re:mote voices

Title: The Jacket
Cast: Adrien Brody, Keira Knightley, Kris Kristofferson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Daniel Craig, Kelly Lynch, Brad Renfro, Fish
Director: John Maybury

Jack Starks (Brody) is fighting in Iraq in 1991 when he is shot in the head. He is briefly clinically dead; miraculously he revives, though not without suffering some level of brain damage. Back in America, he is hitchhiking when a stranger picks him up. Unfortunately the car is stopped by the police, and the stranger kills the police officer. Starks is knocked out and the stranger disappears, so Starks gets the blame. Put on trial it is decided to put him in a mental hospital because of his brain damage rather than prison.

There he his abused by the twisted Dr. Becker (Kristofferson), who uses extreme psychiatric techniques that were banned in the seventies. Strange things happen as result, it seems that Starks is going to lose it entirely. Undergoing experiences that seem to suggest that he has travelled into the future. There he meets a young woman, Jackie Price (Knightley), whom he had met as a child - she tells him that he can't be Starky because Starky is dead. From this we have the questions - has he really travelled into the future, and if he has is he going to die and how? With the help of Price and Dr. Lorenson (Jennifer Jason Leigh), one of the other psychiatrists, Starky hopes to answer these questions.

The Jacket seems on the whole to have not been very well received. I know some people want more of a political undertone since the film starts with the Iraq war - I guess the plot could have used any head injury, so it does lead to the question why bother if you aren't going to go there? Others expected more from director John Maybury after his debut film, a biography about the artist Francis Bacon - though I've not seen that so can't really comment.

Plot wise and in cinematic terms, it is hard to deny that The Jacket is derivative. There are elements of films like One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest and Jacob's Ladder, or even something like Donnie Darko. But the most obvious parallels can be drawn between The Jacket and Twelve Monkeys; both revolve around the idea of time travel and mental hospitals - Adrien Brody can be compared to Bruce Willis's character, Jennifer Jason Leigh with Madeline Stowe's, and Daniel Craig to Brad Pitt.

The Jacket is one of those films I went into without particularly knowing much about. I didn't read the bad reviews, or the expectations. And to be honest I just enjoyed it for what it is, we don't get enough out there weird films - with The Jacket being a satisfying example of the genre.