Release Date: March 4, 2005
Starring: Adrien Brody, Keira Knightley, Kris Kristofferson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Brad Renfro, Laura Marano, Kelly Lynch
Directed by: John Maybury
Written by: Massy Tadjedin
Distributed by: Warner Independent Pictures
MPAA Rating: R (violence, language, brief nudity)
The only way to briefly describe The Jacket is to call it a psychological romantic thriller about time travel. If that sounds overly complex, then you’ve got the gist of the film. Admittedly, though, it also sounds intriguing, and at times it is, but in the end this film is too complicated for its own good. It leads us in so many different directions there’s no way for the story to catch up with itself, and we’re left to grasp onto the few things that make clear sense: a plotline involving a corrupt mental institution, and a romance between the two stars, Adrien Brody and Keira Knightley.
The problem is that there are nearly a half-dozen other story arcs that threaten to strangle the movie before it finishes. There’s Gulf War syndrome, a murder mystery, a female psychiatrist (Jennifer Jason Leigh) trying to help her friend’s epileptic son, a daughter (Laura Marano) living with an alcoholic mother (Kelly Lynch), and a time travel gimmick that allows the main character (Brody) to travel from 1992 to the year 2007. Unless this is all happening in the Brody character’s head -- and there’s enough evidence to prove it’s not -- the movie is simply too full and tries too hard to be a brain exercise like Memento or Vanilla Sky.
Brody plays Jack Starks, a soldier who suffered a severe head injury in the first Gulf War. Somehow he gets back to the U.S., but with amnesia, and for some reason he’s backpacking down a snowy road where a young girl named Jackie (Marano) and her mother (Lynch) are stranded with a stalled pickup truck. Starks fixes it with no problem, makes friends with the girl, and moves on to get picked up by a different driver (played by Brad Renfro). In a terrible twist of fate, the man is fixing to frame Starks for the murder of a police officer, and suddenly we see Starks being convicted for it because he doesn’t remember what happened.
Declared criminally insane because of his war experiences, Starks is committed to a mental hospital run by Dr. Becker (Kris Kristofferson), a man who thinks the best way to treat convicted psychos is to restrain them in a straight jacket, drug them up, and lock them in a morgue drawer for a few hours. While confined in this space, Starks begins to have visions, and soon enough it’s as if he’s actually traveling through time. He meets the grown up version of Jackie (Knightley), and it takes a few extra time jumps for her to start believing he’s from the past. They fall in love and start a collaborative investigation into how Starks is doing what he’s doing.
And that’s only the half of it. There’s so much going on, and judging from how it ends, at least half of it isn’t necessary. We understand that there’s a real romance between Starks and Jackie, and the two actors help us believe it, but we don’t fully understand why it’s happening to begin with, aside from the fact that she’s his only link to understanding what’s going on. The biggest question is, then: Why does he devote all of his efforts to making her life happier instead of balancing that with clearing his record and finding the killer that framed him? We feel for him as he fights to get people to believe what’s happening to him, yet at the same time we’re unsure why his motives are what they are. It’s frustrating that he’s acting like a lovesick amnesiac, not a wrongfully convicted man seeking the truth.
Among the other loose ends is the hospital plotline. Though it’s consistently hinted that the doctor’s treatment methods are a bit too cruel and controversial, nothing comes of it. (In fact, very little at all comes from the hospital story arc, especially from the fellow patients who take up way too much screen time.) As the plot crawls forward, we get a few explanations here and there, but not enough to wrap up the story, much less make a solid point.
The film’s inclination toward being confusing is at its worst when the psychological trips it takes us on are constantly making us doubt whether anything we’re watching is real to begin with. But director John Mayburry makes a point to show Starks’s supporting characters alone from him, proving they exist in a world apart from his own mind. So why make it all so complex and potentially deceiving? Why put us on this mixed up ride only to leave us hanging without a strong meaning to take away from it? It’s never clear.
The very last line of the film is, “How much time do we have?” Perhaps this is Mayburry’s blunt way of saying, “Just in case you didn’t understand what we were doing, here’s the message.” And that message makes sense -- we fight for every second we have of our lives, and this is what we do to make those seconds last. It’s a good message indeed, and there were strong actors there to deliver it for us in The Jacket. There was no reason, though, for the film to go about it in such a clumsy and convoluted way.
-- Andy Zientek (zfilm@earthlink.net)