Conspiracy Theory
Starring Mel Gibson, Julia Roberts and Patrick Stewart
Written by Brain Helgeland
Directed by Richard Donner
I know guys like Jerry Fletcher, Mel Gibson's whacked-out protagonist in Conspiracy Theory. Maybe they aren't so overtly insane, maybe they don't keep padlocked coffee containers inside their padlocked refrigerators to avoid poisoning by their enemies. But they believe that black helicopters watch us from the skies (there is supposed to be a secret United Nations air field in Butler County, Ohio, near my hometown of Cincinnati), and they believe the CIA sold crack to street gangs in Los Angeles and that the Elders of Zion control all international monetary transfers. Spurred on by the raging paranoiac floodwaters of the Internet and the need to find patterns in the violent chaos of human existence, these would-be Jim Garrisons are either permanent residents of the lunatic fringe, or they're right. Conspiracy Theory posits the latter premise. It's a clever idea for a film, and screenwriter Brian Helgeland must have had goosebumps when he came up with it. But then a couple of 500-pound A-list actors came and sat on the project, and Warner Brothers brought in hack Hollywood insider Richard Donner to direct, and Helgeland's clever idea was buried in an avalanche of rewrites and test screenings. Conspiracy Theory is a tragic example of how quickly a good idea can become a mediocre film once it falls into the wrong hands.
The picture begins promisingly enough with a clever opening credits sequence that promises hip, quirky action, Get Shorty meets Taxi Driver. The cabbie in question is Jerry Fletcher, a jumpy, mostly harmless crank who regales his passengers with tales of dark conspiracy and the interconnectedness of every sinister event in world history. NASA is trying to kill the President by causing earthquakes from the space shuttle. Jerry Garcia was a CIA agent. The Vietnam War was fought over a bet between Howard Hughes and Aristotle Onassis. You get the picture. Fletcher publishes a newsletter called Conspiracy Theory, which he faithfully mails to his five subscribers. He also worships from afar Justice Department attorney Alice Sutton (Julia Roberts), whom he saved from a mugging several months back. Jerry's life as a bottom feeder seems set until one day a couple of thugs kidnap him, take him to a deserted warehouse (kidnappers in the movies always take the hero to a deserted warehouse), tape his eyes open and subject him to torture at the hands of sinister Dr. Jonas (Patrick Stewart). Apparently one of Jerry's theories is true, though Jerry has no idea which one, and Jonas wants to know who else knows about it. Jerry bites Jonas on the nose, escapes and winds up in the care of Alice, who is understandably skeptical- until all of Jerry's subscribers turn up dead.
There's good stuff here, and Mel Gibson does a lot with the plumb role of Jerry, a man to whom cocaine would function as a sedative. His performance is at times comic, at times touching. The best scenes in the film are the quiet ones, particularly in Jerry's apartment, which is the cramped exoskeleton of his paranoia. It's filled with file drawers, books, manifestos, clippings, and wall to wall posters of assassination victims and revolutionary heroes. When he brings Alice to the place for the first time, we are touched by his shyness and frantic sincerity as he tries to make her coffee and fails because he can't remember the combination to the canister. This scene shows the intelligent character film buried beneath the veneer of money and star-power. If the film had focused on the relationship between Jerry and Alice, and if it had created a plausible conspiracy within a labyrinthine plot, it might have worked.
But the script is derivative and formulaic. The crucial torture scene is lifted from Marathon Man. The plot is pinched from The Manchurian Candidate (though the having the characters themselves point out this comparison keeps the movie from crossing the line from homage to rip-off). The nature of the premise leads you to believe that you're in for a joy-ride into the right-wing fantasy world of shady government agencies, freemasons, Bavarian Illuminati and the Tri-lateral Commission. But the script never opens up into these larger possibilities- it just ambles along on its well-trodden path, never reaching a crescendo or shocking us with unexpected twists. And the love story between Jerry and Alice is a complete contrivance, unnecessary to the plot, illogical in terms of the characters, but present because the producers think we want to watch Gibson and Roberts get the thigh-sweats for each other.
As mentioned before, Gibson's performance mostly works. Roberts does what she can with the role, but her character is underwritten and held prisoner to the plot. It's fun to see Patrick Stewart step off the bridge of the Enterprise to play a villain, but he never really develops any sort of menacing presence. The supporting performances are perfunctory and forgettable. Richard Donner fashions a few interesting scenes, particularly Jerry's drug-induced delusions during his torture and escape, but more often then not the action scenes go nowhere and the ending looks phoned-in. For all the cash funneled into this picture, it's a surprisingly flat and uninspired piece of work. It was probably doomed from the moment Gibson signed on. There is the seed of a good idea in Conspiracy Theory, but it has been strangled by the weeds of Hollywood packaging. If you see it, enjoy it for its few quiet moments, and for the many and varied crackpot theories it tosses around. And if you have a copy of The Catcher in the Rye on your bookshelf, you may want to get rid of it- it could come back to haunt you.
Grade: C+
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