Cell order
In 'House of D,' Duchovny is prisoner of his own device
by JEFF SIMON, News Critic
4/29/2005
HOUSE OF D
STARRING: David Duchovny, Robin Williams, Tea Leoni, Anton Yelchin,
Erykah Badu DIRECTOR: David Duchovny RUNNING TIME: 97 minutes RATING:
PG-13 for language THE LOWDOWN: Expatriate artist in Paris remembers
his tough coming-of-age in Greenwich Village in the 1970s.
It's literally true that, for many years, New York's Women's House of
Detention had such an accessible location in Greenwich Village that its
inhabitants, if they wanted, could keep up a running dialogue with the
neighborhood residents from their cells. There is, for instance, a
well-remembered Tom Wolfe piece from the mid-'60s about it - early
evidence of one writer's love of social classes in collision.
"House of D" is what David Duchovny has made of it - a sweet, lovable
little movie that presents his debut as cinematic one-man band: actor,
writer and director, all in one movie. He is, if anything, a bit more
talented as a writer and director than he is as an actor, where he is
not exactly, uh, Sean Penn.
It doesn't make "House of D" much more than a standard coming-of-age
tale with some surprisingly bitter plot twists.
It begins with Duchovny, as an artist in Paris, remembering his village
childhood, circa 1973. We flash back to his younger self, played rather
wonderfully by Anton Yelchin, listening to his troubled and recently
widowed mother crying herself to sleep.
The movie itself seems almost French in its determination to let
pungent details tell the story - the cigarette butts his mother leaves
in the toilet, for instance, which become, in his mind, tear-jerking
talismans of his mother's increasingly troubled life. Duchovny's wife -
the tragically underemployed Tea Leoni - plays the boy's mother.
The kid goes to parochial school where Frank Langella is the kindly
priest headmaster and Robin Williams is the retarded (still the 1970s
word) school janitor. And he tells his troubles to an inmate of the
house of D played by Erykah Badu.
To many, the sight of Williams in his sentimental "heartwarming" mode
is enough to cause a sprint to the exits. He's actually quite innocuous
and appealing here, which if you add it to Langella's subtle
performance and Yelchin's and Leoni's moving ones indicates a pretty
talented movie director on the case.
It's a sweet, little film, evincing a filmmaking talent that will, no
doubt, be more artfully employed the next time around.
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