| STRAIT IS THE GATE : John Maybury's The Jacket [7/10] |
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| Thursday, 19 May 2005 | |
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In many ways, The Jacket is to its star Adrien Brody what 2003's Gothika was to Halle Berry: a twisty, nothing-is-what-it-seems thriller, directed by a European, largely set in a sinister, secluded mental hospital, its profile boosted the lead performer's relatively recent, history-and-headline-making Academy Award success. Even Gothika's clunky tagline "Because someone is dead doesn't mean they're gone" could quite easily have been re-used for The Jacket, in which Brody's Desert Storm veteran Jack Starks find himself jumping between 1993 - and the asylum to which he's been committed after allegedly killing a traffic-cop - and 2007, when he romances dark-eyed beauty Jackie (Keira Knightley) and tries to find out how and why he "died" 14 years before. The 'portal' for this apparent time-hopping is the morgue-style metal cabinet in which he's placed, strapped into the strait-jacket of the movie's title, by maverick psychiatrist Dr Becker (Kris Kristofferson). Despite their similarities, the fates of Gothika and The Jacket at the box-office proved wildly divergent. Berry's vehicle shrugged off largely hostile reviews to open at number one and rake in a healthy $60 in the USA (on a reported $40m budget). The Jacket, which cost around $19m, has petered out at a paltry $6.2m. Director Maybury took the unusual step of publicly lambasting the film's handling: "They're promoting this film as a horror film, which is a lie. There's going to be a disaster the first weekend, when all the kids who think they're going to see The Grid or The Hole, find out they're watching some pretentious European drama." The Jacket may indeed do better in Europe, which has an understandably greater tolerance for "pretentious European drama" than North America. And by any measure it's a superior piece of work to Gothika - not least because pictures with a time-travel theme do tend to be much better at cloaking their fundamental absurdities than those of the 'questionable-sanity' sub-genre of which Gothika is a functional but clunky example. Indeed, The Jacket fits snugly alongside the likes of Frequency and The Butterfly Effect as enjoyably convoluted journeys through the space-time continuum. As in those pictures, the primary purpose of hopping through time turns out to be the salvation of a doomed, beloved relative (in this instance, Kelly Lynch as Jackie's mother Jean). Coincidentally, in the week of The Jacket's opening British TV series Doctor Who tackled very similar territory with its acclaimed episode Father's Day - in which the loved one ends up sacrificing himself to prevent a much greater evil from coming to pass. The Jacket's script - by Massy Tadjedin, from a story by Tom Bleecker and Mark Rocco - doesn't put that kind of original spin on the material, though the finale does leave itself open to multiple interpretations. Several viewers have complained that the plot of The Jacket doesn't quite add up, but trying to sort out the paradoxes of time-travel movies is seldom other than a fruitless task. And Maybury's striking direction - not to mention the contributions from a strong cast including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Daniel Craig and Mackenzie (American Graffiti) Phillips in relatively minor roles - makes it very easy to be distracted from the screenplay's more ludicrous and implausible elements. With at least one foot in the avant-garde - his last picture was the impressionistic Francis Bacon biopic Love is the Devil (1998) - Maybury brings an edgy, nervy aesthetic to what is essentially quite pulpy material. So it's disappointing that so many of the mental-hospital scenes relies so heavily on the genre's most worn-out cliches. He's much happier depicting the confused recesses of Starks' mind, crafting blurry, near-subliminal montages which showcase the precision editing of Emma Hickox. Peter Deming's widescreen cinematography, meanwhile, seamlessly blends two shooting-locations (half in Scotland, half in Canada) and persuasively captures the stark chilliness of the picture's Dead Zone-ish mid-winter time-frame(s). Neil Young 18th May, 2005 THE JACKET : [7/10] : USA (US/UK/Ger 2005 (copyright-date 2004) : John MAYBURY : 102 mins seen at UGC cinema, Boldon, South Tyneside (UK), 17th May 2005 - public show |
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