Thursday, May 12, 2005
Duchovny's coming-of-age movie wanders all over the place.
By ROGER MOORE
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
"House of D," David Duchovny's directorial debut, is a sweet but inept coming-of-age tale set mostly in 1970s Greenwich Village.
Duchovny plays an ex-pat painter living in Paris, who uses the occasion of his son's 13th birthday to unburden himself about how his life was changed by events on his own 13th, back in 1973.
There's lots of fun flashback detail, scenes of hijinks in a boy's school, the cool teachers (Frank Langella) and Tommy's first love. Young Tommy (Anton Yelchin) is a punning young artist saving up for a cool new bike.
He's not doing that alone. He has a delivery job that he shares with Pappas, a mentally retarded man played by Robin Williams. They tote their deliveries and save their tips, which they stash beneath the windows of the local women's detention center (the "House of D" of the title).
Weaknesses
The insipid passages overwhelm the picture; the ways the kid struggles to keep his depressed mom (Mrs. Duchovny, Tea Leoni) and Pappas happy and sane. He has a lot on his plate, and when he tries to find time for a girlfriend (Zelda Williams, Robin Williams' daughter), it all threatens to come tumbling down.
But that's what being 13 means to the adult Tommy, that first girlfriend, that first series of adult decisions and mistakes.
Tommy gets romantic advice from an Allman Brothers-singing inmate (Erykah Badu) in that local House of D, a device so corny it plays like autobiography. The resolution of Tommy's problems is just absurd.
Still, the nostalgia is on solid ground, had the casting been a little more on the mark. Young Yelchin, the pretty-boy son of Russian figure skaters, is as bad in the big emotional moments as Williams is at overplaying mentally challenged.
The plot and tone are all over the place, making this pretty much an aimless exercise, meandering through an imaginary and very hip Greenwich Village childhood. And all that wandering plays as if Duchovny still thinks "the truth is out there," if only he can keep filming until he finds it.