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.Kenneth Mon-nitoff), Beth Grant (Kitty Farmer)Donnie Darko is a secret history of the 1980s.Its mysteries are rooted in theexperience of growing up during the Reagan era, with its odd mixture of ColdWar dread and MTV exuberance.The movie explicitly nods to a number offilms central to 1980s adolescence (the Back to the Future series, E.T., RiskyBusiness, John Hughes s high school dramas), but it bundles its references upin an ominous puzzle of a story that never quite gives up its code.RichardKelly s style is a sort of dreamy naturalism punctuated by jags of nightmare.Everything in the movie seems a little unsteady, not quite awake.The mood issustained to a large degree by the heavy-lidded, slightly sinister performanceof Jake Gyllenhaal, whom the film helped turn into a star.Set during the month of October 1988, the movie is several things at once:a spooky piece of Twilight Zone-ish science-fiction; an affecting teen drama;a philosophical treatise; and a scrapbook of an era.Its tone is distinct andstrange, melancholy, sometimes scary, but also funny (lines like  SometimesI doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion are part of what made it acult favorite).It marked Kelly as a significant new talent, although it alsoleft plenty of critics and audiences scratching their heads.It really only cameinto its own when it was adopted by midnight-movie crowds, whose devotionprompted the theatrical release three years later of a longer  Director s Cutversion.That recirculation was somewhat more successful than the initial,182 POST-POP CINEMADonnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) tries to go through the looking glass in Richard Kelly sgloom-ridden fantasy, Donnie Darko.(Courtesy of Photofest)little-seen run, but even so the film has a combined total gross of just $1.3million.(Its budget was a reported $6 million.)The story, to the extent that it can be coherently patched together, is aboutan emotionally disturbed high school student, Donnie Darko, who begins toexperience unsettling visions of a man in a large, ugly rabbit costume.Thevisions are accompanied by bouts of sleepwalking from which Donnie awakesfar from his plush suburban home.While he is away on one of these nightwanderings, a jet engine falls from the sky through the roof of his family shouse and into his bedroom.It would have killed him if he had been there.At first Donnie thinks the rabbit man whose name, he learns, is Frank hassaved his life.But he eventually comes to believe that both he and Frank arecaught in a time vortex and that Frank has been sent back from the deadto recruit him in an effort to close a space-time portal before it turns intoa world-destroying black hole.Or something like that.Over the course ofthe next few weeks, Donnie meets and falls in love with a new girl at school,Gretchen, whose fate ends up entwined with his.When she is killed duringa climactic fight, in which Donnie in turn kills Frank, Donnie realizes thatthe only way he can make things right is to sacrifice himself.He waits for theportal to reopen and propels himself into it, back through time, landing inhis own bed just before the jet engine falls.When it does, Donnie is killed,but both Gretchen and Frank are saved.DAVID FINCHER, SOFIA COPPOLA, AND RICHARD KELLY 183That synopsis, muddled as it is, hardly does justice to the film s convolutionsor its haunting, haunted manner.It is full of strange, striking images: thestatue of a dog-headed man that serves as the mascot at Donnie s school; thetranslucent, wormlike appendages that Donnie sees snaking out of people storsos, foretelling their movements; Donnie carrying Gretchen s body downthe middle of a quiet suburban street.Kelly uses a grab bag of effects, makingabundant use of both slow-motion and sped-up film to echo the story snotions of fluid time.After Donnie s physics teacher gives him a book calledThe Philosophy of Time Travel, the film begins to incorporate bits of the text aschapter headings in the story.(These bits are rarely shown for long enough toread them in their entirety, making DVD viewing an advantage.Predictably,the film s fans have transcribed all of the snippets on numerous Web sites.)There are also a couple of semi-satirical subplots, one involving a fatuousmotivational speaker (played with oily enthusiasm by Patrick Swayze) andthe other detailing the efforts of a teen dance team Sparkle Motion whosemembers include Donnie s younger sister Samantha.But all of this is mostly grist for Kelly s free-associating evocation of the era,and particularly of its movies.In some ways, Donnie Darko seems like a portraitof the 1980s by someone who experienced the decade primarily through itsfilms.The teen-drama aspects particularly Donnie s romance with Gretchenand his affectionate sparring with his sister, Elizabeth (played by Gyllenhaal sreal sister, Maggie) are drawn straight from the John Hughes template [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]