REVIEWED - THE JACKET: AS in the recent remake of The Manchurian Candidate, The Jacket opens in the early 1990s during the Gulf War, on an unexpected act of violence that will have traumatic consequences for an American soldier stationed there. A gaunt, intense Adrien Brody plays Jack Starks, a US marine sergeant who is shot in the head by a young Iraqi boy and declared dead.
He survives, but is so shrouded in amnesia that his life will never be the same again. Returning home to Vermont, Starks has two fateful encounters, one of which leads to his confinement at Alpine Grove, an idyllically named but forbidding institution for the criminally insane.
Is Starks a criminal? Is he insane? Does he, in his altered state, have any idea? There are more questions than answers in the fragmented scenario of The Jacket, a demanding and thought-provoking audiovisual experience crafted with an abundance of ambition by John Maybury, an English painter and youngish veteran of experimental avant-garde films and music videos.
The title of The Jacket refers to the straitjacket in which Jack Starks is encased at Alpine Grove, as part of a sensory deprivation therapy programme devised by a confrontational psychiatrist (Kris Kristofferson), who pumps Starks full of drugs and locks him inside a mortuary drawer for long periods. Unable to move within those creepily claustrophobic restraints, Starks goes into mental overdrive, piecing together shards of memory from his tormented recent past - and finding links to his future.
This is a movie that defies genre classification as it blends thriller, murder mystery, paranoid drama and time-travel fantasy with disorienting use of sound and hallucinatory imagery into a challenging and harrowing whole.
There are elements that recall Jacob's Ladder and 12 Monkeys, Memento and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, as the viewer is drawn into the protagonist's plight and left, like him, to decide where reality begins and ends.
Uncompromisingly adventurous, the film demands an alertness and a willing suspension of disbelief, and it helps significantly that, after a hyperactive opening reel, Maybury allows us to absorb, digest and contemplate the information we are given in such fractured form.
It is hardly surprising that the movie has sharply divided critics and audiences, although there can be little argument about its outstanding production values, nor about the quality of its imaginatively chosen cast, in which Brody is perfectly edgy and intense as a man whose opening line is, "I was 27 the first time I died."
