Donnie Darko's paradise is lost.

By Andrew Repasky McElhinney

THE 113- minute theatrical cut of Donnie Darko, barely released by Newmarket Films in October 2001, was an emotionally lucid and tangentially philosophical teen love story informed by now-beloved pop culture tropes from the golden age of Reagan and shaped by the Clintonian sense of irony that dominated '90s cinema. Despite some "Indiewood" touches like CGI effects and a host of guest stars in supporting roles, the film succeeded as an innocent but intelligent excursion into the mysteries of human relationships, as well as an incisive investigation into the basic frailty that binds post-World War II upper-middle-class America. Ending with the most devastating and elliptical wave in the annals of motion pictures, it was an auspicious debut for its then-26-year-old writer-director, Richard Kelly.

In a knowing postmodern age sick with smarm, the theatrical cut of Donnie Darko maintained a great deal of dignity while being cuttingly satirical and viscerally hip. It suggested everything and divulged nothing. It captured, but didn't cage, its ambiguous reveries on the magic of first love, the realization of mortality, the awakening of sexual identity, and the power struggles inherent in adolescents assuming adult responsibilities. It commanded a palatable sense of silence and the unspoken while blending together a soundscape that was at once mournful, pointedly nostalgic, and lushly romantic. Donnie Darko was a cinéaste's intoxicating dream: pure and fragile poetry that became more potent with each viewing, profound because its mysteries were unanswered and therefore universal.

Alas, the events of Sept. 11, 2001, (and yet another grassroots campaign to keep kids out of R-rated movies) relegated Donnie Darko to near obscurity. Banished to a handful of screens nationwide and robbed of much of its promised advertising budget, the theatrical release failed to find an audience and quickly went underground, whispered about by those in the know and screened at midnight in large metropolises.

Yet like a first beau, Donnie Darko refused to be forgotten. Out in Hollywood, Kelly tried to make other films, all with projected million-dollar budgets in the high teens or low 20s. But several projects stalled in the studio system. He became increasingly dissatisfied that his firstborn was perceived by the industry as a "cult hit that didn't make money" and felt that it was this perception that prohibited him from making another movie. Unwilling to play the same film-financing game at a lower economic level but eager to milk his success, Kelly decided to spend five months embellishing and elaborating his three-year-old feature into Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut.

Like the longer "restored" Touch of Evil (1998) and The Exorcist: The Version You've Never Seen (2000), Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut has much more in it, but the result is far less satisfying. The music cues have been cheered up considerably and reshuffled, the soundtrack souped up with drones so there's always portent but almost no silence. Almost 20 minutes cut from the film have been reinserted to bloat the running time. Clocking in at 133 minutes, The Director's Cut is a cobbled-together mosaic rather than a cohesive delirium seductively circling in on itself. Once informed by '80s pop culture, the film is now infused with it. The knowing irony and general sense of cleverness that crassly lurked beneath the theatrical version now gallop about pompously. The end result is a belabored sci-fi mishmash with unharnessed performances from a gifted cast. At best it plays like an assembly cut. At worst it stumbles along, robbed of any ethereal beauty by metaphors made painfully explicit.

The Director's Cut is the self-sabotaging work of a petulant savant trying to remake the past according to his original intentions. In a recent phone conversation, Kelly confirmed this quixotic streak, expressing dissatisfaction that people didn't understand his film as "comic book sci-fi" and expressing concerns that compromises made to tame the running time to under two hours (after a 120-minute Sundance preview cut) resulted in an open, interpretive text. What bodes ominously for future Kelly projects is his lack of understanding that the film he didn't make is as important as the one he did. And yet, despite his defiance about having "his film" misinterpreted by "the audience," Kelly was unwilling to proclaim any version of Donnie Darko definitive.

It would be a foul tragedy for any Donnie Darko newbie to discover the movie in its new amorphous shape. The lingering sadness of the original theatrical version – which made viewers feel painfully alive and cosmos-connected – has been replaced with a new sadness, wherein a talented director has been caught in his own revisionist masturbation when he should have been making other films by any means necessary. The wave that suggested so much at one time is now an empty gesture.

Andrew Repasky McElhinney is the director of Magdalene (1998), A Chronicle of Corpses (2000), and Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye (2003).