Two kinds of paranoia: 'The Truman Show' and 'The X-Files.'

Commonweal, August 14, 1998 by Richard Alleva

Nevertheless, if The Truman Show suggests at least four levels of interpretation, why do I call it a bauble? This brings me to my basic reservation about the movie. The Truman Show is not refulgent: its wit, invention, charm completely fulfill the script's design but only fulfill it. This film almost never displays the sort of generosity of being that makes you want to see it not once but three or four times. Groundhog Day, to cite another comedy with an ingenious premise, had precisely this aesthetic abundance. You absorbed its ingenuity at the first viewing but at later screenings basked in the richness of the performances and the unflagging rightness of the dialogue and the visuals. Its texture transcends its ingeniousness. That's not the case with The Truman Show in which ingeniousness is all.

I'm a calm admirer of "The X-Files" on TV. Does that make me an oxymoron? I liked all the episodes that had nothing to do with Agent Mulder's search for the Unseen Forces that Control the Universe, but instead were autonomous little creature features with ingenious sci-fi updates on vampires, Loch Ness monsters, and doppelgangers, as well as a guy who could pour himself through keyholes and into toilet bowls. (Most gratifying when that particular predator got squished by an escalator.) The episode with Peter Boyle giving the greatest performance of his career as a clairvoyant insurance salesman was the best-executed piece of tragic fantasy I've ever seen on the tube.

Since the movie The X-Files is, alas, one more installment in the ongoing struggle by Mulder to prove that The Truth Is Out There (Mulder, meet Truman), the film started off on the wrong foot with me, but I would have liked it anyway if it had been done with the low-level, simmering intensity of the televised mother lode.

But getting onto the big screen seems to have convinced creator Chris Carter that he must emulate current blockbuster strategies. As screenwriter Paul (Quiz Show) Attanasio has observed, "So many films today address not the mind and heart, but the blood pressure...." The X-Files joins the pack: one rhythmless, unmagical stunt after another, practically no narrative coherence, Alien-type monsters, wisecracks instead of literate dialogue, and - worst of all - a soundtrack that pulverizes the audience with sheer volume instead of making its collective skin crawl. Only the opening sequence, involving an attempt to locate a bomb in a federal building has any real zip to it. The rest is noise.

Some of the sexual chemistry between the stars survives, but both David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson seem to register better on the small screen. His problem is his handsome face, which becomes inexpressive and blobby when magnified, while her vocal limitations are more apparent on large movie stereo speakers than in our TV sets. Nevertheless, Anderson still strikes me as the thinking woman's action heroine. Perhaps both actors will come across to better advantage when this galumphing movie is reduced to video.