Frustrating passion project

“The Ninth Configuration” definitely comes off like a passion project for William Peter Blatty, who scored before this with his screenplay for “The Exorcist”. And here is another film about faith, though much more frustrating in its execution. And why not? It would be Blatty’s directorial debut. It’s a bizarre and overlong concoction to be sure, but it also has scenes of raw power about psychology and the human condition.

Stacey Keach is the lead, Col. Kane, a psychiatrist assigned to a remote gothic castle some place in the United States. There he will find an assortment of wacky folks who have supposedly cracked during Vietnam, or so the army wants Kane to discern. They believe that some of these men are faking to get out of combat.

If they are, the men certainly put on a good show. Many are of the zany vaudeville variety, carrying on in song and dance numbers and movie quotes. One man (Jason Miller) is even adapting a Shakespeare play for dogs, but draws the line at having another member of the cast dress up like Superman for it.

Another patient of the asylum is Cutshaw (Scott Wilson), a former astronaut who had a nervous breakdown before his launch to the moon. He is the most curious of the patients as he never saw combat and was never trying to get out of it, yet somehow, sometimes, his dialect switches from the rambling nonsense of most of the other patients to a thoughtful discussion with Kane about such topics as God and human suffering.

Keach proves to be a good actor for this as we begin to learn how much inner turmoil Kane is going through as well. He’s a doctor who leads with compassion- his calm demeanor in the face of neverending nonsense becomes the main source of hilarity here. But it soon becomes apparent that he needs that same sort of compassion. He’s a man with his own dark violence and ferocity and there is a struggle to keep that at bay.

At its best, the movie is about PTSD, how trauma effects how we live, and how the brain kicks in to try and overcome it in equally screwy ways. Blatty I think makes a mistake in turning many of the patients into a clown show and he spends too much time in the first half on that but the focus on Kane and Cutshaw in the second half gives the film some meaning that we’ve patiently waited for.

Wilson gives a pretty decent performance, as does Ed Flanders as another kindly doctor. However, it’s the other patients who really are left hanging. They’re funny for a while but don’t really add much past that. It gets fairly weird as Blatty seems to want to use them for a larger point, and there’s even a weirder segment where one of his characters turns into a christ-like figure, yet both are barely explained.

A good portion of this just doesn’t make much sense and even now I sit here I wonder if I grasped all of what Blatty was trying to accomplish here or not. I doubt it. But what I did take away from it was a decent human drama with a few very strong performances to help sell it. The whole thing comes off deeply flawed, yet it’s hard to look away just the same.