FULL-SERVICE PARANOIA

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

We meet Jerry Fletcher (Mel Gibson) in mid-rant, and our first impression is of a typical New York City cabbie of the old, or native-born, variety, full of mis- and disinformation delivered in a rush that permits no quibbling interruption. Assassination plots both current and historical, a unique slant on the militia movement, even (heaven help us!) inside dope on the Vatican's plans for world domination--the man's a full-service paranoid.

Then, having frightened his last fare witless--he drives as wildly as he talks--Jerry pulls up in front of an apartment house, trains his binoculars on a window behind which a woman, obviously above his station and equally obviously a love object, is exercising, and we get really nervous. For we seem to be entering Travis Bickle country, an essentially inimitable place that one wants to visit only once in a lifetime.

But no, this is just the writer, Brian Helgeland, and the director, Richard Donner, having their little misleading joke. For we soon see that underneath the crazy bluster, there is a certain woozy sweetness about Jerry, something suggesting that he is in occasional touch with rationality. Alice (Julia Roberts), the Justice Department attorney he's spying on, notices it too. She's uncommonly patient on the several occasions when he bursts out of the shadows and intrudes on her otherwise orderly life, babbling--well, yes--Conspiracy Theory.

It turns out, of course, that there is nothing theoretical about the conspiracy that primarily obsesses Jerry. We learn that decades earlier it seized and victimized him (among many others) in a government-supported attempt to create our very own Manchurian candidates; that this program has been directed undetected all these years by the visibly wicked Dr. Jonas (Patrick Stewart), one of those shrinks who in life would lose their license but whose malpractices are never questioned in the movies; and that it is the purity of Jerry's love for Alice that is bringing him back to his senses, in intermittent but ever increasing flashes.

Finally, we don't believe a word of this. (A black helicopter hovering unremarked over a crowded Union Square? I don't think so.) But Gibson blurs the line between lunacy and lucidity very funnily, Roberts is a woman who could drive any man sane, and some of the film's offhand observations about the life-styles of the poor and nutty are goofily persuasive (Jerry padlocks his refrigerator and keeps its contents in combination-locked canisters). Caught up in the movie's intricacies, we go along with it, momentarily distant kin to those people who cling desperately to some convoluted explanation for a national tragedy. Conspiracy theory may be reason's most rickety scaffold, but it is more comforting than its alternative, which is chaos theory. Wouldn't want to see a movie about that, would you?

--By Richard Schickel