrinkles in the space-time continuum hit theaters in the US. A plane crash featured heavily in the publicity, and as a result, the film went largely unadvertised to a cinemagoing public mourning the real-life airborne tragedy of 9/11 that had occurred just six weeks prior, meaning that it sank without trace on a commercial level. A year later, the film received an overdue theatrical release in the UK, where it proved to be a surprise hit. In the decades since, that film, Donnie Darko, has built up a solid cult following around the world, the fervor of which is entirely out of proportion to its initial poor commercial reception.
The film is set the fictitious Richmond, Virginia suburb of Middlesex in October 1988, five weeks or so before George H.W. Bush won that year’s presidential election. The titular protagonist (Jake Gyllenhaal, in his breakthrough role) is a teenager with a history of sleepwalking, vandalism and mental illness. In the middle of the night, a jet engine drops on his family’s house and he begins having visions of a six-foot bunny rabbit (James Duval) who tells him to commit various crimes around town in order to prevent the end of the world from taking place in four weeks’ time. While this is happening, he begins dating Gretchen (Jena Malone), the new girl at the local private school he attends, and save for a few more rational teachers (Drew Barrymore and Noah Wyle), his entire school seems to be falling under the spell of suspicious and untrustworthy local self-help guru Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze).
Looking back at it again now, Donnie Darko has aged fairly well. Even though there are a few anachronisms in there (most notably in the shape of ‘90s cars), the film was made at a time before the ‘80s nostalgia boom had fully taken hold, and its recreation of the era is more matter-of-fact and less fetishized than that found in more recent ‘80s-set films like Atomic Blonde. In some respects, the storyline about the dangers represented by the Swayze character feels more relevant now that we are living in an era in which thousands of people will do whatever Jordan Peterson or Joe Rogan tells them to do. All the cast (including Seth Rogen, making his film debut as a school bully) give affecting, believable performances, the soundtrack choices are thoughtful and not lowest-common-denominator nostalgia triggers and director Richard Kelly does a good job of recreating the Virginian landscape in which he grew up. For this viewer, at least, it also serves as a double nostalgia hit for both the late ‘80s and the early ‘00s, and it’s likely to have a similar effect on other older millennial viewers who were in their late teens and very early twenties when it came out.
It’s unfortunate that much of the crew haven’t found great success since the film’s release. Cinematographer Steven Poster, who had a relatively august career pre-Donnie Darko lensing feature films for the likes of Ridley Scott, now finds himself largely confined to work on TV mini-series and music documentaries. Editor Eric Strand, who before this film had worked on Lethal Weapon 4 and was picked to work on the lucrative Tomb Raider franchise directly after it, now has Deep Blue Sea 3 as his last notable film credit. And as for Kelly himself, he went on to direct the overwrought, critically and commercially unsuccessful sci-fi satire Southland Tales in 2005, the underrated, surprisingly creepy PG-13 chiller The Box in 2009 and nothing since then. In an interview with The Independent in late 2019 to mark the latter film’s 10th anniversary, he claimed to have been working on scripts for a number of projects, and only time will tell if his rumored Rod Serling biopic will ever come to fruition.
Regardless of however unfairly the filmmakers’ careers may have stalled in the years since, Donnie Darko is worth revisiting now as an apotheosis of what Jeffrey Sconce and Claire Perkins have termed the “American Smart Cinema” movement of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, as well as a demonstration of how to recreate the ‘80s on celluloid without resorting to camp theatrics.
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