Director: Richard Kelly
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone, Maggie Gyllenhaal, James Duval
Have I Seen it Before: I don’t think you get through college in the early `00s without having seen it.
Did I Like It: Seeing the film nearly twenty years after my first viewing, I’m still digesting (and probably will until I soon record an episode of Beyond the Cabin in the Woods) it all, and the only thing I can confidently say as I type these words is that I’m not sure if I ever did, but I am glad I did not watch the director’s cut of the film here.
To read descriptions of that longer version online, any ounce of subtext was sucked out of the film and we are left at the end knowing precisely the why and how of the jet engine and how Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) fits into the whole mythos.
And that would have been terrible. The film might very well be operating solely on its affectations, but the best way I can possibly observe the film through that lens is that those affectations give the film a certain charm. Removing all of the subtext makes it an exceedingly intricate time travel story.
Now far be it for me to look my nose down on an exceedingly intricate time travel story, but at a certain point if you’re having to rely on long passages from a book that doesn’t actually exist, you may have focused less on a work of cinema and veered into a powerpoint presentation. It’s not the same thing.
But enough about what the version of the film I watched wasn’t, how did the theatrical cut hold up? It might be a film that’s singularly built for people in their twenties, and while the lilting Gary Jules cover of “Mad World” still has a haunting quality, and Donnie is never more heroic than when he calls Patrick Swayze’s preening self-help-guru-with-a-secret the Anti-Christ, the whole thing doesn’t hit like it used to. As you get older, it may very well be harder to appreciate new art. I’m just a little disappointed that art I used to enjoy is hard to hold onto.