Conspiracy Theory Review
by Serdar Yegulalp (syegul AT ix DOT netcom DOT com)February 8th, 1998
Conspiracy Theory (1997)
* * * 1/2
A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: A love story hidden inside a half-serious thriller, and the love story comes out on top.
"A paranoid is someone who knows a LITTLE of what's going on." -- William S. Burroughs
A friend of my mother's is a compulsive collector of odd trivia. One night she came back after a cab ride with six photocopied pages of closely-packed conspiracy theory gibberish, which the cabdriver had apparently foisted off on her after lecturing her about the evils of technology. I guess both she and screenwriter Brian Helgeland must've ridden in the same cab, because CONSPIRACY THEORY takes that kernel of an idea, wraps a love story around it, and milks it quite nicely.
The cabbie in the movie is named Jerry Fletcher, and is played by Mel Gibson. So many of his previous roles featured him playing intensely masculine and assertive roles, so it comes as a shock when we see him gibbering and waving his fingers around like squid's tentacles and motormouthing his way through the opening credits about everything from what they put into the water to who killed JFK. He's a nut.
He's also a nut with a case of puppy-dog erotomania, and the object of his affection is a woman who works in the Justice Department -- Alice Sutton, whose father, a judge, died under bizarre circumstances. Fletcher and Sutton know each other: he comes to her office with another wacko theory every week, and she tolerates his presence, if only because he saved her from some muggers once. But she's clearly only going to take so much of him at a time, and she's not charmed by him. At least at first.
One day Fletcher comes under the attention of some shadowy characters, and is abducted and put through a serio-comic chamber of horrors that makes the "dentist's chair" scene in MARATHON MAN look positively comforting. After that, he's no longer just kooky -- he's charged with the convinction that someone really IS after him. Convincing Alice, on the other hand, is another story.
The plot unspools in several directions at once, but it doesn't come up with anything that leaves us tearing out the cushions of our seats in amazement: the movie isn't working in that direction. The timing in every scene is comic, and the relationship between Jerry and Alice is like a mutant version of a screwball comedy where the society dame is pestered by the resourceful grocery boy. It is, at heart, a relatively sweet-natured story. Sounds strange considering that a good deal of the plot concerns stuff which almost any other movie would have made X-FILES-bleak and BLADE RUNNER-black, but the movie tries something neat and for the most part makes it. Who'd've thunk it: a date movie about MK-ULTRA?
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