“Things are getting strange, I’m starting to worry / This could be a case for Mulder and Scully,” sang that marvellous but short-lived band Catatonia on their album International Velvet. They were referring to a mysterious attraction or interaction between two people, not aliens or a psychic happening, but their usage shows that the protagonists of The X-Files had by then become a short-hand way of referring to something puzzling beyond the bounds of normality.
I caught a few of the old X-Files TV shows aeons ago, but not the subsequent movie (which came out a full 10 years ago, I see). The new, second film, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, takes it for granted that the viewer has some familiarity with what has gone before and that there have been developments beyond the simple fact of two special agents dealing with supernatural events or interventions from off-planet. But what happens to kick off the movie is also par for the course for this kind of story, so it’s not hard to work out what’s going on.
Because of some old disagreements with his one-time employers, the FBI, former special agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) has been keeping a low profile. This is visually reinforced by the fact that he now has a fuzzy beard. His ex-partner, the former special agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), is a medical doctor by trade (who knew?) and is now working in a children’s hospital. She is approached by the FBI to help them contact the elusive Mulder and get him back on the case, or at least this particular case, which has to do with a missing agent and a weird clairvoyant who has some — but not all –vital clues to the agent’s whereabouts.
So, duly, as one might expect, Scully gets in touch with her old partner and, again as one might expect, he goes through the ritual initial demurrals but then agrees to get back on his FBI horse. He doesn’t quite put on the traditional cowboy-movie white hat for this purpose, but he does soon shave off his beard, which is a relief.
This erasure, however, alerts the viewer to a fact that will snag the eye repeatedly for the rest of the film: the fact that Mulder (or Duchovny) appears to have less chin than he should, as if his face had been compressed from above and below, and that Scully (or Anderson) has more chin than is her fair due, giving her face the sense of vertical elongation. She’s a bit Brancusi that way, though thankfully her facial shape somehow evades the horsey look that makes it so hard to take Sarah Jessica Parker or Celine Dion seriously.
The visual contrast does help point up the difference between these two ex-partners, though they are apparently still romantic partners in some form (the ex-files?), and are now once again together on this case: he’s eager to believe in all sorts of weird-ass mumbo-jumbo to explain events that otherwise defy rational investigation and she’s more sceptical. But, it appears, she believes in God, while he doesn’t — he just believes (or wants to believe) in UFOs, ghosties and the like.
It’s a bit confusing, but we get the hang of it. No aliens this time round, though; instead, it’s a question of whether the man who has visions about the missing FBI agent is on the level or not. This question leads to much squinting of eyes and ruffling of brows as Mulder and Scully go through what are obviously very well-rehearsed postures of credulity and doubt. What is quite beyond any doubt is that Billy Connolly, as the clairvoyant ex-priest with the visions, is acting them right off the screen.
Fans of late 1980s and early 1990s stand-up comedy will remember Connolly as a viciously funny Scots comedian who tackled such hilariously grisly issues as “What if men menstruated?” (Cor — talk about flow — !) He got this role not, I presume, because of the personal history that revealed, a few years ago, he had been abused as a child — that would be just too tacky for words, especially given the part he plays in The X-Files: I Want to Believe. (Such plot points are horridly sensational, anyway, and are simply a form of narrative exploitation that unforgiveably numbs the viewer into caring less.) I hope Connolly got the part because he is now a real character actor with an inner solidity that he brings to the screen in a way few others can.
It has taken only a handful of TV and movie jobs (including a brief role in the Tom Cruise clunker, The Last Samurai) for Connolly to reveal this extraordinary subtlety and power. Here he has a difficult role — an ambiguous, complex figure whom we’re supposed, by a certain point, to tag as deeply evil. But he carries it off with immense conviction and builds the role into something more rich, human and sympathetic than anything else in the movie. His character becomes the centre of the film and Mulder and Scully are left as rather pale, stereotyped satellites.
The rest is a predicable plod through a join-the-dots plot; there’s an air of determinism about it that scuppers any real suspense, though some sequences are fairly scary and there’s the odd stomach-turning moment. This is the kind of film that rather too literally applies Chekhov’s dictum that if you introduce a gun in the first act it must go off in the third: here it’s a case of the character who smokes in his first scene will have lung cancer by the end.
I want to believe, but I can’t.