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e_k_bravemanFirst of all, the reason I even decided to watch it in the first place was because I finally sent my Bachelor's thesis to go get printed and decided to reward myself by watching a movie. So I did what any sane 21st century person does and booted up a VPN to see what's on Tubi. Scrolled a bit and saw it there and I was just like, yeah, I feel like watching a cult classic. Let's see what you've got, Richard Kelly.
Good god, dude. I don't know where to even start.
Well, let's start with the funny bits. Ashley Tisdale and Jerry Trainor are in this movie for like a scene. And I instantly clocked both of them. I genuinely love it when that happens, especially when it's for small roles. "Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion!" Also, just. The fucking Smurfette rant, dude. One of the character moments of all time, I mean that genuinely.
Which brings me to my next point: Donnie is just a fucking kid oh my god. Jake Gyllenhaal is just a bit too old for the role, but by the end I bought into it, I bought into the idea that this is an actual dipshit teenager. But he's a dipshit teenager who cares, man, and he's frustrated because of all the condescending amoral fuckfaces that run things. That's not even getting into how he's severely mentally ill. Like okay, I guess the whole thing with Frank and the end of the world was real in a way, but even before all that he struggles to find meaning in his life to the point of extreme distress. In fact, I imagine this preventing the end of the world scheme wouldn't have worked with someone ''sane''. The whole plot is like a suicidal person's power fantasy. Ask me how I know.
Anyway, I love this character. I cried when he died but also... it was kind of beautiful in a way. IDK I think I'm gonna need 5-10 years to figure out how to articulate it properly.
The film itself struck me as very Lynchian. Not just in the sense of surreal things happening in middle America (though that's part of it) but also for the heart at the center of it? Like, it's certainly got that 2000s edge to it, without dropping any f-slurs or anything, but at it's core it cares, just like Donnie cares and like Drew Barrymore's character cares about actually teaching her students something and how his family cares even if they can't articulate it. It's empathetic to its characters, it tries to understand them and their struggles and tries to get you to understand too. It's really not something I expected from this type of movie.
But also. This is probably already a viral social media post somewhere, but you know when you watch a popular thing and suddenly you see its fingerprints in so many other things you've seen? Yeah, this movie is definitely that. I was primarily thinking of Dark, the German Netflix show I was obsessed with at the end of high school/beginning of uni. One or both of Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese (creators of that show) saw this and were like "Okay wait, I want to do something like this but dig deep into the dysfunctional aspects and also into the time travel. And it needs to be set in Germany." And to be clear, I don't mean this as a diss towards those creators, I mean this in the sense that I recognize how someone could derive the concepts they did from this movie, speaking as an artist myself. It's actually a bit hard to articulate what exactly I'm seeing, becuase it's not even the big stuff like the time travel or the specific way it plays out (altho, the ending where the main character has to die for everyone else's happiness definitely makes me go hmmmm) I mean specific scenes and characters have a certain vibe to them, even if they ultimately develop differently in each piece of media.
There's probably more to say about time travel and trauma in fiction, but I would need to sit on it more. Maybe watch The Butterfly Effect (2004) where the main character also solves the problems by killing himself.
