I do not mean it as a slight when I say that John Maybury’s The Jacket plays like an amped-up version of The Outer Limits or The Twilight Zone. It has the same parabolic twists, the same flirtations with the fantastic and supernatural (in this case, blurring divisions between the present, future and past) the same symmetrical structure that resolves all events and eventualities. Because it is a full-length, theatrical release, there is room for more plot development, thematic rhyming, eloquent cinematography and restrained, yet vibrant pyrotechnics. Not a lot of what’s going on The Jacket seems new, not really, but stylistic integrity and meticulous detail carry the day. Movie-makers have been playing with the supposedly symbiotic relationship between temporal effect and cause for a very long time so I imagine they had to step carefully when creating The Jacket not to seem derivative or lame. Like The Outer Limits and Twilight Zone, it’s not exactly Science Fiction, not exactly Thriller, not exactly Horror, it falls somewhere in-between, with its ghoulish tint, its pale pasty looking characters, its torture and hysteria lurking just around the next corner, waiting to shake you the hell up.
In voice-over Jack Starks, our hero and narrator tells us at the outset that “I died for the first time....“ and initiates a quasi-spiritual journey in which he experiences deaths both great and small, presumably shifting between states of consciousness and rungs of the ladder to enlightenment. Adrien Brody, suggesting a very attractive and vaguely melancholy (but not actual) ghost moves from one excruciating episode to the next with brief periods of respite in-between. Starks is a recent war-veteran revived from what was originally perceived as a fatal head wound. His bouts with amnesia make it impossible to defend himself in a murder trial, so in an act of mercy and judiciousness the jury sends him to a hospital for the criminally insane. There a craggy-faced Dr. Becker (Kris Kristofferson) whose motives are highly suspect at best has him strait-jacket, injected with powerful mind-altering drugs and shoved into a drawer reserved for cadavers, during the wee-hours when this kind of abuse can go undetected. And lo and behold, this unconscionably horrific process catapults him into the near-future. Starks becomes so hooked on his ability to impact the present with satisfying results (unlike say, in LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven) that he resists another, more benevolent doctor’s (Jennifer Jason Leigh) attempts to rescue him from these ghastly “treatments.”
Some of these sequences are difficult to take, and again Maybury’s key to success seems to be modulation and virtuosity of depiction. Starks is subjected to painful, horrific situations, especially when he’s confined, but you can almost feel Maybury resisting the temptation to push it over the top. He stops short of punishing the audience in the same way that Jack is subjected to abuse (though with some sort of escape valve in place). The Jacket lacks that shimmer many scary films acquire when we know we’ve moved into a realm of the implausible. The psychiatric hospital is just grounded enough to make its sinister ambience all the more unnerving. It’s easy to distance ourselves when a film’s milieu is obviously surreal or uncanny, but when the director instead sends us these little hints that something is terribly wrong, when the actors all look somehow emaciated or grotesque in small ways, when that feels connected to the skeletal trees or dingy linoleum or the muted luster of the snow, the effect is keen and terrible.
There’s a subtext made apparent in The Jacket when Jack Starks informs Leigh’s doctor that she must use electroshock therapy to save a patient from what was misdiagnosed as autism. The symbolism here, when clustered with the Draconian experiments of Dr. Becker and the calamities that Starks and other characters are subjected to, is unmistakable. Sometimes we must be literally jolted out of our stupor to thrive or achieve resolution. We must be locked into a coffin to force us from the prison of our damaged brains. I suppose we can cut The Jacket some slack in this regard as it is, after all, a movie, and not meant to be taken literally. It troubles me though, because after taking the full effect, the full experience into account, it seems dangerously close to saying atrocities are just another opportunity to take that next quantum spiritual leap. Kind of like those sadists who claim they’re just giving their victims what they want. You could say that any traumatic occasion gives us a shot at personal growth. But The Jacket feels more ominous than that. More dodgy. I’m not comfortable with a film that arguably confuses psychotics with shamans.