Time bandit
What's love got to do with The Jacket?
By Cheryl Eddy

PITY THE CINEMATIC lovers whose passion is compromised by the tricky tangles of time travel. It's hard enough just being in a normal relationship, let alone one that transcends laws of physics and common sense. Sometimes, as in The Terminator, the complications are outweighed by the urgency of the situation (say, eluding the killing machine hell-bent on eliminating the woman who'll spawn humanity's last hope for survival). In other situations, as in Somewhere in Time, the romance runs roughshod over everything else.

Time-travel matchmaking goes another round in The Jacket, a welcome sight for anyone still mourning Adrien Brody's unfortunate participation in last year's nightmare-inducing (not a compliment) The Village. For the most part, The Jacket manages to contain its gooey, cavity-inducing core in layers of gritty confusion, unsettling flashbacks and flash-forwards, and close-ups of Brody's expressively haunted face. Brody plays Jack Starks, a Gulf War veteran whose stint in Iraq came with an unfortunate parting gift: a head wound that may or may not have lasting, extremely mind-fucking effects.

Shades of Jacob's Ladder, the Manchurian Candidate remake, and anything resembling political commentary dissolve as soon as Jack's military background falls into plot-device mode. After the soldier returns home, he's implicated in a roadside shooting – and his injury scores him a one-way ticket to an insane asylum located somewhere twixt Twelve Monkeys (but sadly, not La jetée) and One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. There grizzled Dr. Becker (Kris Kristofferson), who suspects Jack may not actually be Starks-raving mad, taps the new patient as a test case in his unconventional brand of therapy.

Here's where the titular garment – a straitjacket, and a gnarly one at that – comes into play, as Jack is strapped in, doped up, and slammed into an empty morgue drawer. Once inside, he has visions of the future, which include a hard-drinking waitress named Jackie (Keira Knightley, sporting a work-in-progress American accent) who just might have played a key role in his murky, postwar but pre-hospital past.

As the jacket sessions intensify, so do Jack's interactions with Jackie (hey, wait a second: Jack, Jackie, jacket. Whooooa!). When they're together in the year 2007, everything seems absolutely real and far preferable to the concurrent events taking place in a dirty prison hospital circa 1992. When Jack's questioned about the treatments, he growls, "They're making me feel like a different person!" And since he'd prefer to be that person in 2007 than himself in 1992, he deliberately misbehaves so he can get shoved into the drawer and get back to the future (the power of love, as they say, is a curious thing).

British director and artist John Maybury has "edgy" written all over his résumé, which includes the 1998 Francis Bacon biopic Love Is the Devil. He has also directed a string of music videos – likely establishing connections that lured Brian Eno to compose The Jacket's score. Maybury's way with visuals spackles many of the holes in Massy Tadjedin's script, as he slithers through Jack's troubled brain and mirrors Jack's man-without-a-past-or-future blankness with barren, snowy landscapes. He's also helped by having frequent David Lynch cinematographer Peter Deming (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive) behind the camera.

But all the visual zip in the world can't conceal what an ultimately ho-hum story this is. Half the fun of time-travel movies (even ones that take themselves as seriously as The Jacket does) is picking up on anachronisms between the time periods, but Jack doesn't give a crap about anything in 2007 except hunting down the people he knew back in 1992. Sure, he's on a tight schedule, but you'd think he'd at least be a little bit curious. The Jackie character is similarly unrealistic, too conveniently available to help Jack with his metaphysical detective work and too quick to begin passionately sighing, "Come back to me, Jack!" when he slips out of her reality.

One explanation for this suspiciously perfect future would be that Jack is simply imagining the whole damn thing – but there's precious little room for ambiguity once Jack begins bringing back facts from 2007. And despite an intriguing medical-science fiction premise, The Jacket is most interested in being about a seemingly fated love affair. Too bad – amid all the war-is-hell recollections, morgue-drawer freak-outs, sinister mise-en-scène, and where-is-my-mind? life explorations – the Jack-Jackie relationship feels more like a subplot, a rather low-stakes wrinkle in time.

'The Jacket' opens Fri/4 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock for show times.