This Damn Review is Finally Done!

It's no surprise that The X-Files: I Want to Believe poses more questions than it answers and disappoints as much as it satisfies. It raises pertinent questions like, Can a lady really be considered 'alive' when her severed torso is attached to someone else's head? Just what are Mulder and Scully's living arrangements? Why would Scully tell Mulder about the FBI's need for his assistance if she only wants him to not get heavily involved? This is the brother of Samantha Mulder we are talking about! Does Scully not know her own boyfriend? And what the hell kind of name is Dakota Whitney? Was Jennifer Whitney taken?, without fully answering them which in The X-Files world is as tantalizing as it is frustrating and, indeed, IWTB has as many elements that are engrossing (Mulder and Scully!) as elements that are superfluous and dull (Dakota Whitney and Agent Drummy).
The x-file, itself, is egregiously thin. It is a convoluted mess of organ transporters, abducted women, Russian medical experiments, gay lovers, psychics, pedophile priests, yada, yada, yada. While the premise is X-File-y enough - women being targeted for their O-type blood tissue; a man with a psychic connection - the plot is never developed to the point of inspiring dread for the victim or confidence in the investigators.
After agent Monica Bannan is brutally abducted in the teaser, there is never any clue for the audience that she might be in real danger because we have little idea about what her captors could be up to. Classic X-teasers inspire dread by showing us without explaining what the bad guys are up to; the Peacocks bury an infant; Donnie Phaster cuts the hair of a dead girl; Clyde Bruckman foretells a young couple's death. The shock of the teaser makes us want Mulder and Scully to right all the wrongs. IWTB's teaser is so generic the CSI guys could just as easily swoop in.
Father Joe, Billy Connolly in a game performance, cold-calls the FBI with news that he has a 'psychic connection' to the abducted agent. Since Dakota Whitney, of the FBI and leading the charge to find the agent, has no reason not to believe him, she decides to call in Mulder (“out from the cold” as Roger Ebert put it) to draw information out of Joe. Father Joe also happens to be a convicted pedophile which is enough to compromise his credibility for everybody (including Scully) except Mulder, naturally.
I always found with The X-Files that my willingness to see Mulder's point of view was to show how hard he had to work to convince everybody around him (again, including Scully) that what he was talking about was plausible. In early episodes, when Scully was having none of it, Mulder had to work pretty damn hard. Remember 'Squeeze'? Scully got a glimpse of the career she was missing out on by working on the X-Files when violent crimes invites her to help them solve the Toombs murders. When Mulder makes the scene and instantly knows Toombs's deal, he has to convince Scully of the veracity of the X-file, not just her shrill colleagues. (One of which is played by Donal Loague!)
In IWTB, Whitney is out of options and clearly has the hots for Mulder (‘I think this is a longer conversation.’ She suffers eventually) so the struggle for Mulder to convince everybody isn't there. Carter also fails his own lead character when he never shows on film that Father Joe is, in fact, the real deal. At the end of the film Mulder is left to prattle away about how Joe redeemed himself by giving up his life just as one of the victims was having hers restored. Carter should have proven the connection on film with cuts between Joe dying, the villain dying and the victim coming back to life because, as it happens in the finished film, Mulder just looks like a kook.
As tertiary characters go, Dakota Whitney (Amanda Peet) and Agent Drummy (Xzibit) are the outer limits. Peet and Xzibit mean so little to the plot and are so uninteresting compared to Mulder and Scully, it is a shame that production shelled out for name actors when nobodies would have sufficed. Not that Peet and Xzibit are terrible; it is just that Whitney and Drummy have no depth. Whitney's crush on Mulder comes off as more pathetic than endearing and when she meets her maker, we feel nothing other than that she had it coming for calling Mulder 'Fox' only seconds before.
Carter and Spotniz miss an opportunity to make a foil team for Mulder and Scully; one that is by-the-book and results oriented where our heroes are improvisational and focused on a more undefined yet larger goal. As it happens in the movie, Father Joe, Mulder and Scully all come to the end of their stories with no help from these two.
It is Mulder and Scully's relationship that is the heart beat of the film, but, while Carter indicates that they are clearly a couple, fails to brief us on the progress their relationship has made since we last saw them. Scully tells Drummy that "Fox Mulder and I no longer work together" but, in a later scene, she shares a big cozy-looking bed with him so these two must be doing something together. Confusion further reigns in Scully's two scenes at the house Mulder has holed himself up in - she does not so much as take off her coat to make her look like she might live there yet she insists, in one of the two touching scenes where our heroes talk frankly about their relationship, "We are two people now, who come home at night."
Plot holes aside, Duchovny and Anderson inhabit these roles so fully that they manage to create an affecting mini-drama about how two very obsessive people attempt to make a life together. When Scully says "We are two people now..." it is only one side of the story. She is through with their former life and when Mulder counters with "this is who I am, this is what I do" their impasse stings. Duchovny and Anderson deserve significant credit for infusing their scenes together with a lived-in and fond intimacy without sacrificing the restrained quality of their exchanges; i.e. what made the series great. The juxtaposition of what is professional and buttoned up with what is clearly love is what made their pairing so tantalizing and it isn't lost here.
IWTB isn't great nor is it terrible but if this is the best that Carter and Co. can do with The X-Files then I am ready to let go of my desire for a sequel. I just don’t know what Chris Carter is talking about anymore. Carter says, in the July 2008 issue of Rue Morgue, “I came to think of The X-Files as a kind of search for God – that was a very personal thing that I wasn’t even aware that I was doing,” and the Aug. 1 issue of Entertainment Weekly quotes Carter as saying science has become “a religion of sorts.” Indeed, IWTB is chock full tests of faith for characters but they never come off as particularly resonating. I always had the feeling that the more spiritual elements of the later seasons were an attempt by the writers to create some meaning and gravity for the unruly mythology not just for the audience but for themselves so that the writers would have a course to steer it on and the audience would not turn away in frustration. As we all know, it didn’t work out and the ambivalence I felt towards the show’s spiritual themes crept into my experience with IWTB.
I always wanted to believe that The X-Files was about questions of where to put your trust and what and who to have faith in. Mulder and Scully learn to trust and to put their faith in each other and it is all they can depend on in the end. This is a profound lesson for two people who spent nine-ish years (or up until the point William was conceived) denying themselves some simple happiness and stability in favour of working towards some nebulous goal. This conception of The X-Files is decidedly a bit more down to Earth than Carter’s notions of what The X-Files is about but I believe it is one that still has room for grand issues like governmental conspiracies and alien invasion. Carter’s notion of Mulder and Scully’s quest being one for God does not help them much when the proverbial shit hits the fan. IWTB, while making the Mulder/Scully struggle prominent, still features too much of Carter’s over-blown notions of faith/religion/God/whatever – notions that don’t fit into with what I like to think of The X-Files as being. And, I guess, this is where I have to part ways with Mr. Carter though I wish him well. After 15 years or so, neither one of us are enjoying the same show anymore.