'Jacket' works as multifaceted drama
By The Associated Press
Either you're going to go with a movie about time travel, or you're not.
"The Jacket" is a movie about time travel that makes you want to go with it, based on the strength of its performances and the fact that if you try really hard to wrap your brain around it, the premise kinda sorta makes sense.
"The Jacket" is a time-travel movie, but also a romance, a mystery, a psychological drama and a paranoid thriller.
Adrien Brody's character, Gulf War veteran Jack Starks, may be traveling in time to the future while undergoing experimental treatments at a mental institution. Or it may just be all in his mind.
Brody is so believably tormented, he makes it possible to accept that Starks repeatedly jumps forward 15 years to the same small Vermont town he's in now, where he is involved with waitress Jackie (Keira Knightley). It's the kind of nuanced work you've come to expect from the star.
Starks, a U.S. Marine sergeant, returns home after being shot in the head in Iraq. While hitchhiking, he comes across a mother (Kelly Lynch) and her 8-year-old daughter alongside their broken-down truck, and a young man (Brad Renfro) who's on his way to the Canadian border.
He gets in the car. Police pull them over. There's a shooting and Starks ends up on trial for murder, though he has no idea what happened. He's found not guilty by reason of insanity and placed in a state hospital. Director John Maybury covers this ground with smooth montages and imagery.
Here's where things get weird. A physician, Dr. Becker (a menacing Kris Kristofferson), subjects him to an unorthodox procedure. He inflicts it several times on Starks, who flashes ahead to the future, and to Jackie, while in the drawer -- and liking it.
Maybury, who professes to "come from the experimental avant-garde in England," depicts Starks' claustrophobic hallucinations with an onslaught of images and tricks: dizzying zooms and pans, sped-up sequences and oversaturated colors.
He didn't need it. Massy Tadjedin's script is trippy enough, and Brody and Knightley are more than compelling, separately and together, trying to figure out how Starks ended up where he is and how to change his fate.
Knightley gives the performance of her young life; the British beauty is unrecognizable, with smudges of dark eyeliner and a mass of messy hair. She dropped her voice to a different register.
Jennifer Jason Leigh is also in "The Jacket" as a fellow doctor of Dr. Becker.
"The Jacket," is rated R for violence, language and brief sexuality/nudity.
2.5 stars (out of four)