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Anatole Litvak gave film buffs the template for life in an institution for the mentally ill with his 1948 film "The Snake Pit." This was one of the first films to deal intelligently with mental breakdowns and the slow recovery process. Along came Milos Forman twenty-seven years later with a more powerful story, one which started the now-fashionable view that the inmates of an asylum are more sane than their professional keepers. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" featured Ken Kesey's story about a feisty misfit who enters the wards and inspires his low- self-esteem patients to assert themselves. Things didn't turn out to well for him.
How do things turn out for Jack Starks (Adrien Brody), who is accused of killing a state trooper on a Vermont highway, has lost his memory of the event, and is sentenced by a jury to not guilty by reason of insanity? That depends on how you interpret the conclusion, one which is subject to interpretation and has led to a post-film debate among the critics who have seen an advance showing.
Based on a story by Tom Bleecker and Marc Rocco and adapted for the screen by Massy Tadjedin, "The Jacket," directed by John Maybury, defies attempts by the audience to find a genre, which is probably because the film does not fit neatly into any genre–any more than Jack Starks's emotional troubles fit a pattern that might be found in the encylopedia that psychoanalysts use to define specific problems. We can however, come up with a mixture of genres. "The Jacket" is gothic, because it deals with horrifying, supernatural events of the sort common in the literature of the 18th and 19th centuries. It's sci-fi, because a man is projected fifteen years into the future, using that advantage to change events and saves lives. Romance is involved, albeit to a small degree, and some elements that have been used on the legitimate stage by the theater of the absurd come into the picture.
"The Jacket" was shown at the recent Sundance festival to great acclaim, not surprising since the audience for this annual event tends to be young, hip and more adaptable to experimentalism than the typical movie crowds.
In "The Jacket," Adrien Brody's character, Jack Starks, comes back from the dead three times, though to be more accurate he had never actually passed over to the other side: in one situations he was tagged as a corpse. As a soldier in the 1991 Gulf War, he had part of his brain blown away by a innocent- looking enemy agent, forcing him to lose his memory. Picked up by a stranger (Brad Renfro) on a chilly day in Vermont, he is involved in the murder of a policeman and sent by the judge to an institution for the criminally insane–the sort of place that some people say is worse than any jail. There he is treated as a guinea pig by Dr. Becker (Kris Kristofferson), the senior psychiatrist who has given up on conventional treatments and uses the bizarre technique of putting strait-jacketed patients into a morgue-like drawer for hours at a time. There Jack's mind goes on a "trip," meets the beautiful waitress, Jackie Pride (Keira Knightley), and ultimately convinces her that she could avert a disaster that occurred years earlier.
The supporting roles add immeasurably to the story. Jennifer Jason Leigh as Dr. Lorenson acts against the cynical type she usually plays by performing in the role of a psychiatrist who opposes the harsh treatments of the supervising physician, taking a great interest in the case of Jack Starks. Daniel Craig as Mackenzie, a patient who tried to kill his wife thirty times before he is put away in this institution takes a measured approach, acts neither off-the-wall nuts nor as a person who retains all his marbles.
Ultimately, Keira Knightley as the beautiful woman who has unfortunately taken on some of her mother's self-destructive ways and especially Adrien Brody carry the work, Brody as a tragic fellow who is shot almost to death in the Gulf, then jacketed and stored like a sack of potatoes in a mortuary-like drawer, nonetheless emerging from his "trip" inside the metal box to become a hero to one dysfunctional family.
By : Harvey S. Karten
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"I was twenty-seven years old the first time I died," Jack Starks (Adrien Brody) explains to us in voice-over. Although it begins briefly with the Gulf War in 1991, most of THE JACKET is set in 2007 and in flashback in 1992 when Jack dies a second time. In 2007, Jack enlists the help of the lovely but wasted Jackie (Keira Knightley), an ambitionless alcoholic just like her dead mother. In a previous life, Jack had helped them both when Jackie's drunken mom had truck trouble.
The secret to Jack's time traveling, as he slips back to 1992 to investigate the circumstances of his second death, is a straightjacket and a morgue-like human body drawer where a nefarious Dr. Becker (Kris Kristofferson) likes to lock up his patient in a tortuous form of mental treatment. Refreshing playing something other than a prostitute for a change, Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Dr. Lorenson, a junior physician who dares to question Dr. Becker's horrendous methods.
Like THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT, but not nearly as much fun, THE JACKET is more often tedious than tense, although it does contain a few genuinely disturbing moments. Only briefly as a guilty pleasure -- Knightley has two brief nude scenes -- does the movie have much to offer.
THE JACKET runs 1:42. It is rated R for "violence, language and brief sexuality/nudity" and would be acceptable for teenagers.
By : Steve Rhodes (http://www.internetreviews.com/)
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