Young love often clashes, though not always with this much velour.

David Duchovny, in his ongoing quest to emerge from the shadow of Fox Mulder, makes his debut as a writer/director with House of D, a coming-of-age story that tries REALLY REALLY HARD to be heartfelt and meaningful and instead achieves only cloying sentiment. Where are the shape-shifting alien assassins when you need them?

Actually, considering everything his young protagonist goes through, I'm surprised Duchovny didn't throw in aliens, the Cigarette-Smoking Man, the fat-sucking vampire and that whole creepy in-bred family for good measure.  (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, don’t feel bad; just nod and smile.) Tommy's father is dead, his mother is depressed and clingy, and he spends his days delivering meat and hanging around outside the Women's House of Detention with his best friend, a middle-aged retarded man who’s trying to thwart Tommy’s attempts to grow up. And then things get bad. Not just for Tommy, but for the audience as well.

It's a shame, because there are some strong elements here. Tommy could be an interesting character, a good kid struggling with adolescence on top of all his other problems. There's a budding and refreshingly angst-free romance that plays out very sweetly. Most of the comedic scenes work, making the movie seem, at times, like a kinder, gentler, high school Animal House.

Discarded script pages littered the floor. Just not enough of them.

Robin Williams is surprisingly restrained, though not particularly affecting, as Tommy's best friend Pappas.  Anton Yelchin as Tommy and Tea Leoni as his unstable mother do fine jobs with what they have to work with, which is a seriously over-written script with clunky, obvious dialogue and plot points that mount to the point of ridiculousness. Too many scenes seem utterly pointless. None of the characters feel like real people in real situations. Duchovny's direction, too, is hit-and-miss. He has a nice touch for comedy but he's a little too eager to push the poignancy button.

Duchovny also appears as the adult Tommy, narrating the story to his wife and son as an explanation for why he's such an irresponsible jerk. I knew we were in trouble within the first few minutes of the film; Duchovny's voice-over tells us that he's like a safecracker in a movie listening for the tumblers as he tries to unlock the safe of maturity that had slammed shut on his manhood (ouch!) when he was thirteen. Huh? That painful reach for metaphor is the low point, but while the rest of the movie has some nice laughs and a few moments of genuine emotion, for the most part it's mired in self-indulgent schmaltz.

Scully would have never put up with it.

Gorilla Pants rating: 1 out of 4 bananas