X Files Movie: For X-Philes Only

Early in The X Files: I Want to Believe, Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), long ago demobbed from the FBI, are back in the Bureau’s headquarters, waiting outside a closed door to take a meeting with their former colleagues. They glance at a wall portrait of the President … and for a moment we hear the first six notes of the whistled theme that cued ’90s TV watchers to the weekly spookiness of The X Files. Hmmm. Could George W. Bush be an alien — or an alien abductee? A yes to either question would explain so much.

On the other side of the door is a photo of J. Edgar Hoover. Staring at it, Mulder and Scully just shrug, but that’s unfair to the FBI’s snoop extraordinaire, the vicar of voyeurs, the patron saint of the TV show’s belief that under every bed, in every closet or out in a pumpkin patch is something very scary that could bring America to its knees. And even if it doesn’t, it’s worth tracking down, keeping in a locked drawer. Knowledge is power, and belief in the dark side spurs you to gain that knowledge.

The TV show, which ran from 1993 to 2002, and for its first five seasons or so artfully explored all crevasses of paranormal fiction — psy-fi — could have had Bush and Hoover as its patron saints, its Janus heads. They expressed the show’s continuing, contradictory catchphrases: “I Want to Believe” and “Trust No One.” Each Sunday night at nine, the series would juggle the concepts of blind faith (the need to find meaning and pattern in the random events of the universe) and paranoia (which, as any neurotic would tell you, is just common sense accompanied by theremin music). Hip and weird, and reveling in the emotional voyeurism at the heart of any detective show, The X Files spanned the Bill Clinton Era — or, roughly, the time between the two attacks on the World Trade Center — when America’s political and social life was so placid that we had to invent our own monsters. Then 9/11 exploded in our faces, and the horror shows were on the nightly news.

In the new movie, directed by X Files creator Chris Carter and written by Carter and series producer Frank Spotnitz, Mulder and Scully are back, but so much has changed that they seem the aliens. For an obvious start, the stars are older. Anderson, 25 when the show premiered, will hit 40 next month, two days after Duchovny turns 48. In the new movie, he’s bearded and wasted-looking, her profile is more hawklike; and the camera traces the lines the intervening years have written on their faces with the odd intensity of Nicholas Cage running his finger over the route on an ancient map in National Treasure.

A subtler anachronism is the seriousness with which Mulder and Scully take their work and themselves. On TV, Duchovny settled quickly into his role as an obsessive plodder; Anderson’s gravity served as a rebuke to all the actresses her age who spoke in baby talk and aspired to nothing higher than Baywatch. The movie continues that dark, quiet tone, which means that today’s moviegoers will have to forgo expectations of wisecracking heroes and snarling psychopaths, and to take seriously a couple of anguished folks who look and behave with the tired tenseness of anchors on C-SPAN.

Which is why, this weekend, perhaps four times as many moviegoers will take in The Dark Knight on its second weekend as will see Mulder and Scully on their first date in six years.

Sins of the Fathers

A female agent has been murdered, and her colleague Dakota Whitney (Amanda Peet) has enlisted Mulder and Scully to help her find the killer. One clue comes from visions of the murder claimed by Father Joe (Billy Connolly), a Catholic priest who had been convicted of sexually abusing dozens of altar boys decades before. In line with their old TV selves, Mulder is sympathetic to the man’s assertions, Skully skeptical. “Do you believe him?” an agent (rapper Alvin “Xzibit” Joiner) dismissively asks Mulder, who replies, “Let’s say I wanna believe.”

(Spoilers Ahead)

No audience member will be surprised to learn that Father Joe’s visions are accurate: they lead Mulder to more than one dead woman and another in jeopardy. A Russian cabal has been kidnapping women and using parts of their bodies to graft onto ailing comrades. (It’s great to have the Russkies back as movie villains, since screenwriters were running out of ways to cartoonize the Arabs. Carter often portrayed Russians as cold, tough bad guys, ruthless and soulless.) Turns out the boss of the enterprise had been a child victim of Father Joe’s. Did the actions of the predator priest turn this kid into a monster? Do the sins of the Fathers infect future generations?

Mulder has his own mission: to see if Father Joe’s second sight can locate Mulder’s sister Samantha, purportedly abducted by aliens when a child and never seen again. (Actually, we know from the series’ final episode that the girl died in 1987, after undergoing experiments that produced enough Samanthas to keep Mulder addled for years.) And Scully has reasons to get back to her day job, as a surgeon at Our Lady of Sorrows Hospital. She hopes to find a treatment for a boy whose cancer the hospital authorities think is incurable. (X-philes will recall that, in the shank of the series, Scully bore a child, William, through in vitro fertilization; the sperm may have been Mulder’s. The boy in the hospital would be about her son’s age.)

Hoping to assure today’s moviegoers that they don’t need do the homework of consulting the TV show’s labyrinthine “mythology” of its many back-stories, Carter has underlined that this is a stand-alone story; indeed, the film feels like a middling two-parter from the old show. But surviving fans will want to know that Mulder and Scully — those platonic pals whose personal and professional relationship was an essay in heroic withholding, up there with the half-century foreplay of Fermina and Florentino in Love in the Time of Cholera — are shown [spoiler alert!] in bed together. They certainly talk like two people who have been dancing into and out of each other’s arms for ages. “That stubbornness of yours,” Scully says, “it’s why I fell in love with you.” Mulder: “It’s why we can’t be together.”

And while there’s no Cigarette Smoking Man, and the Lone Gunman dweebs weren’t invited to the reunion, Mulder and Scully must be heartened by the brief return of [spoiler alert!] their old boss Skinner (Mitch Pileggi). Just as important is the film’s location in the Great White North. The first five seasons of The X Files were shot in British Columbia, which was a good fit for a show that wanted to leave its fans with a chill. In its pensiveness and good manners, its immersion in desolate wastes, its search for eccentricity, even dementia, behind the blandest Anglo face, the show was devoutly Canadian. For the movie, which is set mostly in West Virginia, Carter took the crew back to Vancouver for one of its snowiest episodes ever.

Today’s target demographic was barely sentient when the show was in its mid-’90s prime. The kids want thrills, and I Want to Believe offers some good ones, though of an old-fashioned variety. The chases aren’t Batmobile-vs.-Joker-truck, they either involve a snowplow or are on foot. And the shock scenes are closer to the murky threat of Val Lewton’s ’40s horror movies than to the slice-and-dice explicitness of the Saw and Hostel slasher series. Early on, a young woman takes a dip in a public pool, then gets out. Submerged in the pool is a man with a predatory smile. As the camera moves in on him, an air bubble escapes. Nice frisson. And there’s one shot that sent people at a critics’ screening out of their seats. We’ll just say it’s a tribute to that old Z-movie classic The Brain That Wouldn’t Die.

The movie has manifold pleasures for the show’s fans, as much for the interplay of Mulder and Scully — the soulmates who were afraid to become lovers — as for a story that concentrates on human, not astral, malfeasance. But for the uninitiated, The X Files: I Want to Believe may seem as musty and forbidding as one of those dank secrets that Mulder and Scully were forever digging up from some backyard, or fetid swamp, or their own aching hearts.