Starring Adrien The Pianist Brody & Keira Guenivere Knightley, with fine supporting performances from Jennifer Jason Leigh willing to look homely & Kris Kristofferson willing to be a whiny villain, it is just about possible to say The Jacket has a splendid cast.
The film certainly has its flaws, the main one being the script's inability to find an ending. The DVD extras include three alternative endings, all inferior to the one that was used, but all of them proof only that at storytelling art this tale just didn't know where the heck it was going.
Brody is a Gulf War veteran with a serious head injury. He is charged with a violent crime which he did not commit but is too brain-damaged to defend himself, so is condemned to a madhouse for the criminally insane.
Kristofferson, bordering on mad scientist, has a theory that psychological torture will cure men who are violently psychotic. The fact that his previous guinea pig was killed by the process hasn't changed his thinking.
Loaded up with psychotropic drugs, bound into a dirty ragged straight jacket, & stuffed in a morgue drawer to experience terror & deprivation, Brody finds escape by travelling forward in time where he discovers that he is going to be killed in the madhouse. He tries between bouts of torture to change his apparent fate, & while tortured he time-travels in order to play detective with a newly met girlfriend hoping to uncover exactly how or why he was killed.
It's not actually much of a story & to make it seem less simple, it holds no answers. Is the man in the straightjacket really sane & innocent or is he the nuttiest of all? Is he really time-travelling or hallucinating he's doing so? Can he really change his fate or does he only imagine that he can? The viewer gets to decide, because nothing in the film is certain. With a less interesting cast this wouldn't've worked at all. Even with a great cast, it only works a little.
copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl
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