Post-Californication Duchovny disappoints in this middling made for tv type drama.
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| "I'm writing a book called How Do I Escape This Movie?". |
Why is it that inspiring true stories often make for
mediocre film treatments? Why do great
actors continue to participate in films like this that underutilize their
talents? And much like this year’s
highly overrated and strangely successful Heaven
is for Real, how do films tailor made for the Lifetime Network or Hallmark
Channel manage to ascertain theatrical distribution? These were many of the things running through
my head as I watched Louder Than Words,
the new film with David Duchovny, Hope Davis and Timothy Hutton.
The film tells the true story of the Fareri family
and untimely death of its youngest member, Maria (Olivia Steele-Falconer) after
contracting a rare case of rabies. Grief
stricken, the remaining family of two daughters and one son split apart at the
seams until Daddy Duchovny has an epiphany to build a children’s hospital in
honor of their daughter’s wishes to bring peace and happiness to hospitalized
children like herself. Timothy Hutton is
a contractor enlisted to pitch the sale, meanwhile the wife and husband’s
strained, distant marriage gradually is reunited as the broken family comes
together to help build the hospital.
Never once do we actually see this hospital save for some illustrations
which appear during the end credits, and the film jumps back and forth between
post-mortem voiceover narration from Maria regarding her life and death
interspersed between scenes of the now.
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| "Is this the part where I get drunk, do drugs and drive my annoying daughter away while I screw hot women. Wait. Not my show. Sorry. Back to boredom." |
Watching Maria, I kept thinking about Francis Ford
Coppola’s insufferable Life Without Zoe and
its precocious little heroine who seemed to be older in maturity and stature
than her parents. What’s meant to be an
endearing portrait of a child full of life simply comes across as cloying and
aggravates without even trying. What’s
more, Duchovny, Davis and Hutton operate on auto-pilot, given cues to cry or
provide stoic, blank stares.
The film
drags and when the inspirational familial reunion and strive to build this
hospital come about, it barely registers.
Incidentally, the film was made in 2013 but is only being recently
released, presumably after sitting on the shelf for some time. Reportedly production was halted by the
arrival of Hurricane Sandy for about a week.
It’s too bad for the rest of us, Sandy didn’t manage to halt this bland,
torpid slog from happening at all. What
could have been a heartfelt portrait of grief transformed into positive growth
and selflessness is just another made-for-TV drama, or in other words, a
complete waste of time.
-Andrew Kotwicki