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.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)