The Jacket
is a cold one.
Springtime is almost here, and with it comes the daily struggle to determine how to dress. In the morning, your breath may still hang in the air, but by afternoon that wool coat you're wearing is too darn warm. What you need is a jacket, a middle-of-the-road solution to your wardrobe worries.
Capitalizing on this fashion favorite, Hollywood offers
The Jacket
, a middle-of-the-road
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film about an amnesia-stricken veteran named Jack Starks (Adrien Brody) who is committed to a mental institution after being falsely convicted of a crime. Inside the institution, pumped full of drugs and locked in a morgue body drawer as part of an experimental treatment by mad psychiatrist Dr. Becker (Kris Kristofferson), Jack begins hallucinating, foreseeing his own death and traveling into the future to help a waitress (Keira Knightley) get her life together.
Packaged, titled and sometimes shot like your average horror-fest,
The Jacket
actually aspires to be a stylish
Silence of the Lambs
-type thriller with plenty of
Twilight Zone
creepiness thrown in, but in achieving this goal the film falls short. Brody's scenes inside the body drawer have a suffocating, claustrophobic edge that is dulled by hyperactive special effects shots darting across the screen at vomit-inducing speed and overloading the viewer with too much visual information á la cable news channels.
In spite of this,
The Jacket
refuses to hang limply over the back of a chair. Director John Maybury (
Love is the Devil
) manages to leave the MTV editing alone during an argument between Jack and Dr. Becker, pulling in tight on mouths and eyes and hovering, thus recapturing some of the tension lost during body drawer scenes. Alpine Grove, the
mental hospital where Jack is being held, is successfully shot in washed-out colors, creating a dreamlike atmosphere of cold fluorescent light.
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When things look their bleakest, the film is buoyed by the performance not of Oscar-winner Brody, but gravel-voiced Kristofferson. Becker is a reserved and sinister villain, like Dr. No with a prescription pad. Kristofferson's monotone and sometimes stiff delivery give his character a quiet, menacing energy without which the film would be lost. The high points are few, however, and the film begins to sink under the weight of its own pretension as it wears on.
Borrowing from such sources as
Total Recall
,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
and even TV's
Quantum Leap
, the film ends up a mish-mash of genres that occasionally meld, if only for five minutes at a time. But instead of warming audiences in the final stretch before Spring,
The Jacket
leaves one feeling cold and wondering why it wasn't left hanging in the closet.
