Donnie Darko (2001)

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.

Saved! (2004)

Director: Brian Dannelly

Cast: Jena Malone, Mandy Moore, Macaulay Culkin, Patrick Fugit

Have I Seen it Before: Several times. It’s one of my wife’s favorite movies, so it ends up being a movie I see roughly once a year.

Did I Like It: It’s charms cannot be denied. It could have been like any other number of teen comedies, especially of the era, but it manages to transcend.

Most teen movies are going to have the same general structure. Characters fall in and out of love. Misunderstandings abound. It all ends in a prom or other dance. To my mind, only John Hughes could eschew this format, and he only did so some of the time, and only when he tightened the focus of his adolescent epics to the timespan of one day. Even that most perfect of all movies, Back to the Future (1985) can’t quite pull out of that particular orbit.

So it is, too, with Saved. Many movies in the genre are content to hit those same beats and offer nothing new. They are quickly forgotten. What separates those special stories—like Saved!—that live within the trappings of a genre and manage to transcend things. For one thing, it’s the setting. While some version of Christianity is probably still prevalent in America, most can’t say they went to a private Christian academy for their High School.

Even I can’t say that, and I tragically got all of my education in the state of Oklahoma. Even if the setting is alien and interesting, the characters are familiar, or at the very least feel real. The writing is certainly critical to this quality, the performances cannot be ignored. Mandy Moore—long before she established her acting bonafides in NBC’s This Is Us—paints a villain that is both blindingly frustrating and totally human in her hostility. Mary-Louise Parker normally plays knowing and shrewd characters, but here plays largely oblivious but ultimately decent with the same level of believability. The relationship between Macaulay Culkin and Eva Amurri—despite coming from what on paper appears to be supporting characters—is the emotional heart of the film, as they are the true strangers in this strange land, but still manage to cut through any artifice they might have needed to survive only to believably wear their pathos on their sleeves. Other movies would be content to have cookie cutter characters lurching to something akin to life by actors either too bored or too unwilling to bring anything interesting to the proceedings.

That may be the secret to any film that exceeds expectations. Just tell a story using a familiar structure, in a completely unusual setting, with interesting characters. It must also be perfectly cast.

That easy, right?