The Jacket: Frank's Take
01/04/2005 . Source: Frank Ochieng 

The Jacket feels a little snug around the arms as a messy mind-bender. Although this murky psychological thriller has a challenging premise that’s undoubtedly riveting, British director John Maybury (1998’s Francis Bacon biopic Love is the Devil) never really finds the right niche to secure his hysterical head-spinning account of a lost man on the brink of a breakdown.

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The Jacket (2005) Warner Independent
1 hour 41 minutes.
Starring: Adrien Brody, Keira Knightley, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Brad Renfro, Kris Kristofferson, Mackenzie Phillips, Kelly Lynch, Daniel Craig. Directed by John Maybury.

The Jacket feels a little snug around the arms as a messy mind-bender. Although this murky psychological thriller has a challenging premise that’s undoubtedly riveting, British director John Maybury (1998’s Francis Bacon biopic Love is the Devil) never really finds the right niche to secure his hysterical head-spinning account of a lost man on the brink of a breakdown.

What’s even more disappointing is that The Jacket is an awkward and cliched conglomeration of almost every dazed and confused film imaginable from the Oscar-winning One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to Adrian Lyne’s vastly underrated 1990 horror show Jacob’s Ladder. This particular Jacket—sad to say—doesn’t fit very well in the imaginative psychedelic realm of its creepy convictions.

It wasn’t necessarily a bad move in casting the amiable Oscar-winning Adrien Brody in a macabre melodrama meant to stimulate one’s cerebral senses. Physically, Brody’s lanky body and droopy puppy dog eyes makes for the ideal catalyst who’s imprisoned in a moody and tension-packed session of identity crisis. And artistically, who will question Brody’s preference for engaging in this menacing material?

After all, he’s not as easily dismissive as peanut gallery pretty boys Ashton Kutcher toiling in The Butterfly Effect or Barry Watson flinching every which way in Boogeyman. What is so surprising about this lackluster creepfest are the high profiled backers behind this convoluted project heading up by defining collaborators Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney. Brody, along with his notable supporting players, makes for a durable bit of acceptable casting. But even with these capable performers, The Jacket feels very laborious and restrictive in its hallucinatory haze.

We’re introduced to an American Gulf War soldier named Jack Starks (Brody) who’s shot in the head while trying to help out an Iraqi youth. Of course this severe wound leaves him with terminal amnesia. Anyhow, Jack returns to his native Vermont and ends up doing a good vehicle-related deed for a substance-abusing mother named Jean (Kelly Lynch) and her daughter Jackie (Laura Marano). Shortly afterwards, Jack accepts a ride from a riff raffish motorist (Brad Renfro). When a cop decides to pull over the traveling pair, the demented driver becomes panicky and kills the officer. The stressful situation brings on a blackout phase and soon Jack is out like a light. When he eventually comes around to his wits he finds out that he has been wrongfully fingered as the cop killer.

Before one can utter the derogatory word “nutty”, we find our disillusioned vet holed up in the Alpine Grove asylum for the crime-committing unstable. At this flea-bitten facility, Jack is at the mercy of this ruthless mental hospital’s staff that includes a dastardly head nurse (Mackenzie Phillips) and a leading physician in the form of spooky and stone-faced Dr. Becker (Kris Kristofferson). The devious doc’s idea of suitable treatment for the “Starks”-raving mad Jack is to bound him tightly in a straitjacket as he twists and turns on a gurney. Jack is force fed all kinds of questionable drugs and then is abandoned in a morgue cave of sorts while left to contemplate wildly in his caustic confinement.

While lingering in the ominous dark like a trapped sardine in its sealed can, Jack finds himself time-traveling with his plagued mind as he visits the future. During his wandering lapses, he meets up with a conflicted waitress named Jackie (Keira Knightley) circa 2007. Jackie happens to be that little girl he met previously on that Vermont road with her stranded parent prior to his cop-shooting predicament. But now she’s all grown up in his consciousness and available to love and adore at will. Thanks to this peculiar re-connection, Jack is able to realize the youthful innocence of Jackie’s inner child and her intoxicating romantic allure as his adult love interest.

Despite some of the sinister Alpine Grove medical personnel that mishandled Jack with all the care of a non-talented one-armed man juggling chainsaws, there is at least a decent individual looking after his interests carefully in the caring person of Dr. Lorenson (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Becker’s resourceful assistant. And what would a mental ward drama be without the obligatory fellow patient looking to spice up the proceedings to accompany our harried hero’s journey into hell? In this case, Mackenzie (Daniel Craig) is the ragged rogue that gets to soak up the exhausting scenery.

The Jacket is a jumbled and jittery jaunt brandishing its moping mode of run-of-the-mill shock therapy. As artfully drab and daunting as it tries to be in its probing presentation, the movie chugs along uneventfully without once fundamentally offering anything substantial in originality or skittish scope. The tattered script by Massy Tadjedin has no idea whatsoever as to how to gear this sluggish fingernail fable into a suspenseful spectacle.

Admittedly, The Jacket is an assembled rip-off from better trippy tales that might recall such hit and miss targets as Gothika, The Manchurian Candidate, Three Kings, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Twelve Monkeys, and the very obvious One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Jacob’s Ladder as referenced previously. Marbury’s meandering narrative is so busy weaving a quilt of familiarized frightfests from yesteryear that it forgets to work on its own riveting terms. Basically, The Jacket trudges along and is never able to compensate for its watered-down horrific cliches regarding warfare dysfunction and the same old overwrought conventions of mental institutional mayhem we’ve witnessed countless times before.

It’s too bad that as a psychological horror thriller, Marbury’s ambitious but unevenly weird couch-tripping concoction doesn’t click on all cylinders and suffers from its disjointed delusions of misplaced grandeur. What it boils down to is this: if The Jacket doesn’t fit, you must not acquit.

Frank Ochieng

(c) Frank Ochieng 2005