Jack Starks (Adrien
Brody) is not having a good time. Shot in the head by a young boy
during Desert Storm, he survives to return to Vermont with a host
of psychological problems, only to be framed for the murder of a
police officer and committed to a mental institution. There he is
introduced to the brutal “treatments” of Dr. Becker (Kris
Kristofferson), where he is drugged, jacketed, and thrust into the
drawer of a morgue for hours at a time. The thing is, he appears
to travel in time to 2007 when he’s in the jacket, where he learns
he died in a few days from the date he was just in. Jackie (Keira
Knightley), a young girl he met briefly before being committed,
may be the only hope to prevent his own death. Then again, he
might be hallucinating the entire thing.
CRITIQUE
Mix some Jacob’s
Ladder with a bit of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, set
in the first Gulf War, and add a time travel twist, and you have the
bulk of The Jacket. That’s not necessarily a bad combination,
but it’s rather ambitious and the end result doesn’t have a very
engrossing story or very endearing characters.
Why many of these
characters do what they do is almost totally unexplored, leaving us
with a gimmicky “Only SHE can help him prevent his own murder” sense
of been there, done that. We don’t even really know who Jack Starks
is, since for most of the movie he’s either getting shot, recovering,
or being strapped into the infamous jacket for a round of
“treatment.” We don’t know who Dr. Becker is or why he does the crazy
experiments that he thinks will help violent, mentally ill inmates.
We feel for little Jackie (Laura Marano) as she endures her alcoholic
mother with a kind of universal likeability, but not so much for Keira
Knightley’s portrayal of the grownup Jackie, who has taken up smoking
and drinking as her main hobbies.
So the question of
why we care about any of this comes up, and the only good answer
appears to be that we want to figure out the mystery of what’s really
going on. Somehow we expect that the film will end up making some
sense in the end, because obviously the filmmakers know what’s behind
it all, right? Three alternate endings suggest otherwise.
For all the
problems with The Jacket, the film is strangely addictive.
Perhaps it’s Brody’s performance as a stand-up Everyman who we’d like
to see succeed or the good old-fashioned murder mystery quality, but
The Jacket spins a web that I can’t help but crawl into.
Daniel Craig’s performance as fellow inmate Rudy Mackenzie helps a lot
in terms of making the asylum experience more real and giving us a
character that is more than one-dimensional.
THE VIDEO
The Jacket is presented in
the original anamorphic widescreen. The transfer is excellent and the
visual effects (used for effect and not as mainstays), most
notably those involving Starks’ eyes as he slips in and out of
consciousness. A kind of pale, sterile palette adds to the ambience
of the asylum, which for Jack may be his own mind.
THE AUDIO
The Jacket
is presented in Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound. Though good for the
most part and not too heavy handed during “scare” scenes, a few parts
of dialog are slightly muddled. Otherwise it sounds fine.
THE
EXTRAS
My thanks to
whoever decided to have fewer but better extras on the disc, as
nothing is quite as boring as hearing a director drone on about
something totally uninteresting for an hour and a half. The Jacket
does not have an audio commentary, but does contain the original
trailer and two very watchable featurettes.
The Jacket:
Project History and Deleted Scenes (28:15) is a mix of commentary and the deleted scenes
themselves. It would have been better to have these scenes
individually selectable, but the substance is worth the
inconvenience. Most of the scenes are even worth watching, and it’s
too bad that some were cut because they would have smoothed out some
of the film’s seeming inconsistencies. Several alternate endings are
also included in these scenes.
The Look of The
Jacket (9:02) covers some of the more visual components and influences
of the film. Probably more interesting if you’re already familiar
with “experimental cinema.”
FINAL THOUGHTS
Okay but not great,
The Jacket suffers from the lack of direction indicated by the
cannibalizing of the original script and of the uncertainty of the
totally different endings prepared for it. It might be worth a look,
but it’s by no means one of the year’s best.
