REVOLUTION #9
1/2
A smart little indie.
Running time: 91 minutes. Not rated (language). At the Quad, 13th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues.
IT’S a mad mad mad mad world, for sure, but not as mad as it appears to the young protagonist of “Revolution #9.”
In writer-director Tim McCann’s well-crafted indie drama, mental illness strikes James Jackson (Michael Risley) like a lightning bolt, soon after he and his girlfriend Kim (an excellent Adrienne Shelly) have announced their engagement to her parents and been given a lukewarm reception.
It begins with a few innocuous conspiracy theories, but Jackson’s persecution complex ratchets up quickly into full-blown paranoid schizophrenia.
He is convinced he’s personally under attack from “the corporate armies of the media” via cryptic messages embedded in e-mails and in one particular TV ad for a brand of perfume called Rev9.
In short order, he loses his job and apartment, and frightens Kim’s young nephew by accusing him of being part of the conspiracy.
Meanwhile, the loyal Kim is treading her own road to perdition: The medical system fails her, her family and friends do nothing but question her taste in men and, as he becomes increasingly paranoid, Jackson turns on her.
Apart from one ineffectual gimmick – the numbers one through nine flash up periodically – McCann (“Desolation Angels”) uses the medium adroitly: He draws us into Jackson’s nightmare world with an agitated camera, unorthodox angles and vaguely ominous background noise.
The cameras focus on small, everyday objects, and the extreme close-ups of the characters’ faces cleverly builds an air of menace – but there’s quiet humor too.
Spalding Gray has a couple of very funny scenes as Scooter, the pompous director of the Rev9 commercial.
When Jackson, posing as an art magazine journalist, accuses him of conspiring to reprogram him, Scooter, blinkered by his own egotism, responds with: “Oh, you’re a culturist.”
McCann weaves in a somewhat toothless condemnation of a bureaucracy that forsakes the mentally ill, but “Revolution # 9” works better as an inside look at one person’s slide into madness – and, more particularly, the impact of that on his loved ones.