X-FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE takes the bold and very smart step of eschewing the CGI excesses of the last X-FILES movie, and of all the other fantasy/sci-fi/adventure flicks of summer. Instead it gets back to the heart of what made the series so engrossing. Not the things that go bump in the night, not the lights in the sky that might be more than fireflies or shooting stars, not the infinite variations of what forms life, human and otherwise, might take. No, this is all about the relationship between skeptical doctor Dana Scully and her erstwhile FBI partner Fox Mulder, whose philosophy is best summed up in the poster that hung on his wall at the agency and still does in his home office where he clips articles about the world’s oddities– the eponymous “I want to believe.”
Scully has left the FBI to work at Our Lady of Sorrows hospital, where her current case is a tousle-haired moppet named Christian who is in the last stages of an aggressive condition. Questions of when to give up on the lad, and when to take aggressive, painful courses of treatment dovetail nicely with the film’s other story. An FBI agent has gone missing and the agent in charge, played by a somber Amanda Peet, instead of giving up, she has persuaded the agency to ask Scully where they can find Mulder, since disgraced and persecuted by the FBI, and gone underground long since. All will be forgiven if only he will help find the agent by working with the defrocked, pedophile, and chain-smoking priest, Father Joe (a wooly Billy Connolly), who has been receiving visions of where she is and what is happening to her. Not clear visions, not visions with a location or a phone number, but enough for Peet’s character to also want to believe.
It’s no surprise that Mulder snaps at the bait. It’s no surprise that he insists that Scully join him on the investigation. It’s no surprise that they quickly fall into their old roles arguing opposites side of the paranormal. What is a surprise is how Chris Carter, the man behind the X-Files from the beginning, has avoided the pitfall of making this film a hit-parade of the greatest hits of the X-Files mythos. Instead, he has masterfully re-imagined the ways Mulder and Scully have grown as partners in life as well as work. Their relationship gives the story its emotional core and its intensity, even as Carter tosses dying children, random body parts and a serial killer at them. While she struggles with when to give up on Christian, Mulder has no problem sticking with Father Joe’s visions, even when credible suspicions surface. Is she really struggling with her own loss of a child, is he still searching for his lost sister, abducted by aliens 30 years previously? When Father Joe tells Scully to not give up, it’s the key to it all, but not for the obvious reasons.
David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson reprise Mulder and Scully with a bittersweet wisdom that age and their characters shared emotional adventures have given them. He is still boyishly ironic, she is still maternally acerbic and the dialogue revealing that is crisp, even when Mulder waxes loquacious about precognition, or the pair discuss the philosophical implications of what each suspects about Father Joe, clairvoyance, and their own relationship. Aside from the mystery/suspense element of the film, the dynamic of an adult relationship between two people who know each other to the core is as refreshing, as challenging, as it is rare in cinema. Also rare is the film’s forthright consideration of theology and it’s place in the larger consideration of the paranormal. Scully’s observation to Father Joe, a man she loathes unrepentantly and very obviously, that perhaps his visions aren’t coming from the God he beseeches with every breath to forgive him, bespeak her own religious convictions, the which oddly don’t conflict with her general views on the paranormal. The direction by Chris Carter gets it exactly right with an economic elegance that is as moody and dark as the tale being told. There is even a shout-out to the quintessential X-FILES image of flashlight beams scouring the none too friendly darkness. The weakest part of the film is an awkward bit of conversation designed to introduce Skinner, the pair’s old boss from their FBI days. As sharp as the rest of the writing is, the clunkiness of the dialogue that brings him back is like a smack in the face. On the other hand, the way the film introduces the iconic theme music is nothing short of puckish. The way it fleetingly, tantalizingly has a familiar face pass Mulder in the all at headquarters hearkens back to all that was most engrossing and most maddening (in a good way) about the first couple of seasons. As for the mystery that sets the action in motion, it mixes a creepily credible medical premise with motivations that make the resulting mayhem far more disturbing for the nobility of those motives gone so very wrong. And it mirrors nicely, and with an equal creep factor, Scully’s other case, the medical one involving the moppet.
THE X-FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE is a thoughtful excursion into the darkness that Scully so wants to leave behind. And it is Scully’s whose final word is also the final moment of the film, one word that sums up all the beauty and pain of life and the full, even joyous acceptance of both. It is moment that, the like film, is profound without being pretentious, and deeply moving without being maudlin.
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