Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on March 3, 2005, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
It’s easy to see why The Jacket received a cool response at its Sundance Film Festival premiere, and it’s the same reason hardcore genre fans might find it disappointing as well. To wit: After an opening act in which the film promises to head down dark and provocative psychological avenues, it instead settles for becoming a conventional and unchallenging time-travel drama. The story becomes more concerned with romantic entanglements than thrills or mind games, and while a solid lead performance by Adrien Brody holds the interest throughout, there’s a nagging sensation the longer the movie goes on that this tale of a traumatized soldier isn’t being all that it can be.
Brody’s character, Jack Starks, is first seen being shot in the head during the first Gulf War, which kills him very briefly before he is resuscitated. A year later, he’s ambling along a snowy road when he comes upon a mother and young daughter whose truck has broken down, and helps fix the vehicle; he’s then picked up by a young motorist (Brad Renfro) who attracts the attention of a patrolling policeman, leading to a confrontation whose details are unclear in the beginning. Jack, who has no memory of the incident, winds up standing trial for the cop’s murder and being declared legally insane, whereupon he’s committed to a mental institution and forced into an unorthodox experiment overseen by Dr. Becker (a nicely restrained Kris Kristofferson). Trussed up in an elaborate straitjacket and drugged, Jack is imprisoned in a morgue drawer for hours at a time, and the forced sensory deprivation leads him to have visions placing him into what he quickly determines is his own future (2007, to be exact).
Up to and through the first couple of Jack’s previews of coming attractions, director John Maybury evokes an effective mood of disorientation, utilizing startling visuals and editing tricks to put the viewer into Jack’s uncertain state of mind. This sort of jagged cinematic approach has become familiar by now, but it works in the early stretches because it’s of a piece with the material. Yet as opposed to the goofy brio of the similarly themed The Butterfly Effect, which spun its own time-hopping scenario into increasingly outlandish directions, Maybury and scripter Massy Tadjedin (working from a story by Tom Bleecker and Marc Rocco) adopt a more somber and focused tone. Too focused, as it turns out, because just as Jack develops amnesia about his past, so too does the film seem to forget about the violence that brings him to the hospital. The brutality of his treatment even ceases to become an issue, as Jack starts to actually seek to return to that drawer and thus the future.
The reasons for this have to do with Jackie (Keira Knightley), a waitress in 2007 who’s living a hard-knock life and who, Jack quickly figures out, is the grown-up little girl he first encountered on that wintry back road. How exactly he wound up dropped into her future isn’t explained (heck, the movie never even details how Becker’s experiment sends him jaunting through time in the first place), yet his ensuing affair with Jackie soon becomes the movie’s primary concern, above and beyond his own past, present and future (which he discovers may be in grave danger). The Gulf War and Renfro’s character ultimately prove to be MacGuffins, pieces of an elaborate setup that is never really paid off.
Fortunately, the movie has Brody, rebounding nicely from his unfortunate turn in The Village, to keep the attention. Looking appropriately haunted and/or determined, he keeps you believing in his reactions to the plot’s turns even as they become less compelling themselves. He’s well-matched by Knightley, doing a convincing American accent and nicely conveying Jackie’s desperation, while Jennifer Jason Leigh, as a sympathetic doctor working for and clashing with Becker, is fine as always in a role that unfortunately remains mired in the functional. Another, less likable underling of Becker’s is a nurse played by Mackenzie Phillips, appearing startlingly aged and yet, under that circumstance, still startlingly recognizable.
The movie also can’t be faulted on a technical level, as Peter Deming’s (Scream) photography of the chilly exteriors and Alan MacDonald’s stark production design, along with Brian Eno’s moody score, all work toward giving the proceedings the right uncomfortable air. (Even the end titles’ unlikely marriage of Iggy Pop to Louis Armstrong’s “We Have All the Time in the World” succeeds better than you might expect.) It’s on a conceptual level that The Jacket falls short; the material doesn’t live up to the craft surrounding it. By giving in to the story’s potential for sentimentality, the filmmakers end up straitjacketing the drama and suspense.
