With young star and Pavel Checkov-to-be Anton Yelchin‘s long-delayed Fierce People just around the bend, what better time to swell the rolls with this only slightly redacted look at David Duchovny’s directorial debut, House of D, originally published upon its theatrical release in 2005? To wit:
X-Files
star David Duchovny, House of D, is a
loose-knit coming-of-age tale for which perhaps the best word is baffling.
Just: baffling choices, baffling incongruities, bafflingly touching scenes
followed closely by ones just as bafflingly recondite, half baked or otherwise
not fully formed. House of D will
find a limited warmhearted reception in American art house audiences with a
special fondness/tolerance for New York-set “filmic postcards” where no
knuckles of indulgence are ever rapped. Others, however, will find the movie
too tedious and its emotional rewards too minuscule to bother investing their
time.
After opening on an American ex-pat artist living in Paris,
the bulk of the film centers on young Tommy (Hearts of Atlantis’ Anton Yelchin), a bright and facile private
school teenager who nurses a crush on a sweet girl, Melissa (Zelda Williams,
daughter of Robin), and enjoys using his French instructor’s tenuous grasp of
English slang to his humorous advantage. The death of Tommy’s father has left
him alone with his well-meaning but emotionally crippled mother (Téa Leoni), so
he spends as much time as he can out of the home. Tommy runs delivery routes
with his best friend Pappas (Robin Williams), a 41-year-old mentally
handicapped man who is also an assistant janitor at his school. Tommy and
Pappas hoard the bulk of their delivery savings in a buried tin can just
outside a women’s detention center (hence the title); Tommy one day strikes up
a conversation through the bars with an unnamed lady (Erykah Badu), and
eventually comes to value her warped advice when his life further unravels.
Duchovny is, off camera, a pretty smart guy, something you
might have gleaned from any number of interviews with him — where, given their
collective self-conscious preening, actors frequently come off as a bit dim —
or even just his screen performances. So as a writer’s piece, House of D has a few brief passages of
literary mellifluousness, particularly an auspicious opening narration which
compares blooming adolescence to old Hollywood noir flicks, and talks about
“the safe of life” opening up at age 13. But as directed, the film never really
coalesces into anything more than a bunch of jumbled musings starring the same
faces.
Reportedly based on unfastened recollections of his own
Village
tenderness, such as when Tommy fishes from the toilet several of his mother’s
cigarette butts in an instinctive play at holding on to her memory. Too often,
though, issues of logic and pacing belie the film’s sort of itinerant artistic spirit. It
makes absolutely no sense for Tommy and Pappas to bury their money blocks from
their brownstone apartments (Pappas has an alcoholic father, but there’s no
reason Tommy couldn’t hold it), and I’m not sure I understand the merits of the
delivery boy buddy system, other than its narrative convenience. House of D, in other words, feels deeply, intrinsically personal,
but it lacks a universal cohesiveness. Too many of its narrative elements seem
utterly arbitrary (Tommy is an aspirant artist whose connection to art we
barely see and never understand), dashed off descriptors and twists in a
headlong dash toward raw, uncalculated emotional expression. (LionsGate,
PG-13, 95 minutes)