Writer-director Kelly cuts the Gordian knot of 2001’s sleeper Donnie Darko with this extended cut. It doesn’t all quite hang together well enough to explain the original enigma – why does a vision of a humanoid rabbit named Frank pull Donnie Darko (Gyllenhaal) out of bed just in time to miss a jet engine crashing into his suburban Virginia bedroom? Is teenage Donnie a paranoid schizophrenic? Is he somehow living in two parallel universes? Is he a Christ figure? A superhero of some kind? Having a dream? Having a hallucination? Moving backward in time? Or all of the above? Let’s just say that the director’s cut involves pages from The Philosophy of Time Travel, a book by desiccated hermit Roberta Sparrow (TV actress Patience Cleveland, who died last May), a lot of cheesy double-exposed eyeball imagery, and a rainstorm. Better, the extra scenes flesh out the family relationship and make more explicit the film’s interest in spiritual reasoning.
This article appears in August 20 • 2004.