To grow up in the early-to-mid 2000s and to care at all about watching movies meant to be very aware of Donnie Darko. It was a film that had such a hold on so many budding cinephiles much in the way that Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith had on so, so many of us. I was too cool for Donnie Darko though and felt as though “I saw through it.”
And so I ignored Richard Kelly films for almost two decades. I was vaguely aware of Southland Tales‘ troubled released. Something about the Cannes debut going badly, it eventually being reclaimed, etc. It is a story we have heard so much before that my teenaged indifference to Donnie Darko caused me to not care too much about the specifics of Southland Tales opinions, and I never even heard of The Box until recently.
The opportunity in 2023 to see Richard Kelly speak (at a screening of The Box) though seemed like an occasion to finally give Kelly’s films an honest appraisal as an adult.
I am delighted to report back that I have such a deep fondness for them. The key to Kelly’s films are their sincerity. You watch these films, and their high concepts are never approached at a safe distance. Kelly goes all in and asks the audience to trust him that it will be worth it. There is no ironic detachment. You get the sense watching these films that total emotional investment will be rewarded. It is a feeling that has been all-to-missing in too many big films in recent years.
3. The Box [2009]
I saw this film accompanied by an introduction and post-film Q/A with Richard Kelly, and I was struck by a tension in this film and Kelly in general. Kelly mentioned how valuable it is to leave some mystery and not answer all the questions and to trust the audience with that. That is an essential quality to almost all great films. And yet, the biggest weakness of this film is that after a stunning first hour that has you on the edge of your seat, the tension is slowly let out of the film like air leaking from a balloon as it reveals more and more of “what is going on.” We simply learn too much and get to look under too many rocks. There is a sincerity and genuine quality to Kelly films that is undeniably appealing, but it also seems to lead him to just show too much when our imagination would suffice. It is a tension present in all of his films but never more stark than in this otherwise fun film.
2. Donnie Darko [2001]
“Son, it breaks my heart to say this, but I believe you are a very troubled and confused young man. I believe you are searching for the answers in all the wrong places.”
If there is one idea in art that I am always a goddamn sucker for it’s that there is something really wrong with the world and its status quo and it is driving us all goddamn insane. Combine that with my love for investigating the teenager canon as an adult, and Donnie Darko is hitting so many quadrants of my interests.
Being a teenager and growing up in an extremely privileged bubble and having some semblance of awareness of the world is maddening in just a very particular way. Is it the most important battle people face on this planet? Of course not, but it’s a battle all the same. Richard Kelly’s mild phenomenon of a debut film explores that idea and much of the ensuing emotions and angst that comes a long with it. Are you important? Do you make a difference? Do you impact the world? Why do we yearn to know these answers so much to take on the world? Donnie Darko seemingly answers those questions at the end, but the answers aren’t nearly as important as the journey to figuring out the questions. That journey is fascinating to look back on.
1. Southland Tales [2006]
This is the movie you make when you earn some cache for making a cult film that made a ton of money on video sales. You make a sprawling epic about how fucked up the United States is, do a bunch of stunt casting, and make it as uncommercial as possible. You spare no expense on the production design for the bozo mode dystopian environment you create for the movie’s setting. You craft a sprawling epic with an ensemble involving dozens of characters. You address some of the most important themes of the day. The United States is a joke. The world is ending. And it’s all vaguely nonsensical when you try to make sense of it.
Yet, Richard Kelly is trying to make sense of what it feels to experience that very universal and somewhat timeless feeling. Simultaneously, he has made the most early-to-mid 2000s time capsule that there has ever been. I’m sure every moment in human history has been insane, but my formative years were the early-to-mid 2000s so it seems like a more significantly notably insane political and cultural moment, and it always felt like everything was connected and converging on each other. The Republicans are full-blown evil. The Democrats are feckless. (If there is even a meaningful difference between the two.) The patriotism is off the reservation. The military industrial complex, the war-mongering, the ballooning of the surveillance state and mass incarceration are accepted as facts not to be challenged. The distance between the rich, the politicians, and the celebrities seem more non-existent than ever. There is no real hope that anything can get better. Kevin Smith is seemingly really important for some reason. It truly felt like a wild moment for one’s brain to develop.
Of course, there has never not been a wild moment to come of age. But this movie speaks most of all to when I came into being, so this movie only becomes more and more fascinating for me.
The Reel World 