Two very skinny people find each other in “The Jacket,” a turgid new mind-bender of the “Memento” school. The slim actors are Adrien Brody and It girl Keira Knightley, who are required to be so haunted in this movie they practically waste away.
| Dreary: A tale of a Gulf War veteran (Adrien Brody) with memory loss, subjected to wiggy experiments in time and space. Brody and Keira Knightley suffer convincingly, but the movie is turgid.
Rated: R rating is for nudity, violence, language. Now showing: |
Brody’s character, Jack Starks, begins the movie by getting shot in the head during the Gulf War. Apparently dead, he is returned to life (or is he?) with a serious memory-loss condition.
Back in the States, the unlucky Jack finds himself committed to a hospital for the criminally insane, convicted of a stateside murder. (Since he can’t remember anything about the event, he’s not a compelling witness in his own defense.)
An evil doctor, played by Kris Kristofferson in an unusual haircut, decides to use Jack as a guinea pig. He shoots Jack full of mind-altering drugs, binds him in a straight-jacket, and slides him inside a morgue-style drawer – leaving him there to freak out for a few hours in the darkness.
The doctor has performed this experiment on other patients, though it is unclear whether they were all survivors of gunshots to the head. That would make for a very small subject group, it seems to me.
As cruel as this experiment is, it must be deemed a success, or at least sort of interesting. After all, it allows Jack to do some kind of astral-projection kind of thing – maybe – and he meets a young woman (Knightley) who’s down on her luck and eager to take in a drifter with a head injury.
There are twists to come, and connections to be made. Also a couple of nude scenes involving Brody and Knightley, proving just how skinny they really are.
The director, John Maybury, is an arty type who worked in experimental films and music videos before his previous feature, “Love is the Devil.” His approach is overdetermined and cold, and he skips over logical issues in the plot.
He’s got some interesting supporting actors, including Jennifer Jason Leigh as a concerned doctor, Kelly Lynch as a burnout, and Daniel Craig as a mental patient. Keira Knightley assumes an American accent and a morbid attitude with surprising self-assurance. Adrien Brody suffers convincingly, but let’s hope that his Oscar win for “The Pianist” and his lean face don’t doom him to these kinds of tortured roles.
At various points you may suspect, from the time shifts and coincidences, that what we are watching is not real but perhaps the thoughts going through Jack’s mind in the seconds after his gunshot wound. At least, that’s a theory I toyed with as I tried to stay interested in this dreary tale.
Adrien Brody and Keira Knightley star in “The Jacket.”
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