The Films of Richard Kelly

Donnie Darko, the debut film of Richard Kelly, had been working its way up my Netflix queue, and arrived at the top coincidentally when his second feature, Southland Tales, was released on DVD. I recently took a look at them both. My reaction: he has a great visual style, and has some mind-bending plots, but he's far too undisciplined to be taken seriously.

Donnie Darko, which I gather has some sort of cult status, is a mostly entertaining picture about a troubled teen who, with the aid of a large, sinister rabbit, discovers a wrinkle in time. It's one of a long line of films about the slow torture of being a different sort of child in suburban America, and scores some nice points (the send-up of self-help programs, with Patrick Swazye at his smarmy best, is well-done if not obvious). I saw the director's cut, which includes pages from a book called The Philosophy of Time Travel, which for those who have lots of spare time, can provide clues to just what is going on. I think I understood what was going on--Jake Gyllenhaal's Darko is communicating with a guy in a rabbit suit from the future, and then goes back in time and makes a self-sacrifice--but I can't be entirely sure.

Donnie Darko is clear as glass compared to Southland Tales, which on the surface is a screed against the Patriot Act and Homeland Security. Set during the 2008 election, the film concerns an action star who is the son-in-law of a Vice Presidential candidate (shades of Schwarzenegger, I suppose) and twin brothers, one who is a cop and the other is, well I'm not sure. Then there's a porn star who has gone into the mainstream, and is somehow involved with a group of neo-Marxists who are protesting the crackdown on civil rights. Time travel is also involved in this film.

At the beginning of the film, I was engaged in the vision, if not the convoluted plot, but about halfway through I found the whole thing tedious. Kelly's dystopian vision is nothing particularly new under the sun, and he ladles on the quirkiness until it becomes self-parody (he has a Pynchonesque tendency to name characters in whimsical fashion). He makes some interesting commentary on how celebrity and politics are intertwined (I watched this the same day that Dateline on NBC devoted a whole show to Britney Spears), and the encroachment of the porn culture into mainstream entertainment. But can we really take a film seriously that has Jon Lovitz as a bad-ass cop? By the way, by my count there are four current or former Saturday Night Live cast members in this picture, and three of them taste hot lead. If you've ever had to endure Cheri Oteri and her annoying cheerleader character, you'll enjoy watching her get blown away.

Kelly needs a good story editor, or a producer who calls his bluff, and says, "What the fuck is this supposed to mean?" Even his actors didn't get it--Curtis Armstrong, in the supplemental materials, describes the script as "impenetrable." He sure said a mouthful.