The Badger Herald: ArtsEtc.: What’s Up, Don?

Updated Saturday, November 21, 2009, at 6:41 p.m.

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ArtsEtc.

What’s Up, Don?

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Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal, “Bubble Boy”) is different. Not different good, but you might say different bad. Unless, of course, you were his mother (played elegantly by Mary McDonnell, “Independence Day”), in which case you might simply shrug it off — boys will be boys. Jeffery Dahmer’s mother probably said the same thing.

Donnie Darko, the boy — sounding amazingly like a superhero, a neighbor notes — does really crazy things, the least of which include sleepwalking through suburbia, burning down homes and sleeping on golf greens. Then again, maybe Donnie’s simply doomed to this life. There’s something to be said about a boy whose bedroom is decimated by the fallen engine of a passenger jet that never existed — at least not in this space-time continuum.

“Donnie Darko,” the movie, does less to impress than the youth himself. This is a scrambled little tale about wormholes, bad dreams, the end of the world and time travel all shoved into the head of our hero (or anti-hero) Donnie Darko.

My best interpretation of the overtly ambiguous plot goes something like this: Donnie is visited by a bunny-costumed corpse from the future named Frank whose warnings seem to inspire the very events that lead to Frank’s death in the first place. So, Frank came back to do … what, exactly?

Bred in that underbelly of society called suburbia that modern film seems to abhor, “Darko” does little to distinguish itself from any other thinly-veiled attack on the restricting shackles of upper-class youth.

In a society feeling the tightening grip of recession, it’s becoming infinitely harder to feel remorse for the drug-czar’s daughter’s addiction in “Traffic” or the society-induced mental instabilities of a prep school teen in “American Beauty” and “Donnie Darko.” Pop a few Prozac, but let us know when you’re out of a job and home seems to be the mentality. Then we’ll listen.

GRADE: B-