'Jacket' unfolds into chilling mystery

March 04, 2005|Globe Staff

What happens to Adrien Brody in ''The Jacket" shouldn't happen to a dog. It probably wouldn't happen to a dog or PETA would slap the producers with a lawsuit. Oscar-winning stars seeking that next jolt of career juice, on the other hand, can take a little abuse.

Playing Gulf War soldier Jack Starks, Brody is: shot in the head by an adorable Arab tyke; nearly buried alive; left with retrograde amnesia; shipped home to Vermont, where he hitches a ride with a sleazebag who frames the poor, woozy sod on a cop-killing charge; railroaded into a mental institution that appears to have been designed by the architectural firm of Lovecraft & Poe; shot up with a mystery potion by a fetid-looking Kris Kristofferson; and then left to sleep it off in a morgue drawer.

That's in the first 15 minutes.

You're not entirely sure where John Maybury's film can go from here -- will it be ''Gothika"-style horror? a metaphysical jigsaw like ''Jacob's Ladder"? -- but you're certain Brody is doing some almighty twitching up there on the screen. Wracked, skeletal, alternately whimpering and shrieking in pain and confusion, the ''Pianist" best actor makes such a convincing victim that he gives Jim Caviezel in ''The Passion of the Christ" a run for his martyrdom.

Just when you're about to give up, though -- and here I ask those who prefer their plot surprises to be surprising to step away from the newspaper -- ''The Jacket" plays its hand. Sitting in that dark drawer in 1992, Jack feverishly and literally daydreams himself into the year 2007, and the film turns into one of those time-loop head trips that keeps its hero frantically parsing the relationship between cause and effect.

Before he hitched that fatal ride, see, Jack paused to help out a stranded motorist and alcoholic mom named Jean (Kelly Lynch) while befriending her 8-year-old daughter Jackie (Laura Marano). Once he time-travels 15 years into the future -- please don't ask me how this works -- he's reacquainted with Jackie, all grown up and played with brooding anger and black fingernails by Keira Knightley. Not only has her mother died during the intervening time, she informs Jack, but so has he -- 15 years ago. Some quick calculation reveals that the Jack Starks lying in the asylum morgue has four days to live.