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 Greenwich
Village youth and stories from Duchovny’s mother, House of D has a few moments of uncommon
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)

Another Sean Penn flick looms just around the bend — his adaptatin of Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer’s acclaimed bestseller, which I’ll be seeing next week. To stuff the archives in anticipatory fashion, a re-posted review of the little seen but highly worthwhile The Assassination of Richard Nixon, originally published upon its theatrical release in 2004. To wit:

The
Assassination of Richard Nixon tells the story of Sam Bicke, a
self-described grain of sand on the beach of America, and as such isn’t
destined to find the audiences of Ray,
The Aviator or Finding Neverland, bigger pictures with insurmountably larger
palettes. In fact, its rewards are so modest and reserved that it’s a small but
appreciated wonder that the film is seeing a theatrical release at all.
Nonetheless, anchored by an emotionally arresting lead performance by Sean
Penn, the movie stands as a gripping portrait of run-into-the-ground, working
class decency teased up into a furious rancor.

Inspired by a true story, the film is set in the early
winter months of 1974, when a rising tide of social inequities and injustices —
the fallout of the CIA-sponsored killing of Chilean leader Salvador Allende,
the stand of Russell Means and others at Wounded Knee, campus violence, and the
slow, creeping sprawl of the Watergate scandal — have come to make the very air
aspirant small businessman Bicke breathes seem oppressively thick and full of
bleakness. Sam believes that a man doesn’t give up his rights at a job, nor
should he have to lie to make a decent living, but he finds his values and
mores being tested in his new post selling office furniture and equipment for a
pop-and-son outfit.

There — goaded, hectored, humiliated and hazed, his
marginalization increasing tenfold every day — the socially awkward Sam slowly
falls out of favor with the few people in his life keeping him at all grounded,
namely his estranged wife Marie (Naomi Watts)
and would-be business partner, Bonny Simmons (Don Cheadle). President Nixon,
for him, embodies the sneering face of elitist and discriminatory contempt, and
so Sam eventually decides — in less a hatched plan than a followed flight of
fancy — to head to Washington D.C. and kill the commander in chief.

Mueller doesn’t fully connect the dots between Sam’s
desperate, choking personal uncertainty and anger and the full-blown mania of
his assassination plot (at just over 90 minutes this is a movie of
masterful mood more than psychological substance) and Cheadle and Watts aren’t
given enough to do. But Penn, in his angsty, swallowed depression, totally
sells this soul-crushing portrait of besieged civility. He takes what could
easily be tongue-in-cheek scenes of high-camp disaffection — strolling into a
Black Panthers office with $107 and pitching them earnestly on a more inclusive
mascot to draw in untapped Caucasian donations; awkwardly re-enacting a
potential “honest sales pitch” to an indifferent loan officer during a meeting;
and suffering the indignity of having to shave his mustache in order to look
more like a family man — and makes them heartrending mini-portraits of
uniquely American estrangement and alienation. Spare and unassuming, just like
its subject, The Assassination of Richard
Nixon doesn’t have the flash and pop of many of this awards season’s bigger
biopics. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a solid film, one of the better
character studies of 2004. (THINKFilm, R, 96 mins.)