The
Ninth Configuration (William Peter Blatty) 1980
As
the first film to be directed by William Peter Blatty, scribe of The Exorcist,
I’m sure that The Ninth Configuration must have been greeted with some
degree of eagerness. Unfortunately the knowledge that his new work would have a
built in audience seems to have created in its director an assumption that
people would be willing to put up with this insanely
self-indulgent and bloated work. Though The Ninth Configuration walks
boldly into a crisis of faith as The Exorcist did, there’s no doubt
that it’s an inferior film to that earlier hit, no matter how much it must
have meant to its director. The film, which chronicles the rehabilitation of a
group of psychotic Vietnam veterans who are housed in an old cathedral in the
Pacific Northwest, presents itself as an allegory that’s so impossibly
overstuffed that it can’t help but explode. It attempts nothing less than to
shoehorn the modern American experience into a desperate attempt by people to
deny the unavoidable possibility that there may not be a God. In doing so,
Blatty has his cast of colorful lunatics reference a multitude of movies (The
Treasure of Sierra Madre, Frankenstein, The Jazz Singer, The
Great Escape, Spellbound, and many others), pop culture events, and
historical occurrences, in an attempt to expose them all as folly. It would take
a brilliant director to overturn so much historical baggage, and Blatty simply
isn’t one, no matter how hard he tries to be. As a result his film’s point,
which depends on our agreement with these delusions, is never made.
So
much goes wrong in The Ninth Configuration that it’s difficult to find
a place to start. From the bizarre music video that opens the film onward,
there’s no sign that we’re on familiar ground here, and while that’s
initially refreshing, slowly patience ebbs as it becomes apparent that Blatty
isn’t taking us anywhere new. Better movies like One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest and Shock Corridor have used the insane asylum as a
microcosmic metaphor of our national lunacy, but those films worked to a degree
because they didn’t feel like they were exploiting the madness of their
characters to make a screenwriter’s statement hold water. Blatty flubs badly
here, since he makes each member in his cast of crazy people so wildly different
that their insanity seems gimmicky (there’s the Shakespeare-loving one, the
ex-astronaut, the black one, etc…). The way that they march into the room of
the institute’s psychiatrist one at a time to deliver their colorful and
humorous monologue makes the film feel like a sitcom. We’re told that the
inmates are all intelligent, but they’re all unnecessarily glib here, and the
way that each of them makes astute (but groundless) observations about The Way
We Live shreds all credibility.
As
the film proceeds, and it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the patients
from the doctors, the movie seems to be suggesting that the standards that we
use to judge the world we live in are wildly out of whack, but I can’t
subscribe to that thesis, since the film’s presentation of it is so messy. Any
specks of truth that might emerge from the prisoners’ observations are
obscured by the unavoidable realization that Blatty is using them as his podium.
While that’s not inherently offensive, since the movie skews so far from
reality, it’s glib and far from convincing. When Blatty finally asks us to
accept one of these psychopaths as a Christ figure, it’s too much. As he
continues to build upon his pompous mess of a movie, he tries to invoke The
Deer Hunter and the most serious, soul-searching moments of Bergman’s
oeuvre, but comes up with nothing that’s remotely affecting. To ask one’s
audience to endure your soul-searching is a great demand, and if you’re doing
it, you had better be able to back up your ideas with enough cinematic verve to
transport the audience to a world where these questions truly matter. The
Ninth Configuration, which is a truly bad movie, is a parable that can’t
convince the audience that it’s worth pondering. Even on its own terms, the
movie seems a bit shallow, since after the personal absolution of its characters
finally arrives, Blatty offers no answer for the rest of the blighted masses.
Perhaps worst of all, it fails to excite even as an exercise in sheer excesses,
since the ending turns toward the introspective instead of toward the epic.
Instead of trying for something brave when it matters most, it hews its bets and
resorts to cheap sentiment.
