The Jacket

Directed by John Maybury
Written by Tom Bleecker (story), Marc Rocco (story), Massy Tadjedin

If you were wondering what Adrien Brody could possibly do as a followup to his sensitive portrayal of the retarded Noah Percy in The Village (and really, what normal moviegoer wouldn't be?), the answer would appear to be to star in a very, very retarded movie.

Brody plays Jack Starks, a man suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and probably brain damage after being shot in the head by a little kid during the first Gulf War. A few months later, he's back in the States, apparently living as some sort of drifter (this is never explained, though I guess it happens). He helps a little girl and her apparently-deranged mother start their truck. This scene is important because we meet the girl again (now Deeply Troubled) several years on in her life. We know she is Deeply Troubled because she drinks a lot, she smokes a lot, she appears to have bought all of her home furnishings from Urban Outfitters (you gotta watch out for those Urban Outfitters chicks, seriously), and she wears black nail polish. Hey, her mother wore black nail polish! Important character detail here!

Meanwhile, Jack gets falsely accused of a cop killing (Damn you, Brad Renfro!) and is sent to a mental institution where he undergoes a super-secret, radical therapy (presided over by a waxy Kris Kristofferson) involving...ahem...being pumped full of drugs, getting tied up in the titular jacket, and being locked in a morgue drawer for hours at a time. Some combination of the above, along with the PTSD or the brain damage causes Jack to...ahem...travel into the future. This is never explained. I'm guessing it's the jacket, it must be some sort of a magic jacket. Otherwise, the movie would be called, say, The Drugs, or possibly The Drawer, or maybe even The Brain Damage.

So he goes into the future and...that's basically it. He's not there to clear his name, or to save anybody, or to help mankind, or anything. The fact that he learns of his own death is basically an afterthought, and the subplot involving his trying to solve his own (possible) murder sort of loses steam and is abandoned partway.

I guess in this way, it is attempting at some sort of realism, or as close to realism as you can get in a movie involving time travel. If you woke up one morning and discovered that you could travel through time, face it, you wouldn't do it to save humanity, you'd probably do it just to make out with the hot chick (here, Keira Knightley, who was always just a blonde Winona Ryder, but here is just plain Winona Ryder).

There's a lot more plot involving another inmate who tried to kill his wife and Jennifer Jason Leigh curing an autistic boy, none of which really goes anywhere, makes much sense, or is worth detailing, except...under what possible circumstance would a doctor let a patient (whom she knows that a court of law has judged to be criminally insane) out of hospital grounds, LET ALONE let wander about unsupervised, LET ALONE let him go into a stranger's house (again, unsupervised) that she knows has a kid in it, LET ALONE ask HIM if HE'S okay by HIMself, if SHE should just wait by the fekking truck?

Like I said, none of this really matters, as the focus of the movie is on the time travel, but as the focus of the movie, it here simply signifies nothing. If you saw the not-completely-dissimilar The Butterfly Effect, you saw how incredibly narcissistic and simple-minded that movie was in its judgments of which past actions effect which present person at whatever moment is most convenient to them, and have absolutely no effect on anyone (or anywhen??) else. Well, at least Ashton was trying to protect his girlfriend from becoming some cut-up four-dollar crack whore. The Jacket goes one level of narcissism further by not having any actual reason for the act other than the act itself. Yes, certain things come up, and a Signficant Letter is written (albeit on Asylum for the Criminally Insane letterhead - probably wanted to tear that off before delivering that letter there, sport), but again, mere afterthoughts. Like, not only is it narcissistic, it's like being narcissistic for narcissism's sake, which I suppose would be the very definition of narcissism (I hope no one is trying to read this review aloud).

The movie you should be watching, of course, is Twelve Monkeys, which had all manner of things this movie did not, not least of which is a sense of humor.