Playing God (review)

Duchovny's ability to make you buy the almost unbelievable will serve him well throughout Playing God. Because the barroom surgery catches the eye of Raymond Blossom (Timothy Hutton), an organized crime boss with henchmen who read Fortune magazine, and Ray recruits Eugene as his pet doctor. (It's handy to have someone around to fix up gunshot wounds -- emergency rooms are so inconvenient, and they ask a lot of nosy questions in hospitals.)

Get past Duchovny's good looks, and you see that he's a terribly interesting actor. On the surface, his Eugene seems too together to have succumbed 1) to drugs and then 2) to crime. But Duchovny uses this apparent strength as Eugene's weakness -- it's his hubris and overconfidence that leads to his downfall. Unlike Eugene, Duchovny actually is smart and assured -- he gives Eugene a complicated emotional palette: bewilderment combined with a hunger for excitement and finally resignation to his chosen path as he confronts increasingly bizarre and farfetched situations, including an episode with two dumb hired guns who want him to resurrect a dead colleague and another emergency barroom surgery, this time on a pool table. There's also plenty of the sly, dry wit we've come to expect from Duchovny on The X-Files, a winking irony that lets you know he knows how silly this all is, but come along for the ride anyway.

In an odd way, Eugene reminded me of the character Duchovny played on Twin Peaks (yes, he was on Twin Peaks). As Dennis/Denise, the transvestite FBI agent, Duchovny treated with respect a character than could have been played strictly for laughs and gave him/her some pathos that made you see past the shtick. I think he's done that with Agent Mulder as well.

And, oh yeah, as Playing God demonstrates nicely, he looks great in a pair of Levis, too.