chani | Before going back to school (Reply)

Today I saw The Jacket starring Adrien Brody. Interesting movie despite its flaws.

Jack Starks first tells us he was 27 the first time he died. It was in 1991 during "Desert Storm" in Iraq when he got shot in the head by a child trying to protect his family. Then we see him waking up in the hospital where is body had just been declared dead. 12 months later he's walking along a road in a cold winter, and he meets a child with her drunk mother near their broken car. He helps them, fixing the car and gives the child, Jackie (Jack, Jackie...there might be a connection here!), his military plaque, his ID. Later he's trying to hitch a ride and is picked up by a young driver until a police officer pulls over...Jack says during the trial that he doesn't remember what happened, but the police officer was shot. He only can remember the girl Jackie and her mother Jean, but they can't be found. Hallucinations? Suppression? He must be guilty but as a veteran they decide that he suffers from Gulf War Syndrome and he's sentenced to a mental institution...where he becomes the guinea pig of Dr Becker (not the nice Dr Becker from the Little House in the Prairie!).

It's Christmas but Jack is far from being gifted. He's drugged up by Becker and put in a straight jacket (hence the title of the film), then thrown in a the confined space of a morgue drawer. The locker becomes a door and Starks then experiments several trips through his memories to eventually find himself in 2007 where he meets again...Jackie! Jackie whose life is a real mess. She 's alone and sad and drinks as her late mother used to (some dark humour here...guess how Joan died? She passed out from drinking with a fag in her hand, a fire ensued and she burned up...Joan of Arc anyone?). He also learns that Jack Starks died in 2002, January...

But I don't think that this movie is about Time Travel. It's a love story and it's a film about the perception of reality (the locker and the drugs opening the doors of perceptions...Jim Morrison and Co where are you?), about what it means to be alive, about what could have been and what could be if....

Many interpretations are possible. Jack Starks may have hallucinations, and he also may have died indeed in Iraq or when the police officer was killed on the road since he remembers during one "trip" in the locker that he was shot himself (again in the head)! then , besides in one last scene Dr Becker tells him "we are all dead"...and Jackie could have died along with her drunk mother on the road after he fixed the car after all. That woman was too drunk to drive.

We also learn during the movie that one of the doctors, Dr Lorenson (played by the always excellent Jennifer Jason Leigh) is secretely treating a kid, Babak who cannot speak...and this kid strangely looks like the one who shot Jack in Iraq...Here we could interpret the mute kid in a very political way!

Jack looks like undead most of time, his body being often carried out and the morgue drawer is kind of a clue. BTW Jack keeps dying from a wound in the head during the movie (in Iraq first, then on the road, and at last in January 2002 as it was foreshadowed).

Anyway, the film is interesting for its construction and shoots rather than for its plot or meaning. The first scene in the morgue drawer is powerful and painful at once. The close-ups on Adrien Brody's eyes are really nerve-racking. You can feel the claustrophobia he is suffering. I also liked Daniel Craig's performance a lot.

The love story is interesting too, because it works on 3 timelines. When Jack and Jackie first meet, she's a kid and he's her hero (he fixed the car and gave her his soldier ID), then he meets her in 2007 and she' s all grown-up but just so pretty in a lolita kind of way. Here I need to point out something. I think that Hollywood has found a new mould for the actresses because Keira Knightley is the doppelgänger of Nathalie Portman in that movie! I think they are cloning girls over there and the pretty slim brunette with big brown eyes is a very much in demand model since Wynona Ryder.

Well, so Jack and Jackie get closer (she very conveniently believes his story and decides to help him) and they become lovers. Afterwards he gets to see her again in 1992 while she's still a child but while he's already known her in a biblical sense as a woman, and finally they meet again in 2007 after he died and changed her life as if their first 2007 meeting had never happened. Ok here I need to explain something.

Jack uses his knowledge of the future to fix things in his present (just like he fixed the car): he tells the good doctor Levinson how to treat Babak, and she drives him to Jackie's house where he gives Jackie's mother a letter. The Jackie in the end of the film is happy, works in a hospital, doesn't drink and still has her mother. So basically Jack saved Joan from the fire, Jackie from a crappy life and Babak from the neverending epilepsy crisis that made him dumb!

So maybe it's a film about penance and redemption. The American soldier who died in Iraq might have need that.