DIRECTOR
Richard
Donner
SCREENWRITER
Brian
Helgeland
PRODUCER
Joel Silver
CINEMATOGRAPHER
John Schwartzman
MUSIC
Carter Burwell
EDITORS
Kevin Stitt
Frank J. Urioste
CAST
Mel Gibson (Jerry Fletcher)
Julia Roberts (Alice Sutton)
Patrick Stewart (Dr. Jonas)
Cylk Cozart (Agent Lowry)
Stephen Kahan (Mr. Wilson)
Terry Alexander (Flip)
Alex McArthur (Cynic)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 129m
U.S. release: August 8, 1997
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official
website
Other Richard
Donner films
reviewed on this website:
- Lethal
Weapon 4
- Maverick
|
An
hour after coming home from Conspiracy Theory, I read
Entertainment Weekly's cover story on it and was most
unsurprised to find the following sentence: "Unable to resolve
how the movie should end, [director Richard Donner] filmed two
different endings and left the final decision up to a test audience."
Test audience: the two ugliest words in a movie buff's
vocabulary. Has there ever been a film that benefited from such
cowardly studio waffling? It's a shame, because Conspiracy
Theory is two-thirds of a fine comedy of paranoia. At its
best, it's a Looney Tunes riff on Taxi Driver and The
Manchurian Candidate, with Mel Gibson as the looniest toon
of his career.
Jerry Fletcher (Gibson), a grungy New York cabbie, has an elaborate
theory for everything. Bobbing along in his own private sea of
crackpot logic, Jerry is the most entertaining creature of the
season. This is the fifth time Gibson has worked with Richard
Donner -- their other four team-ups were the Lethal Weapon
trilogy and Maverick
-- and these men obviously go well together; they bring out each
other's playfulness. As long as Donner stays with the babbling
Gibson (in one of his riskiest and least sexy performances),
the movie is completely satisfying.
But then the script (by Brian Helgeland) embroils Jerry in a
real conspiracy. Jerry, it turns out, isn't as nutty as he seems.
Donner and Helgeland keep us as confused as Jerry is, zapping
us with flashbacks or, perhaps, flash-forwards -- they're flashes,
anyway. The only one who can help Jerry is Alice Sutton (Julia
Roberts), a Justice Department lawyer whom he loves from afar.
He's been pestering her for months with one theory or another,
but will she believe him when it really counts?
Conspiracy Theory works as a twisty thriller given a manic
edge by Gibson. Donner has fun with the paranoid theme of such
thrillers -- that you can't trust anyone or anything, even your
own memory. The chief villain, played by Patrick Stewart with
cool malice, spends half the movie with his nose bandaged (after
Jerry bites him) -- one of several nods to Chinatown.
Helgeland writes some wonderful rants that Gibson happily sinks
his teeth into, and the production design in Jerry's cluttered
maze of an apartment is a triumph (he has padlocks on the fridge
and on the food inside); when the place was blown up,
I felt a pang of loss, as if a quirky supporting character had
been killed off.
Then we come to the third act, when the movie lapses into generic
action scenes, contrived revelations, and half-baked romance.
I won't reveal the ending, but it's the kind of cop-out that
seems to please test audiences (and insecure studio execs). It
didn't please me; as Julia Roberts got onto her beloved old horse
and rode towards a potential sequel, I looked away in embarrassment.
Conspiracy Theory is well worth seeing for Mel Gibson's
immensely enjoyable performance and the edgy comedy of its first
hour. But once the movie starts heading for its climax, don't
trust anything it says. |
