The Jacket

The success of dramas that allow a character to question or manipulate a sequence of past events leading to a new outcome has been fairly prolific over the past few years. It began arguably a decade ago with broad actioners like the Back to the Future series and has led to a series of films that demand more intuition from an audience and are of broad appeal to audiences looking for a film that doesn’t declare its ‘hand’ too quickly.

Films such as Memento, Donnie Darko, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Butterfly Effect and The Machinist are all of that ilk, films which explore the ‘what if things could be different’ scenarios. The Jacket also falls into that category, broadly it might be seen as a cross between Donnie Darko and Jacobs Ladder.

Plot-wise, Jack Starks (Brody) is sent home from the 1990’s Gulf War, surviving a bullet in the head and being left with amnesia (shades of Memento) and a year later, he’s out hitch-hiking and helps a strung-out driver (Lynch) who’s the worse for booze and then gets a lift with a man (Renfro). Later, Starks blacks out after a cop stops their car. When he re-awakes he finds the cop dead and he himself holding the murder weapon. So much for a quiet re-introduction to society and did he do it?

A plea of insanity taking into account Stark’s war record and de-commission, sees him relegated to a mental institution and the strange cure techniques of a doctor (Kristofferson) who believes in giving his patients memory-inducing drugs and then fastening seat-belts, to straitjacket them into a tightly coffined cocoon as a means of trying to coax patients into facing their demons. For some, the drugs are over-bearing and the experience tragic, leaving them in a semi-catatonic state and you wondering if the doctor’s methods do more harm than good.

What will Starks do ? Learning his own stark future, Jack with the help of Jackie (Knightly), must rearrange what happens in the present to affect the future (shades of the kind of fate manipulation popular in Eternal Sunshine and Donnie Darko) if he is to have any chance of survival.

Directors Antoine Fuqua and Marc Rocco and lead actor Mark Wahlberg were due to be involved but in the end Brit John Maybury (Love is the Devil) takes the helm and Brody the lead role. Maybury manages to hold the suspense to good effect and gives the filing cabinet environment of the patients, a truly confining terror. It doesn’t always work as a film. At times it almost seem too complex for its own good, but a strongish cast give the mind-inducing hokum a genuine sense of credence with Knightley as Jackie and Kristofferson as a mad shrink particularly good ; ultimately the fact that you are made to to question things throughout is really the strongest point of the movie.

Matt Arnoldi