Originally published 4/7/2005
The Jacket
Director: John Maybury
Writers: Story by Tom Bleecker and Marc Rocco, Screenplay by Massy Tajedin
Producers: Peter Guber, George Clooney, Steven Sodergbergh
Stars: Adrien Brody, Keira Knightley, Kris Kristofferson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Daniel Craig, Kelly Lynch, Brad Renfro
The Jacket is a good movie with a great movie sitting just out of its reach. It is resolutely the sum of its parts when you yearn for it to be more. Where you sought deeper emotional closure you find only the pleasing-but-square termination of plot lines, and in the jungle of details you hoped would form some richer tapestry you find only irrelevancies. I can’t really share which details are so irrelevant, as it would take away from whatever mystery the movie has to offer, so I will endeavor instead to just get you off and running as the movie does.
Jack Starks (Adrien Brody) is an ex-soldier who suffers from bouts of amnesia and delusions, due to a gunshot in the head received during the first Gulf War. It rendered him clinically-dead, briefly. In 1992 he’s hitchhiking in the northeast and happens upon a broken-down truck driven by a drunken wreck of a mother (Kelly Lynch). He repairs it and befriends the little daughter, Jackie (Laura Marano), who looks as if she’s had to take responsibility for this family unit long before she should have.
Then, further up the road, he thumbs an ill-fated lift from a wanted criminal (Brad Renfro), who shoots a patrolman dead and pins the crime on the befuddled Jack.
He is sent to a care facility for the criminally-insane, where he catches the eye of the sinister Dr. Becker (Kris Kristofferson). Seeing him as beneath any human consideration, Becker “volunteers” Jack for a bit of mad scientist therapy involving a radical drug cocktail, a restraining harness (the “jacket” of the title), and a dark morgue drawer. What this is meant to accomplish he is rather vague on, but he’s not above changing his medical opinion about how long to leave people in the drawer if they annoy him.
While inside Jack experiences violent hallucinations, the return of long-lost memories, and then – something else entirely. He seems to drop back into the outside world, only the year is 2007 and he has no idea where the intervening 15 years went. Here he re-encounters Jackie, all grown-up in the very comely form of Keira Knightley. Her life has not gone well since that day at the roadside, but she does know one thing – Jack Starks’ dead body was found on New Years’ Day, 1993.
How and why Jack has seemingly come unstuck in time and/or back from the dead I won’t get into, although it seems fair to reveal that it only happens when he is locked in the drawer, so as abusive and uncomfortable as the treatment is he schemes to get more of it, even lying to a concerned doctor (Jennifer Jason Leigh) about the causes of his injuries.
With his great syrupy-sad eyes and whippet body Adrien Brody is an ideal actor for this sort of role – he has an ability to seem at once both animalistically determined and vulnerable to any stiff breeze. We don’t ever get to know much about Jack Starks other than the basic data the deposits him into the plot – he means well, has gaps in his memory and can tinker with engines. But with Brody in the role we get both the suffering and such an urgent need to understand what’s going on that you half expect Jack to be just as disappointed as we are by the flat purpose underneath it all.
The other characters are similarly given the pencil-sketch treatment; by casting talented actors director John Maybury contributes heavily to tension and sympathy the script might not otherwise provide. Worth particular commendation is Daniel Craig as fellow inmate Rudy MacKenzie – a creepy tightrope act playing a person who is crazy, believes he isn’t, but once in awhile will fake it for the right reasons.
Knightley, she of the porcelain-pure looks, has made a meteoric rise through the ranks of starlets and takes a smart step in between Jerry Bruckheimer productions with a dressed-down role here. She plays the troubled grown-up Jackie as more than just eyeliner and cigarettes, in the time we spend with her she convincingly carries us through all sorts of extremities of mood. She doesn’t strike a false note on the way to her eventual feelings about Jack.
There are some of the flashy quick cuts, digital bleeds and other gizmo trickery which is so in vogue these days, but on the whole they’re not overdone and the movie has a rich look to it. The locations are suitably chilly in keeping with the perpetual snow – this is one of the grimmer recent movies to be set prominently during the holiday season – and there’s an effectively modern score by rock musician/producing god Brian Eno.
What is perhaps most misleading is the idea that this movie is a thriller at all – it’s not so much a jump-out-of-your-seat ride or a race against time (time being a somewhat fluid thing here) as it is a slow-bubbling mystery that just wouldn’t fit together without the intimations of time travel. Everyone whose job it is to escort you from the beginning to the end does appreciable if unspectacular work – it’s where they are escorting you to that will ultimately let you down.