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By PAUL BRENNER
As the line between the
theatrical release and the DVD release of a film
become more and more blurred, and a film owes its
financial success more to video sales than box
office receipts, the original DVD release of
"Donnie Darko" may well become an industry
milestone.
Originally released theatrically a month after the
horrors of September 11, 2001, the film quickly
tanked (in retrospect, a film which talks about
the world ending, where an airplane drops
inexplicably out of the skies and crashes into a
house, where the suburban landscape is riddled
with empty and dispirited characters awaiting an
end in some sense or another was, perhaps, too
close to the national mood of the fresh post-9/11
world to cause throngs of patrons to line up at
the box office). But upon its video release in
2002, "Donnie Darko" rapidly became a cult
favorite of an ever-growing legion of fans.
Riding the crest of the wave, Twentieth Century
Fox Home Entertainment has now released the
two-disc "Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut."
Supplementing the original release, the new
"Donnie Darko" provides more pabulum for the
DarkoHeads while allowing director-writer Richard
Kelly to tweak around the narrative (if you can
call it that) and expand and extrapolate upon his
original film, providing twenty minutes of extra
footage weaved into the film (much of this extra
footage had earlier appeared as deleted scenes on
the first "Donnie Darko" release). The result is a
more cohesive riff of the plot than the first
go-round, which was much more elliptical and
caused more head scratching (if Arthur C. Clarke
had gotten hold of "2001" and released a "2001:
Author's Cut" with Clarke's explanatory passages
from his novelization, you may get an idea of what
the Director's Cut portends).
Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Donnie Darko, a surly
high school student who manages to survive an
airplane engine crashing through his bedroom by
sleepwalking onto a golf course. After feeling
that he should have died in his room the night of
the crash, he begins to have visions of a shadowy
and hellish figure of a giant rabbit with a nasty
countenance. Reality and hallucination (or the
future and the past) become obscured as Donnie and
other characters inexorably plunge to their
respective fates (of particular debilitating
foreboding is Donnie's girlfriend Gretchen, who
has a chance between meeting her demise by either
getting stabbed by her ax-murderer step-father or
getting run over by a car). In "Donnie Darko" a
sinister force of nature has already prepared the
bleak future and, although fractured dreams and
imaginings can offer alternate realties for the
characters, their fates have already been sealed.
"Donnie Darko" is 9/11 as filtered through the
sensibilities of a David Lynch. Unease,
foreboding, and sarcasm are the film's bywords.
The film is a disturbing metaphor for the U.S. and
may well prove to be a key American film in the
post-9/11 cultural landscape.
The film appears on Disc 1, along with an audio
commentary by Kelly and "Donnie Darko" fan,
director Kevin Smith. Disc 2 features a production
diary (with commentary by cinematographer Steven
Poster); a documentary on the "Donnie Darko" cult;
a featurette; the Director's Cut theatrical
trailer; and a documentary celebration of "Donnie
Darko" by a "fan" who won a "Donnie Darko" contest
from the film's website. |
