Review: The Jacket
The Jacket
Starring Adrien Brody, Kiera Knightley, Jennifer Jason Leigh
Directed by John Maybury
2.5 stars (out of 4)
A half-gelled blend of social commentary, star-crossed love story, and time-jumping Vonnegut rip-off, The Jacket succeeds at being unremarkable in an era when most films are praised for undue glory or reviled for poor quality and low ambitions. Most trailers advertise The Jacket as some kind of modern-day thriller, which it most certainly isn’t: teens looking for the latest J-horror jaunt won’t find it here. What they will find is an interesting story put to only modest use in the hands of a talented but seemingly uninterested director, an Oscar-winning actor and the latest pretty face to come across the pond.
Jack Starks (Adrien Brody) is shot in the head during the first Gulf War, and his wound damages his brain’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction, reality from fantasy, etc. He also has memory problems. After the injury, we follow him back to the States, where he’s hitchhiking through Vermont (who knows why). He helps a woman and her young daughter who have been stranded with car problems, and he’s later picked up by a driver (Brad Renfro) who’s shortly pulled over by the police. The Stranger, as Renfro’s character is billed, shoots the cop and leaves the weapon on the ground next to where Jack has fallen, knocked unconscious when the cop draws his gun and fires, accidentally hitting Jack. Jack awakens with no memory of the incident and is imprisoned in a mental institution. It’s at this turning point that film needed to actually begin forwarding a plot, or at least pretending to do so. Sadly, from here it just meanders through science fiction and visceral Euro-art-house cinema and fate-defying romance, without the conviction to pull off either one.
The head doctor, Becker (Kris Kristofferson), apprehends Jack from his cell one night, places him in a straightjacket and slides him into a morgue drawer for 3 hours. Becker’s goal with the treatment is to break Jack and “reset” his psyche in an attempt to jog his fuzzy memory. Jack goes into the drawer and we go with him, in the first and longest of the film’s several intense scenes where we do nothing but watch, uncomfortable and helpless, as Jack struggles limply against his restraints, cries, and suffers from a series of violent flashbacks. This is where director John Maybury shines, so to speak: the barrage of images and sound thrown at Jack/us is genuinely unnerving. I felt claustrophobic and cramped the entire time, staring at Adrien Brody’s eyes and mouth and drops of sweat in extreme close-up. In the jacket, Jack has visions of the year 2007 (the film takes place in 1992). More than visions, he actually interacts with people he sees, including Jackie (Kiera Knightley), the girl whose mother Jack helped on the side of the road, now all grown up.
Jackie’s mother died years ago, and she’s actually got a lot of information on hand about the specific nature and date of Jack’s death, only a few days away from Jack’s place in time. It’s not a particularly meaty role, but Knightley does nothing with it. Her previous roles (The Pirates of the Caribbean, Love Actually) have been short of spectacular, as well, but at least she was surrounded by actors and set pieces more worth watching. Her performance in The Jacket consists of biting her lip and looking disaffected without trying too hard to look disaffected. She creates zero chemistry with Brody, who only falls in love with her because the screenplay demanded it.
And so, Jack find himself jumping from his time to the future whenever he’s put back in the jacket and into the drawer. His visits become about learning more of the details surrounding his death, then become more about spending time with Jackie, who turns out to be the love of his life. Whether Jack discovers how he dies becomes inconsequential next to the moments he gets to spend with Jackie before slipping back into the past.
It’s in these weakly structured escalating plot points that the film loses its audience because it loses itself. No one seems to know what the film should be, and none more so than Maybury, under whose control the film glistens with style and flails about in blind and fruitless search of substance. Every 20 minutes or so you realize you’re watching a different movie, with a different style and heart and goal. Jack resumes his voice-over narration in the film’s final moments, a jarring touch that made me realize his narration had only appeared for a few lines at the beginning before disappearing. And that’s The Jacket: a few ideas about a movie that never quite add up to one.
