THE X FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE
2008
This is a ‘stand-alone’ film deriving from the extremely popular TV series which ran for nine years were simply a reasonably entertaining murder thriller with psychic overtones.
Needless to say (but still saying it), fans of the series will want to see this story no matter what. Whether they will be happy that, while Mulder and Scully (David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson) are centre-screen, this is not a film about FBI or government paranoia and mysterious aliens. It is a here-on-earth investigation of disappearances and a grim conspiracy that has to do with medical practice and malpractice.
Scully is now a doctor at a Catholic hospital and concerned about a young boy with a rare and deteriorating brain disease and whether he should be permitted to die or to undergo a number of radical and untested surgical procedures. Mulder, by contrast, is living, more or less, as a hermit. Scully is asked to bring him back for an FBI investigation which involves a former priest (Billy Connolly) who claims to have visions about the case. Mulder, with his keen intuitions about intuitions becomes interested. Scully is the rationalist, the sceptic. The FBI (Amanda Peet and Alvin ‘Xzibit’ Joiner) are on the side of the sceptics but keep getting drawn into the search for the missing women.
The surgery issue (and stem cell research) is intercut with the investigation, making the two issues closely connected in themes, especially about the efforts to prolong life. Mulder pursues the hunches and leads to a final confrontation. Scully has to question her presuppositions and the possibilities that there could be more realities than those that science allows. This centres on the truth or fakery of what psychics say and do. The film takes great interest in what advertising says is ‘supernatural’ (which it is not because that is the area of grace) but which, to be technical, is ‘preternatural’, experiences beyond the normal.
Set in a wintry West Virginia (though filmed in Canadian mountain locations), the film has action and chases but it also has a great deal of discussion about issues.
Scully works at a Catholic hospital where the Board is headed by Fr Ybarra (Adam Godley). The film makes him a very serious character and, from Scully’s point of view, quite unsympathetic, especially in discussing the decision about whether to go ahead with the boy’s surgery. This is dramatised in Scully’s discussions with Fr Ybarra, with the boy’s parents and their decision not to go ahead with the operations as well as in her impassioned speeches at the Board meeting where the hospital management support the decision against the surgery.
The screenplay introduces stem cell research since the surgery requires results from such research. In fact, the screenplay does not speak about stem cells from embryos or adult stem cells. And, in further fact, when the malpractice at the centre of the mystery and experimentation with dogs and with humans is exposed, the audience’s emotional response is against what is, as expected, characterised as the work of a ‘modern Dr Frankenstein’.
It can be added that nuns appear in the hospital but the producers have not checked out what contemporary nuns in hospitals actually do, whether they walk in solemn pairs down corridors or what they wear in terms of habits modified from older days – this presentation of nuns is over thirty years out of date.
Writer-director Chris Carter, who created the original series, says that his story ‘involves the difficulties in mediating faith and science’. This involves talk about belief in God or non-belief, Scully ‘cursing God’ for allowing children to be born with fatal diseases. Mulder, somewhat off-handedly but seriously, asks her whether she thinks God is unable to sleep because of this. Mulder is open to faith beyond the senses, at least. The title of the film, taken from a poster used in the series and shown here in his room, states in capital letters, ‘I WANT TO BELIEVE’.
Billy Connolly plays a former priest, Fr Joe, a convicted paedophile, with quite some restraint instead of his sometime over-the-top style, is a convicted paedophile priest, guilty of penetration of 37 of his altar boys.
Derogatory remarks are made about Fr Joe. Scully is particularly antagonistic and judgmental and Mulder makes a few of his offhand sardonic remarks about the priest. But the screenplay is actually leading its audiences into some more serious reflection on these issues and the consequences.
Fr Joe has been suspended from his priestly functions and lives in an institution for offenders. He experiences psychic ‘visions’, stating that he did not ask for them but that God had given them to him. It seems to be an opportunity for him to make some kind of atonement for what he has done. The question of what attitudes people should take towards offenders is a key one. By the end of the film, with some complications about the identity of the central criminal in terms of being one of Fr Joe’s victims – and some ‘mystical’ connections made between deaths and the saving of lives – this introduction of a paedophile priest is not a mere opportunistic device but something more substantial. It seems that underlying the character of Fr Joe in an X Files story we can find some of these deep issues.
