The writing and directing debut of David ("Mulder") Duchovny is a coming-of-age film of mortifying immaturity. At its outset, Duchovny is an American artist living in Paris, narrating in that flat affect of his, telling us of a secret which he has harbored since his thirteenth birthday, and which he plans shortly to share with his son on the latter's thirteenth birthday. (In the extended flashback to the early Seventies, Duchovny's off-screen wife, Téa Leoni, will play the part of his on-screen mother: something for the Freudians to chew on.) At this juncture in cinema history, the casting of Robin Williams as a "retarded" janitor at St. Andrews School for Boys -- it's a period piece, remember -- gives sufficient grounds to dismiss the film from serious consideration, even without the face-deforming Nutty Professor dentures. Given the giggly delight taken in the comic material of asses, balls, boners, peepee, etc., over and above the "childlike" nature of the character, it's easy to see why Williams came to mind for the part. But that's exactly the point, exactly the reason he should have been expelled from mind. The bathroom humor bumps up against equally low sentimentality: the faceless black woman who imparts sage advice from solitary confinement in the House of Detention, three stories above street level; and the face finally given to her, three decades later, in the present-tense return to the States at the end. And, if anyone still cares by that time, the eventual revelation of the deep dark secret -- not to give too much of it away -- takes a couple of tons of chutzpah, coming within months of Million Dollar Baby. Duchovny, in effect, becomes the real-life equivalent of the string-bean mental defective in the Eastwood film, forever challenging Thomas "Hitman" Hearns to a punch-out. And Eastwood, then, would become the "Hitman." With Anton Yelchin, Erykah Badu, Frank Langella. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
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