'Jacket' pieces just don't hold together in puzzling story

By JOHN DeFORE
Austin American Statesman

Jack Starks, the Gulf War veteran protagonist of "The Jacket," begins the film by telling us that he was 27 "the first time" he died. That doesn't quite mean what it sounds like -- this is not the story of a man who becomes immortal -- but it does give the right impression: "The Jacket" puts Jack through a reality-defying wringer, even if it never quite gets us to believe what he goes through.

Warner Independent Pictures

'The Jacket'

2 out of 5 stars

Director: John Maybury
Starring: Adrien Brody, Keira Knightley
Run time: 102 minutes
Release date: March 4, 2005
Rating: R for violence, language and brief sexuality/nudity.
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Upon his discharge from the Army -- he was injured so badly that medics thought he was dead -- Jack (Adrien Brody) gets into trouble. He is wrongly convicted of murder (or did he do it?), then deemed criminally insane and sent to an asylum where secret experiments are being conducted on patients. Before Jack knows which way is up, Kris Kristofferson and a couple of sadistic nurses are drugging him, belting him into a straitjacket and locking him up in a morgue drawer -- which the movie wrings for every harrowing ounce of claustrophobia it can get.

Here's where it gets tricky. For some reason, this drug/jacket/lockup treatment gives Jack the ability to travel forward in time. If the "why?" of that matters much to you, you might want to skip the film.

In the future, Jack meets a foul-tempered girl (Keira Knightley, whose performance is like Winona Ryder playing Helena Bonham Carter's "Fight Club" role) who falls for him. When he tells her he's a time traveler, she accepts it like a good girl; the two set off to solve the mystery of his imprisonment.

That question is never resolved as convincingly or as poetically as the similar one in Terry Gilliam's "12 Monkeys." Still, the movie has moments that work reasonably well. The transition scenes within the coffinlike drawer -- where Jack slips from confined reality to his time-traveling state -- are creepy and make good use of some hallucinatory special effects. (Director John Maybury's previous film, "Love is the Devil," was about the painter Francis Bacon, and little bits of that demented visual world have rubbed off.)

Then there are the closing credits, a hypnotic stream of organic images that would be worth praising if it were not lifted directly (and without acknowledgement) from experimental auteur Stan Brakhage's "Mothlight." Most viewers won't think twice about the imagery running behind the names of crew members; but few will make it out of "The Jacket" feeling like it did enough to answer their questions about the plot.