Ray Pride

"An insult to the brain," meaning an injury brought on by a blow to the head, is one of those perfumed bits of medical terminology that has almost literary resonance.

Think, too, of phrases like "exquisite tenderness," describing the lingering sensation of pain-pleasure that comes after a particular nasty bruise (or, for men, a kick to the testicles). "The Jacket," which debuted at Sundance in January, is a twisting, thinly plotted yet visually vigorous thriller about memory and hope.

The Sundance press screening, which I missed after a last-minute fall on the ice, held its own brainy injuries, with a New York journalist almost coming to blows with an elderly San Francisco journalist who took his seat, insisting her interview with director John Maybury the next day was more important. Among those who managed to gain precious admittance to the jammed screening, the wan joke ran that "The Jacket" was an insult, a crass failure, and hadn't earned even that modest scuffle between East and West.

Which is a minute illustration of why film festivals can be dangerous to your critical health: it's the movie, silly, not the gossip. In its thematic essentials, "The Jacket" has the timbre of a movie made by co-producer Steven Soderbergh (who joins seventeen other credited producers). Yet Maybury, who began his career as a painter and worked with the late Derek Jarman as set and costume designer for 1977's "Jubilee" and editor of 1987's "Last of England," is an antsy visualist. For shorthand, the story partakes of tricksiness that's a little "12 Monkeys" by way of its precursor, Chris Marker's "La Jetee."

Opening in 1991, "The Jacket" starts with Jack Starks (Adrien Brody), a US Marine Sergeant in the first Gulf War almost dying from a gunshot wound to the head. Suffering memory lapses, he returns home to Vermont, where a good deed in the snow while hitchhiking a few months later, involving a broken-down pickup, a drunken mom and an 8-year-old girl named Jackie spirals into a small-town murder charge. Starks is found not guilty, but is sent away to a hospital for the criminally insane, where a Dr. Becker, played by Kris Kristofferson, a gorgon of medical malpractice, face riven with crevasses, lined deep with guilt and grief, experiments on his patients with hallucinogens and restraints. Starks' bursts of memory, and eventually, what may or may not be actual time travel, comes when he's bound, drugged and slid into a drawer in the morgue in the hospital basement. (This tightly coiled gimmick, the reserve implicit in this cool-to-the-touch summa of claustrophobia, seems Soderbergh-esque at any distance.)

Brody plays Starks as a bundle of tics and fevers, but Maybury's style is more intent than M. Night Shyamalan's, who used Brody's itch-to-twitch in a mostly long shot performance in "The Village." His memories open out into a new vista, in the year 2007. At a diner, Starks meets Jackie (Keira Knightley, capably, snappily, channeling the damage of an early 1970s Jane Fonda character), a waitress who takes him in like a hurt pup. Back at her apartment, where she lets him spend a chaste Christmas Eve, clues to his past, and several possible futures, pile up. (Their later encounters have a peculiar sensual urgency.)

Maybury, who considers himself part of England's "experimental avant-garde," is quoted in his film's press kit that Soderbergh told him he "wanted to bring filmmakers like myself, Todd Haynes, Harmony Korine--filmmakers who are on the fringes not just of mainstream filmmaking, but on the fringes of independent filmmaking--and to bring us into the mainstream, to give us access to Hollywood studios, star actors and stuff like that." And it is good to see "stuff like that" applied to the narcotic lavishness of Maybury's formal eclecticism, whether in his art installations, or video work like his 1994 "Remembrance of Things Fast," which he draws images from for the hallucinations in "The Jacket," or the autumnal, flicker images that play under the end credits (which reminded a colleague of some of Stan Brakhage's work). His 1998 "Love is the Devil: A Study for a Life of Francis Bacon" is a luscious, poisoned feat of emulation of that painter's leering, lurid, lush figurative work, and one would hope that Maybury's eccentricity would be up to loosing "The Jacket"'s mangle of genres--time travel, noir, twisted romance, amnesia thriller--not just a Silly Putty Moebius strip of internal contradictions tricked up by rat-at-tat iterations of color bursts and ambiguous recollections. The highest compliment I can offer a movie like this is that I'd like to see it again.

"The Jacket" is nowhere near the disaster some writers will be typing about, nor is it any sort of insult: in the end, it's about kindness, selflessness, knowing when to take one more baby step, to make one more small gesture outside one's self, one's projections, one's delusion that everyone lives in the very same world that plays out in our heads.

"The Jacket" opens Friday.

(2005-03-01)

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