Fire Will Walk With It

At the end of August of 1992 I had one of the most memorable film experiences of my life, and it took place in a completely vacant and I must admit very lonely movie theater in Bowling Green, Kentucky. It was actually audience wise the most desolate opening night I have ever attended, and the film was none other than David Lynch’s masterful Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. I still remember the isolated awe I felt in that deserted theater that night and the absolute confusion as to why no one else was there to feel it with me.
Lynch’s controversial big screen prequel to his celebrated television series is now rightly viewed by many as one of his major works…a disturbing and powerful masterpiece that is among the most memorable and distinctive films of the nineties. Of course this wasn’t the case in 1992 as Fire Walk with Me was subjected to the most pulverizing critical and popular reception David Lynch had ever received, it even made the reception Dune got look positively glowing. It was viewed by many as the last unnecessary chapter of a series that had run its course, and was considered beyond passé before it briefly appeared and vanished in that late summer of 92.
Of course time has shown Twin Peaks to be one of the great television series and it’s arguably more beloved now than it was when it was originally on the air. Anyone who was around when it originally aired can attest to the baffled and angry reaction many people had to the series second season, a season which is now rightfully viewed as one of the most important in television history.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that first viewing of Fire Walk with Me lately…specifically that empty feeling I had for a month or so after, as I watched people who gleefully celebrated the end of something I had held so dear. It was a frustrating thing because I couldn’t even argue for the film because so few had bothered to see it…and I must admit that it was as depressing as hell.

I’ve had that same exact feeling again recently due to the reception that The X-Files: I Want To Belive has received. Now I’m not arguing that Carter’s new film is in the same league as Lynch’s…it isn’t and it doesn’t try to be, but the two do share some remarkable characteristics though that are more than worth noting.

They are both challenging and extremely personal works from filmmakers attempting to continue two of their most iconic works, both of which coincidentally started out life as small screen productions. They are also two works not afraid to deliver exactly what WASN’T wanted by many of show’s core fans. Imagine Fire Walk With Me as the quirky dark comedy or I Want to Believe as the big budget monster movie many fans wanted but neither Lynch nor Carter were interested in delivering what was expected, even if a possible career set-back was a real possibility.
The films were also both treated with disdain by the studio’s obvious non-belief in them. If you think I Want to Believe has been handled badly, go back and check on the non-campaign for Fire Walk with Me. The fact that I even managed to catch it in a theater is nothing short of miraculous. There is also the feeling with both that many people who weren’t fans of the series’ were gunning for them, and nothing Lynch or Carter could have delivered would have been good enough.

Finally, the main thing that perhaps connects Fire Walk with Me and I Want to Believe is that they were delivered to a time period that simply didn’t want them. The X-Files is as irrelevant to as many people in 2008 as Twin Peaks was back in 1992 and it took guts for Lynch and Carter to make their respective films in the first place. Time has thankfully caught up with Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me now, so much so that it might be hard for a lot of younger fans to imagine there was ever a time when people thought Lynch’s show was anything less than a classic, but trust me that time did occur.

I’ve been extremely depressed by the reaction granted to I Want to Believe and especially by a lot of people’s callous dismissal of The X-Files in general, a series that meant a lot of things to a lot of different people and had a huge impact on our popular culture in general. I can only harbor the hope that the film and series will one day find its audience again much like Lynch’s show and film did…in fact I am counting on it. 2008 might not be a good year for The X-Files popularity wise, but I am willing to wager money that ten or fifteen years from now many of its most vocal opponents will be lining up to and singing its praises.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and The X-Files: I Want To Believe are two vastly different works, but they are both extremely personal and uncompromising films made by two very genuine filmmakers who clearly had something meaningful they wanted to say. To paraphrase something I once read on Lou Reed’s Berlin, these simply aren’t works made for their time but are more importantly works for all time…so perhaps I shouldn’t be depressed after all.

"Hell does not always look like Hell"

“A wretched Tarantino rip-off, this trashy thriller aspires to flip black comedy but manages only moments of unintentional hilarity…Duchovny doesn’t so much sleepwalk his way through the film as remain in a coma.”
-Liese Spencer, Sight and Sound-

“Playing God is David Duchovny's first starring role, unless you count Showtime's Red Shoe Diaries episodes. It seems crafted to match his new stardom on The X-Files, and it does: He has the psychic weight to be a leading man and an action hero, even though his earlier TV and film roles might not have revealed it. And he also has a certain detachment, a way of standing above the action, that stars such as Clint Eastwood and Robert Mitchum have.”
-Roger Ebert’s Original 3 Star Review-

It’s funny when you find out that a personal favorite film of yours was almost universally hated by both the critics and public when it was released. I actually just recently began to comprehend how much I should probably consider Andy Wilson’s 1997 feature Playing God starring David Duchovny, Angelina Jolie and Timothy Hutton a ‘guilty pleasure’ but since I really don’t believe in that whole idea, I will just celebrate it as a film I like very much…a hyperkinetic B-movie that has always reminded me of the kind of vehicle Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney might have made together early in their careers with one devastating girl thrown in for good measure.

David Duchovny had certainly done a lot of work before his iconic and much loved Fox Mulder came into view on The X-Files, but by 1997 Mulder had became virtually all the talented actor was known for. Playing God was to mark Duchovny’s breakthrough role on the big screen and his first major step away from the character that had made him a household name. Unfortunately Playing God, a miserable failure financially and critically, did neither and it is often overlooked by even the most rabid Duchovny and Jolie fans…a mistake as it is a key work for both of them.

Playing God marked the American and big screen directorial debut from British born Andy Wilson, a man who had previously only had his hand in some British television (Cracker being one series) and a handful of music videos (with the band Underworld being most prominent). Wilson directs Playing God like a love letter to the kind of modern neo-noir genre that began to populate American cinemas soon after Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs first began to make a major impact. Bloody, brutal and using every trick in the book (from slow motion shoot-outs to classic car chases), Playing God is very much a film aware of the trappings of its genre but it delights in playing directly into them, making it a much more watchable and successful venture than some of the more pretentious offerings from the period.

Working from a script by relative novice Mark Haskell Smith, Wilson’s Playing God is a successful hard boiled adrenaline ride fueled by three incredibly charismatic performers that is only marred by a last act that has studio interference written all over it. I have always suspected that if Wilson was able to revisit this film for a Special Edition DVD and reinstate the original darker ending then the picture would have a shot at becoming a small cult film instead of the footnote it is usually labeled as.

Future Traffic Producer Laura Bickford reportedly put a lot of time and energy into Playing God, a project she was excited about in the mid nineties but one that would cause her to nearly reconsider her career all together (according to Sharon Waxman’s book Rebels on the Backlot) and that makes sense as Playing God does have a compromised feel about it (part of which is due to the fact that the film's original backer Columbia Pictures stepped out just two weeks prior to shooting leaving the production in total distress before the camera's even rolled) but I will stand behind my opinion that Playing God is a very successful and tough modern noir that despite the flawed last act works as well as any other ‘Tarantino knockoff’ from the mid to late nineties you care to name.

Playing God’s plot, one that allows its leading man to be a heavily flawed and easily corruptible junkie, is an intriguing one. Centering on a destroyed doctor named Eugene Sands who has lost his license due to having a patient die during a routine operation because of his addiction to Phenolcitrate (synthetic heroin), Playing God begins after Sands saves a man’s life who has been shot at a club where he buys his drugs. Sands is then brought fairly willingly into a life of crime by a hot shot schemer with big ideas named Raymond Blossom (Timothy Hutton) and by Blossom’s smoldering girlfriend with a big secret named Claire (Jolie).

As clever as the set up is for Playing God and as great as everything is from the Trip-Hop inspired soundtrack (a real keeper) by Richard Hartley to the kinetic cutting style of former Coppola and Roeg collaborator Louise Rubacky, Wilson’s film is basically a showcase for three extremely charismatic and distinctive stars…it’s the kind of film that helped shape Hollywood…Playing God is an old fashioned Star driven piece and Wilson clearly realizes and plays into this making his film a much smarter production than it might have been in more experienced hands.

Even though he has an Oscar sitting on his shelf (for Robert Redford’s superb Ordinary People), Timothy Hutton is almost always overlooked as one of the great actors of his generation. I’ve always though that if Playing God would have found an audience back in 97 then Hutton’s career would have went into major turn around mode, as his delightfully over the top work as Raymond Blossom is a real blast…the kind of bombastic Molotov Cocktail performance that you typically only see an Al Pacino or Eric Roberts delivering and Hutton really sells it. He’s great as Blossom and it’s an infectiously fun performance to watch.

Roger Ebert would write in his positive review of the film that, “And the surprise in the movie is Timothy Hutton, as the villain. I sense the curtain rising on the next act of his career. Having outgrown the sensitive-boy roles that established him (Ordinary People, Made in Heaven), he returns to his dark side, to notes he struck in such films as The Falcon and the Snowman and Q & A. He shows here what sets the interesting villains apart from the ordinary ones…Hutton creates a character instead of simply filling a space”. I agree completely…Handsome, charming and sinister to the max, Hutton’s Blossom is one of the most memorable villains of the nineties and the fact that he makes you like him in the process makes the performance even more resonate.

Angelina Jolie was at the dawn of her significant career in 1997 and with Playing God she asserts herself as the most fascinating American actress of her generation. Never mind that she is essentially just playing ‘the girl’ here, Jolie is fantastic in the film and like Marlon Brando at the beginning of his career it is impossible to take your eyes off her. She would call the film "very rock n roll and fun and loud and say-what-you-want-to-say, dress wild and love wild", which of course goes a ways towards describing her performance in the film itself. Co-producer Melanie Green was quoted as saying that Angelina has "the wisdom of an old soul...the grace and style of an older woman" but in Playing God she is vitally young and in her role as "the girl" she manages to project that certain vitality that can only happen in your twenties incredibly well.

Within a year a Playing God’s release, Jolie would strike gold with her devastating turn as doomed model Gia Carangi in Gia and she would be the highlight in Playing By Heart, a film that included everyone from Sean Connery to Gena Rowlands to Duchovny’s X-Files co-star, Gillian Anderson. Playing God would mark the last time Jolie would be cast as just “the girl” and it remains one of the most important if little seen of her early roles.

Wilson’s film belongs to David Duchovny though. Featured in nearly every scene and playing Sands with the kind of understatement and subtlety not seen since the likes of McQueen, Newman and Redford in the seventies, Duchovny is fascinating as the addicted doctor who is “always looking for a new way to fuck up.” Showing off his natural humor while still managing to interject a lifetime worth of hurt into Sands, Playing God should have been a major coup (as his follow up film, the wonderful and endearing Return To Me should have been) for the talented actor but most critics (Ebert and a few others accepted) didn’t seem to know what to make of Duchovny’s un-showy performance. It’s a captivating and extremely interesting performance that I think will surprise people who have always put off watching this film due to the reception it got.

Playing God appeared a couple of weeks before Halloween in 1997 and was out of the theaters by the time the trick or treater’s were finishing up their yearly bag of candy. Making less than five million at the box-office and being savaged by the critics, Playing God proved to be one of the biggest bombs of the year and it failed to make David Duchovny into the movie star a lot of us have known for a long time that he should be. The film faired a bit better in Europe but not much and it appeared quietly on home video in the early part of 98 where it didn’t find much of an audience either.

Duchovny was reportedly unhappy with the final product due to the studio forced ending (he admitted later that it was "not the movie I wanted to make" and that "the character is redeemed because it's a hollywood movie...I didn't want to redeem him, but there were other people involved.") and Wilson went back to working in British television shortly after but Playing God is a film that I’m not guilty about loving. It’s a classic genre piece told in a distinctly nineties style and I haven’t tired of revisiting once a year or so in the decade that has passed since it was first released. I’d love to see what the film was supposed to have been originally, but I must admit that I’m really happy with what it became…even if it is a lonely club to be a member of.

For more of my images from Playing God or to resize any of the above photos for your own needs, press any of the above pictures to be taken to my new Zoomr page.

The X-Files: I Want To Believe (An Ambitious and Personal Final Chapter)

***Some Minor Spoilers Follow***

Chris Carter’s The X-Files: I Want to Believe is one of the most personal American films of the decade; a flawed but ambitious work that is surprisingly poignant and haunting in several unexpected ways. It is also a film that dares to not be what many long time fans of the show will want or expect. I Want to Believe is clearly the film Chris Carter wanted to make, a cold and somber work that bravely risks alienating fans of the show who were wanting another fun creature filled ride into the unknown.
Coming over five years after the series finale of The X-Files, I Want to Believe is remarkably chilly production that finds its iconic lead characters Fox Mulder and Dana Scully in an iced over snowy winter investigating the disappearance of a missing FBI agent. Carter’s film trades in the show’s celebrated paranormal aspects for a subtle and very human mystery centering on ideas of stem cell research and black-market organ donations. The film isn’t entirely missing elements of the supernatural as there is a visionary psychic helping on the case, but Carter is more interested here in the idea of faith and the nature of science’s place in spiritual issues rather than things that just go bump in the night.

Considering the film is a relatively low budget affair, I Want to Believe is an exceptionally striking looking production thanks to cinematographer Bill Roe, a man who shot dozens upon dozens of the original show throughout the later seasons. The snow and ice covered plains are shot beautifully by Roe and Carter handles filming the landscapes equally well, bringing an intelligent sense of how to fill his often wide-open frames in nearly every shot of the film. Direction wise, I Want To Believe is an obviously well-thought and lovingly compiled film and visually it is nothing short of exceptional. The legendary main theme by Mark Snow is also used to great effect for the most part in the film and his new score as whole works exceedingly well. Kudos to both Carter and Snow though for knowing when to supply the film with just the right amount of silence though, a smart move that allows the score to become even more effective than perhaps it would have been.

Cast wise, Duchovny and Anderson both shine in the roles they both made so famous. Duchovny is especially moving in essaying the transition from the bearded and frozen over Mulder at the beginning of the film to the rejuvenated and believing figure at the end. It’s probably the swan song to one of the great characters of the past couple of decades and Duchovny gives a beautifully wearied and poetic performance that ranks along with the best work he has ever done. The always reliable Anderson is just as good, especially in a moving scene between her and the fallen priest that is as chilling as it is profound.

New to Carter’s world are an excellent Amanda Peet as the younger FBI agent Whitney who calls Mulder back to the bureau and a disappointingly one-dimensional Xzibit as her partner, who is one of the film’s weakest links. Peet and Duchovny share a couple of extremely effective scenes and she delivers her most confident and assured work since her undervalued turn in Igby Goes Down several years back. The best co-starring performance of the film though is given by Billy Connolly as the pedophile priest Crissman. Connolly is frankly astonishing in the part and his performance is among the most effective and eerie of the decade as he projects a damaged and at times sinister vulnerability that is hard to shake.
While Carter indeed doesn’t deliver the film many of the show’s fans have been asking for he does at least fill it with affectionate nods to the series, including a number of quick cameos and visual references. He also adds a late period appearance by one of the show’s most notable characters that allows for probably the film’s most emotional moment.

I Want to Believe isn’t a perfect film by any means. At times the main mystery seems a bit too telegraphed and tired and it’s debatable as to whether a side plot involving one of Scully’s patient is necessary as it is underwritten and at times uninvolving. Carter also missteps a couple of times in his attempts to lighten the mood, especially in a what could have been a clever scene involving photos of George W. Bush and J. Edgar Hoover, a moment spoiled by an unnecessary music queue. The film also fails to hit some of the expected emotional notes it goes for involving the relationship between Mulder and Scully, as though Carter had trouble knowing exactly where to take them as a couple. I actually found Carter’s often maligned direction here to be more effective than his usually more celebrated screenwriting. The co-written with Frank Spotnitz screenplay finally just feels a little under-developed and it hurts the film.

Still, problems aside I Want to Believe is a successful production that works as both a fine finale to the series and a hopeful attempt at restarting it. It is perhaps not what many of the show’s original series fans will want but it is what its creator wanted to deliver, marking it is as one of the most surprising and bravest films of the decade even though it isn’t always completely successful.
Even though everyone involved wants to continue the series with more films, Fox has effectively killed it. Releasing it with a zero ad campaign a week after one of the most successful films of all time, I Want to Believe barely scraped the five million mark on its opening day. Ironically the little cult series with a small but dedicated audience that became an international phenomenon is now back to where it started, which is perhaps the way it should be but for those of us who wanted many more of these it is a bitter disappointment.
Chris Carter marks himself as an exceptionally brave and personal filmmaker with The X-Files: I Want to Believe. It would have been easy for him to have made the fantastical monster movie that many fans expected but instead with I Want to Believe he delivers a heavily symbolic film ripe with religious imagery that suggests the ideas of faith and belief at the core of The X-Files were much deeper than just accepting the possibility of aliens and the paranormal.
I have seen several message boards postings lately asking that Carter apologize for not delivering the film many fans of the show wanted, I would say that for making a brave film obviously very close to the heart, Chris Carter and the cast and crew of I Want to Believe have absolutely nothing to apologize for.