The Jacket Review
by Laura Clifford (laura AT reelingreviews DOT com)March 7th, 2005
THE JACKET
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Jack Starks (Adrien Brody, "The Village") returns from the Gulf War in 1991 after having been shot by a small Iraqi boy he was trying to comfort. Twelve months later in his home state of Vermont two more life altering events happen. First he meets a little girl, Jackie (Laura Marano), with her strung-out mother (Kelly Lynch, "Joe Somebody") and broken down truck. Jack fixes the vehicle, gives Jackie his dog tags (we just know we'll be seeing these again, probably in a strange setting) and moves on. A stranger (Brad Renfro, "Ghost World") picks him up, gets pulled over, shoots a cop and pins the murder on Jack before abandoning the scene. Jack's trauma causes memory loss and he's found criminally insane. At the Alpine Grove Psychiatric Hospital, Jack falls prey to Dr. Becker (Kris Kristofferson, "Blade: Trinity") who uses him to experiment with behavior modification therapy banned in the 1970's. Jack's shot up with neuroleptic drugs and imprisoned in a morgue drawer for hours, trussed up in "The Jacket."
This odd hybrid of a film was produced by Jon Guber in partnership with Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney's Section Eight Films with British art director John Maybury ("Love is the Devil") at the helm of this sci-fi/horror/romance/thriller (story by Tom Bleecker and Marc Rocco, screenplay by Massy Tadjedin) featuring a cast of English and American actors and locations in Scotland and Canada. The cast is uniformly excellent and the production is artfully eerie, even if the story is a Frankenstein of borrowed movie parts that don't always fit together
seamlessly.
'I was 27 the first time I died...' Brody narrates as we watch heat seeking missiles find their targets in grainy green footage that gives us the impression of night vision goggles. Twelve months later, we're transported into the Stephen King territory of "Riding the Bullet" before Jack promptly lands in the weirdness of "Kingdom Hospital." After a period of calm, tranquilized on drugs, Jack is yanked out of his bed in the middle of the night by Nurse Harding (Mackenzie Phillips, TV's "One Day at a Time"), taken to the basement, outfitted in a straight jacket, given an injection and slid into a morgue drawer as if being buried alive. Cinematographer Peter Deming ("I Heart Huckabees," "Mulholland Drive") gets us right inside with Jack by using extreme closeups of his eyes, where war flashbacks are projected onto his pupils, his mouth, the camera travelling right past his teeth as he screams, and his bound hands helpless at his sides.
Jack's second experience, though, isn't quite as horrible. After several Iraqi mind zaps, Jack suddenly finds himself outside of a diner in the snow. A wary waitress (Keira Knightley, "King Arthur") eyes him from her car, then asks if he needs a lift. It's Christmas Eve and he ends up at her small hovel of a home where she chain smokes and drinks herself into a stupor. Poking around, Jack finds his dog tags, then pictures of the young girl and her mother from a year ago. Jack has landed in 2007 and he becomes determined to save the woman the little girl Jackie has become from following in her mother's footsteps. By his next treatment, they've fallen in love, but Jackie's done some investigating of her own and discovered that Jack was found dead on New Year's Day of 1993, only days away back at Aspen Grove.
"The Jacket" is patched together with pieces of "The Butterfly Effect," "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Altered States" and "The Crow," among others, but some of its own conceits do not work particularly well. The character of Dr. Becker is ill defined, seemingly only motivated by sadistic and egomaniacal tendencies in 1992, but coming across as genuinely contrite and well-intentioned in 2007. A significant subplot involves Jack's advice to Dr. Lorenson (Jennifer Jason Leigh, "In the Cut") regarding her treatment of a friend's autistic child, but he gets the information from her in 2007 and feeds it back in 1992 - there is no genesis of the actual idea, a time travel conundrum that isn't logical (a similar routine, where Dr. Becker tells Jack about other patients undergoing his treatment in 2007 only to have Jack inexplicably know this in 1992 does work because obviously Becker would have known this information). Jack's visit to Jackie and Jean again in 1992 after having made love to Jackie in 2007 carries an unsettling whiff of pedophilia. One also wonders why the filmmakers did not take advantage of commenting upon Bush Jr.'s war in 2007 when the action begins with his father's version in 1991. And yet, the film works in far more ways than it doesn't.
Brody and Knightley have an instantaneous spark of sexual chemistry that makes his gambits to return to the horrific drawer understandable. One provocation is particularly amusing, when Jack supports fellow patient Rudy Mackenzie's (Daniel Craig, "The Mother") ramblings about the Organization for the Organized in group therapy, beginning a mini riot. Craig, whose inevitable breakout role must be just around the corner, brings such conviction to dialogue like 'the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse didn't bring flowers which makes it really difficult to get organized' that he almost makes sense. Jennifer Jason Leigh is quiet and still, giving Lorenson an air of gravity and true regard for her charges (she's subtly aged, as well, with 1992 eyeglasses obscuring the small lines around her eyes that we see in 2007). Also good is Kelly Lynch as the junkie mom, who receives a strange wakeup call from Jack akin to Darla in The Crow. (Another subtlety - note the poster of David Bowie's Aladdin Sane album cover briefly seen in Jean's living room.)
Brody is forging a strange career for himself, his last role as the mentally-challenged Noah in "The Village" a grating contrast to the Oscar winning one which preceded it. "The Jacket" may not be the type of film the Academy takes notice of, but Brody's twitchy hysteria is the stuff of nightmares and his tender courtship the material of dreams - a crystallizing performance.
B-
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