RITES OF PASSAGE
by Chris Dashiell

The teen horror film and the teen comedy are both about as shallow and cynically complacent as film genres can be. Donnie Darko, the debut film of writer/director Richard Kelly, explodes this phony teenage narrative by taking a serious, internal point of view - one that involves suffering and mental illness - and infusing it with a sense of humor that deepens the human element instead of trivializing it.

Set in 1988, the film tells the story of Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal), a high school student and borderline schizophrenic. An opening dinner table conversation introduces Donnie's family - his rebellious older sister (real life sib Maggie Gyllenhal) announcing that she's voting for Dukakis, to the chagrin of her parents (Mary McDonnell and Holmes Osborne). In the course of this comic prelude, we learn that Donnie has stopped taking his medication. Late that night, an eerie voice calls him outside to a neighboring golf course, where he encounters a monstrous bunny rabbit named Frank, who informs him that the end of the world is near. During Donnie's absence, a plane engine falls from the sky destroying his bedroom. Investigators can find no evidence of a plane in the area.

With its deft mixture of conspiratorial sci-fi, subjective horror, and broadly satiric Americana, Donnie Darko bravely sidesteps the temptations of cheap irony, creating a genuine mood of free-floating angst. The high school sequences, featuring Drew Barrymore as an unconventional English teacher, and a gym teacher (Beth Grant) who indoctrinates her class with videos promoting a fear management technique pioneered by a creepy motivational speaker (Patrick Swayze), are wickedly funny and subversive. Donnie falls for a new girl, a loner named Gretchen (an affecting Jena Malone), while a series of mysterious disasters hits the community - a water main breaks, flooding the school; a home burns down. As he struggles against the frequent visitations of the toothy, menacing Frank, who orders him to commit destructive acts, Donnie searches for meaning amidst chaos by exploring the possibility of time travel.

Donnie Darko is not a perfect film. Kelly's timing is less than razor sharp. His writing could use more subtlety at times. (Grant's gym teacher/fanatic, for instance, although amusing, is so caricaturish as to be jarring). Still, the picture is remarkably adept at touching some of the scary, secret places inside of us. It's obvious that the 1980s have a special significance for Kelly. The movie is sprinkled lightly with cultural references that evoke the strangeness of an era too recent to be legendary, too long ago to be familiar. Whether it's the Bush-Dukakis presidential race, or the sex lives of the Smurfs, the cultural humor in Donnie Darko half-conceals, like a palimpsest, the main character's sadness and dislocation.

Although viewers may understandably focus on the slippery plot mechanics of time travel, it seems to me that the theme itself is more resonant than the hows and whys of the plot. Time travel, while inherently absurd, expresses a longing to correct the irrevocable - it's the perfect expression of adolescent sorrow. It also evokes an adult regret of youthful heedlessnes. Donnie Darko, in contrast to the 1985 film Back to the Future (which it references), doesn't turn time travel into optimistic empowerment (i.e. pop entertainment) but lets it stand as the contradictory symbol it is - hope in the midst of fatalism, life within death, reality as Möbius strip.

Kelly's film is anything but escapist, demonstrating respect for the pain felt by the characters. Mary McDonnell plays a real and sympathetic mother. Even the ineffectual father seems genuine - not the stereotypical buffoon. Katharine Ross does an expertly modulated turn as Donnie's therapist - her combination of coldness and reluctant vulnerability is spot on. Most of all, Jake Gyllenhaal's performance in the title role flies in the face of expectations. Repression is in full force here. Donnie is sullen, withdrawn, seriously disturbed, and there's nothing very cute about it. But it is precisely this honesty, the gravity of a sad kid's point of view, that allows us to recognize ourselves within the film's hallucinatory inner struggle.

I would venture to guess that Donnie Darko's journey owes something to R. D. Laing and Thomas Szasz - insanity as survival in a crazy world. When Frank calls to Donnie it is ultimately a call to understanding, the only acceptable resolution to his screwed-up life. Therein lies the film's compassion - not presenting another young victim of society, but a person with choice and purpose, even through the medium of madness.

I can't help wondering if Donnie Darko's box office flop couldn't have been avoided with some intelligent marketing. It would seem that Newmarket, a small indie distributor (kudos to Drew Barrymore for helping to produce the film) couldn't get a grasp on how to sell such a unique stylistic experiment. It doesn't fit into the pigeonholes with which marketing departments are comfortable. Yet somehow I doubt that the movie's disappointing reception will prevent Richard Kelly from continuing to make good, interesting films.

The biggest hit in Mexican film history, Y Tu Mamá También (And Your Mother Too) is another subversive take on the teen film, albeit not as wise or inventive as Donnie Darko. The movie follows two stoners just out of high school, played by Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal (the kid with the attack dog in Amores Perros), on an extended weekend road trip with Luisa, an attractive thirtyish woman, as she runs away from her philandering husband. For a while the picture seems like Bill and Ted's Excellent Mexican Adventure. The boys are the spoiled children of rich, influential families. They act real dumb, and their interests consist of sex, drugs, and partying, to the exclusion of all else. Sometimes their antics are quite funny, sometimes just stupid.

The director and co-writer is Alfonso Cuarón, known best for two Hollywood films, A Little Princess ('95) and Great Expectations ('98). Here he tweaks the teen comedy film by inserting a deadpan narrator who explains relationships, spotlights minor characters, and drily comments on the Mexican political and cultural scene. He also switches the point of view from the stoners to Luisa (Maribel Verdú) and back, with the effect of satirizing the shallow minds of the boys while exalting the female. All this results in a rather strange mix of humor, psychological drama, and social satire. It doesn't really gel, but I have to give him points for even trying.

The raunch factor is high. One needn't look much farther than that to understand the film's popularity. The movie opens with a sex scene, and there are plenty of others to follow, along with the requisite dick jokes, and a scene where the boys lie on diving boards and jack off into a swimming pool. This anything-goes attitude is perhaps something new in Mexican cinema. There is none of the queasiness or hypocritical nods to repression one finds in American films.

Luisa ends up seducing both guys, for reasons that aren't clear until later. She also acts as a combination pal, mother, and mentor. I know that Cuarón wants her to be the movie's heart and soul, but his own partiality, already evident in previous films, towards a flavor of male prurience, undermines his good intentions. The film's approach to Verdú, despite her good acting effort, inescapably focuses on her gorgeous bod, and that tends to define her role. The film spends too much time identifying with the stoner duo's objectifying attitude to really honor the Luisa character as a person. In addition, the narration, which is amusing at first, becomes tiresome and pretentious, like something Cuarón tacked on to ease his conscience for making a teen sex comedy.

On the plus side, Y Tu Mamá takes some chances in the plot development later on, in ways that you don't usually see in films of this kind. It also makes interesting connections between social privilege (something an American film would take for granted) and the hedonism of its young protagonists. When all is said and done, the movie feels like a mess - Cuarón doesn't have enough of a light touch to make the elements come together - but you might want to give it a look anyway for its curious take on the teen sex genre, and its occasionally successful comic sensibility.

Monster's Ball, a film directed by Marc Forster from a story by Milo Addica and Will Rokos, demonstrates how expert direction and acting can elevate a movie above the limitations of its plot. The story, which has "social significance" written all over it, concerns a death row guard (Billy Bob Thornton) - inheritor through his ex-prison guard father (Peter Boyle) of a legacy of racism and denial - whose participation in the execution of a black prisoner (Sean Combs) leads to a tragic break with his own prison guard son (Heath Ledger). Circumstances of shared sorrow introduce him to the widow (Halle Berry) of the man he executed, with whom he falls in love, neither of them knowing at first the fateful connection between them.

This whole set-up, rife with melodramatic possibilities, taxes one's credulity, to say the least. And the screenplay sometimes fails to evade formula - the old bigot played by Boyle (boo! hiss!) being the most egregious example. But Forster chooses a style that downplays the implausibility of the plot elements while bringing out an emotional richness in the themes and characters. Instead of underlining the drama with music or emphatic cuts, the film takes a dry, laconic approach. The movie's visual texture is reminiscent of the best examples of 1970s American film - a gritty, semi-documentary feel, with the feelings submerged in a subtly detached objectivity that mirrors the main character's depression. Forster captures the plainness of small town life, the ordinary pleasures as well as the dreariness that borders on desperation.

Monster's Ball is a tale of gradual regeneration - a change so radical that it would seem miraculous if it weren't presented with such patience, such respect for the time it takes for people to move through their feelings. But the film's beauty is not just a matter of directorial style. The acting transforms the characters into seeming flesh-and-blood. Billy Bob Thornton is intense, quiet, and sustained in his approach to his central role. For us to believe that a man can transcend the hatred and ignorance he was bred in - that love can slowly change even a hopeless man - we have to be shown. Thornton shows us through the smallest details. He portrays the slow emergence of his character's softest place - it is not compassion, but need that compels him towards a better part of himself,. and he makes it feel true.

Halle Berry lends her character, a single mother barely coping with the pressures of life, marvelous conviction. No grandstanding here, no heroism. This woman is insecure, not very well educated, not as good a parent as she'd like to be. Berry holds back when she needs to, and her big dramatic moments are moving and authentic. The Oscar was fully deserved.

Although a sex scene between Thornton and Berry got a lot of press, the virtues of Monster's Ball are generally those of restraint. Issues of race are presented plainly, without moralizing. The long sequence of the execution, with interesting use of cuts to accentuate the event's dreadful nature in the midst of ordinary life, is an understated masterpiece. And give credit to the writers for an unexpectedly lyrical ending - tender, tentative, open-ended, like the hope it holds out.

©2002 Chris Dashiell
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