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'House of D': Gives itself the grade it deserves.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Alphabetically speaking, David Duchovny had a lot better luck with the letter "X" than he does with the letter "D."

Duchovny makes his feature directing debut with "House of D," which the former "X-Files" star also wrote. An unwieldy mix of sappy buddy movie and hormonally challenged coming-of-age nostalgia, the movie is set in Greenwich Village in the early 1970s.

Lions Gate Films

'House of D'

The verdict: That rare movie that gives itself the grade it deserves.

Director: David Duchovny
Starring: Anton Yelchin, Tea Leoni, David Duchovny, Robin Williams
Run time: 96 minutes
Release date: April 15, 2005
Rating: PG-13 for sexual and drug references, thematic elements and language.
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Which, of course, is where Duchovny grew up in the early '70s, thus suggesting at least some of this self-conscious mess is autobiographical.

The movie begins in the present, with Tom Warshaw (Duchovny), an expatriate American artist who's lived in Paris for decades. He's just missed his son's 13th birthday and his very French wife is le boiling mad. But Tom has his reasons, which are explained (sort of) in the lengthy flashback that makes up the bulk of the movie.

It's 1973 and 13-year-old Tommy Warshaw (well played by Anton Yelchin) lives in the Village with his mother (T�a Leoni), a recent widow. Still engulfed in grief, she gets by on pills and her unwavering love for her sometimes wayward son.

Tommy's best friend is Pappass, with whom he makes deliveries for the local deli. Pappass has the mind of an 11-year-old and is played, I'm sorry to say, by Robin Williams in full man-child mode, a la "Jack" and "Hook" and other films that shall go nameless.

With no adult guidance to speak of, Tommy turns to Lady Bernadette (singer Erykah Badu), an inmate inside the Women's House of Detention (hence the title) in the middle of the Village at Sixth Avenue and Christopher Street. She can only see him with the aid of a mirror shard, and her advice, though well-intentioned, leads to mixed results.

Duchovny does a credible job of capturing New York in general in its early "Taxi Driver" phase and the Village in particular in its "Next Stop, Greenwich Village" phase. He also gets solid performances from Yelchin, Badu, Leoni and Zelda Williams, Robin's daughter, who plays Tommy's uptown crush.

But the movie never gels. It lies there, flat and unconvincing, with little spurts of florid melodrama. And the coda, which is supposed to wrap up all the loose ends, elicits little more than a so-what shrug.

Further, casting Williams is an immense miscalculation, by the director as well as his star, who should know by now to steer clear of these self-indulgent displays. Actually, Williams isn't completely to blame. He does his wide-eyed/oopsy-scatological shtick well. If he were an unknown or maybe Tom Cruise "stretching" himself, his work would probably be widely praised. But he isn't, and it can't be.