The Jacket (2005)

Director: John Maybury
Format: DVD
DVD Features: added scenes, alternate endings, trailer, featurettes
Starring: Adrien Brody, Kiera Knightly, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kris Kristofferson
Trailer

The Jacket is a film that I’ve owned for a while now. I found it on my neighborhood video store’s discount shelf. I’m always looking for horror films and anything that looks intriguing that I don’t mind paying a cheap price for. Usually, I buy a few films I’ve seen before, and end up with another one or two undiscovered films to round out my “4 for 20” purchase. Surprisingly, I haven’t been burnt often. There are a handful of actors and directors that I collect, in a way. Adrien Brody is one of those actors, but more on him in a minute.

Jack Starks (Adrien Brody) is dead…well, maybe. He barely survived a grievous head wound while serving in Desert Storm. After being released from medical a year later, he’s hitchhiking down a rural road when he comes across a woman and her little girl having car trouble. He’s just managed to fix their truck when the severely inebriated mother chases him away from the child. But, Starks leaves his dog tags with the girl Jackie (Laura Marano). A bit further down the road, a young man in a station wagon offers him a ride. The driver either has trouble with the cops, or is just plain nuts because, when they’re unexpectedly pulled over by the local PD, the man starts firing on the officer. Jack is caught in the crossfire and is unconscious with a dead cop and a recently fired weapon when the authorities find him. Since Jack’s memory is Swiss cheese, and there were no witnesses to the crime, he is sentenced to treatment at a hospital for the criminally insane.

Quite unwillingly, Jack becomes the subject of Dr. Becker’s (Kris Kristofferson) radical experiments. They involve a lot of medication, being strapped into a filthy straight jacket, and then being shoved into a morgue locker. However tortuous the “treatment” might be, it affords Jack an unexpected peek into the future. It’s during his first trip that he meets a young woman (Keira Knightly) who offers him her couch to sleep on for the night. While casually browsing her apartment, Jack happens across a pair of dog tags. When he reads the name engraved on them, he’s shocked to discover that the name is his. Starks spends the rest of his time flashing back and forth between the year 1995 and, when he’s in the jacket, 2007.

Nobody in The Jacket looks pretty. Jack is emaciated and hollow-eyed. The older version of Jackie is a binge drinking chain smoker who wears dark makeup and doesn’t seem to care about much, let alone her hair and clothing. All of the doctors at the hospital seem like they were pulled straight from the set of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. That is, except for one Dr. Lorenson (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who doesn’t look like she’s gotten a wink of sleep in years. Combined with grainy camera shots, oddly disturbing score (by Brian Eno) and a bleak, snowy landscape, The Jacket has an atmosphere of misery, which is a perfect backdrop for the storyline.

I mentioned Adrien Brody earlier. Aside from having that genuine East Coast attitude and killer good looks, the man is an amazing actor. In 2003, he became the youngest actor ever to win the Best Actor Academy Award for his role in The Pianist. He’s also got a history of taking on unconventional roles, a quality that I have always admired in great actors. So, I was gratified with his appearance in The Jacket. He truly seems tortured and yet, has everyone else’s best interests in mind. Keira Knightly is terrific as the older Jackie. She does such a magnificent job as a tragic, self destructive beauty that I wish she’d play such characters more often. Don’t forget solid performances by Krisofferson and Leigh that really round out the cast.

One problem that I’ve got with this movie is the rapid pace at which Jackie and Starks develop a romantic relationship. It almost seems as if part of the movie was cut out. One moment, she’s kicking him out of her apartment for “snooping” through her things and the next, she’s driving him around the countryside, helping him figure things out. Granted, Jack doesn’t have much time to play with in the movie, but they seem to “hook up” awful darned fast. I guess it’s that Brodie charm.

Overall Rating: 4
Hottie Rating: 5 (Knightly and Brody are both smokin')

Alternate Viewing: Summer of Sam
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