The Jacket (2005, DVD)

There's a certain kind of film whose stock in trade is confusion, skepticism and disorientation. Some call it the "jerk-around" movie - a roller-coaster ride through reality. I'm talking about films like Memento, Mulholland Drive, Vanilla Sky, Spider and Waking Life.

In some respects, the Jacket aspires to be one of these.

But there's another kind of film. Its stock in trade is more of a big "what if" - pushing the limits of the possible. Forget Rashomon (and its clones). This one melts the borders of mundane reality. I'm talking about time-travel pieces like The Butterfly Effect and Twelve Monkeys. Or there's the ubermann schtick like Altered States and Lawnmower Man.

Throw in a little Angel Heart and the Fifth Floor, then stir till you've got a bubbling mess. The result is an interesting, if annoying, brew called The Jacket. Jack Starks (Adrien Brody) is one messed-up cookie. He's a guy who keeps dying, coming back from the dead, and wandering the world, never quite sure who he is or what he's done.

The idea, by itself, probably did more for this film than the script that came out of it. Somewhere along the line, its best possibilities turned into this:

Mortally wounded in Gulf War I, Jack is revived, shipped back to the states and continues onward with his life, just in time to be embroiled in a cop-killing he can't remember, while on a hitchhiker's journey to nowhere. Ruled incompetent to stand trial, Jack ends up in the care of the State, and the special care of sadistic Dr. Thomas Becker (Kris Kristofferson). Dr. Becker's ideas of justice and treatment are one part Frankenstein, two parts Mengele: Throw the guy into a strait jacket, jack him up on meds and toss him into a morgue tray and slam the lid shut like he's a load of laundry. Ignore the screams. Just keep him in there until he changes the way he sees the world - or pays for his sins.

Somewhere in the bleak, claustrophobic death of his "treatment," Jack starts having experiences even weirder than his life.

This is the crossroads of creative choice. You can go just about anywhere with this. Comedy. Drama. Horror. Sci-Fi. But you have to make a choice. Unfortunately, this is where The Jacket decides not to choose. Instead, it throws in everything except the kitchen sink. The result is a cinematic stew as confusing as, well, spending the night in a morgue tray while jacked up on demerol.

Paging Hunter Thompson.

That's not to say the Jacket isn't worth watching. I avoided the full-price hit when it premiered, but gave it a go for two dollars at a theater where the hidden price was in my club sandwich. What I saw was more interesting, in terms of the story, than most of the stuff that opens big. Today's market is often determined by the moods and tastes of the attention-deficit viewer. For that reason, I thought it was refreshing to watch anything with the sheer guts to get off the beaten path and strive for drama.

On the other hand, guts come in two kinds: balls to the wall and clever. The first kind produces straight-out, critically-acclaimed box-office bane: In The Bedroom, Mystic River, Million-Dollar Baby. That kind of film gets made because it "has to be made" - regardless of the fact the studio is likely to take a savage beating on opening night.

The Jacket is that other kind, the clever kind, the M. Night Shyamalan kind. Someday, when the police are done with Wendy's "chili finger" woman, they're going to raid Shyamalan's house and find a stack of Stephen King novels, piled high and highlighted with care. King discovered the secret salvation of the hopelessly profound. In an attention-defecit world, where fluff is king, you have to "cut" drama to keep from giving your audience a thought overdose. King's first success, Carrie, is a great example. In that story, a high-school girl gets taunted by everyone until she has a meltdown. In the hands of a purist, she'd commit suicide - and we'd have a group discussion about society and people who feel "invisible." Instead, all that pain is the warm-up act for a "round two" of fantasy-driven self-discovery and revenge. Think Spider-Man with buckets of blood but no flag.

Practically everything Stephen King does is a hybrid between straight drama and a supernatural fantasy thriller. The Shining is a portrait of a man who has a breakdown and tries to murder his family - except the man is living in a haunted house at the time. The Langoliers is about the frights of flying - with a twist straight out of the Twilight Zone. The Green Mile looks like Dead Man Walking - till it turns out one of the deathrow convicts can bring the dead back to life. King discovered, a long time ago, that you can have the best of both worlds - if you're clever. Dramas don't have to be boring. Popcorn films don't have to be dumb. A little symbiosis (and cross-pollination) can bring us halfway down the mountain top, and halfway up from the gutter.

But it's a delicate balance.

Just ask M. Knight, who blew audiences away with the Sixth Sense. People still think that movie worked because it was a ghost story. Ha! It worked because Shyamalan book-ended a story about relationships within the shell of a roller-coaster ride. Stupid people were thrilled. Smart people were charmed. Money was made. Unfortunately, we rarely learn as much from success as from failure. Like Clinton in '93, Shyamalan thought he could do anything. He was like Nixon, flying above the clouds in Air Force One, oblivious that Watergate was waiting for him below. "We're above politics now," he reportedly said. Famous last words, to be sure.

M. Night followed up The Sixth Sense with Unbreakable, an amazing film that foreshadowed 9/11 and the resurgence of the $100 million comic book movie. Unfortunately, for Shyamalan, he chose to shoot it as a straight drama, with precious little in the thriller department. I can remember walking out of that film with a smile on my face, and seeing people drifting out into the parking lot, ready to retch. They came for spills and chills. They got American Lit. Stupid people were furious. Shyamalan forgot to bring the candy. It's what Paul Thomas Anderson did with Punchdrunk Love. He took Adam Sandler, an SNL star who regularly opens in the $30 million range, and turned him into an actor. Wow. Way to go. Hollywood doesn't have enough of those. In the meantime, these guys who can turn low-budge sitcoms into $100 million at the box office must be growing on trees.

We need to go back to the George W. Bush School of Successful Pandering: Never turn your back on that crowd of peasants heading for the Frankenstein Castle with torches in hand. Faster than you can say, "No new taxes," they will turn on you for a guy who can "feel your pain." Not that Unbreakable sucked. I loved it. So did about three other people scattered across North America. We get together every ten years - and have a pact: Whichever of us survives the others will drink a bottle of wine and fart in the wind.

It took Shyamalan another film, Signs, to get back into the game. He turned a man's crisis of faith ("We are all alone") into a crop-circle thriller ("We are not alone") - and it opened like a hurricane. Smart people talked existentialism. Stupid people talked about the aliens. Money was again made. But just as soon as he'd learned his lesson, Shyamalan made The Village, which promised a Salem-like meltdown in the woods. Instead, we got more relationships, with a little bit of Twilight Zone and some mood music. Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed The Village, particularly the second time around, when I watched it as a drama, not as a thriller. I'm convinced that my own script about Salem, The Unraveling, still has a place out there, a place where we can talk about societal meltdowns that don't originate from, and degenerate into, soap-opera pablum like The Crucible. (Excuse me while I spit.)

The Jacket wants to go a little M. Night on us, but finds the way a little dark and foggy. There's something lyrical about a story where a man keeps dying, keeps surviving and keeps having misadventures. Somewhere between Bringing Out The Dead and Forrest Gump, there's a place for it. It could even be wildly episodic because its hero has nine lives. It could include a little bit of mystery, to hit the ground running, with the audience having to work to catch up (rather than the typical, boring, voice-over music video that plays like a bedtime story with all the backstory stuff neatly inserted in the opening).

But the Jacket doesn't want to be a mix between Bringing Out the Dead and Forrest Gump. It wants to be a mystery. It wants to be a jerk-around thriller. It wants to be Twelve Monkeys and it wants to be a drama. It doesn't see any conflict beween all these choices - and that's where it ends up lost and confused every bit as much as its lead character.

In going for the Great American Hybrid, this film forgets an important writer's adage: Don't bend more than one rule. Bending one opens a window of possibilities releasing us from boredom, the tyranny of the predictable. Bending two leaves everything up for grabs. We don't know where the story is going. The more chaotic things get, the more we pull away out of frustration.

Successful twists on reality still keep at least one foot in the real world. If a story gives us multiple accounts (Rashomon, Courage Under Fire) there's at least some part of the story that isn't up for grabs - such as the journey of the investigator, trying to solve the case. If the story gives us multiple timelines (Twelve Monkeys, Butterfly Effect), we get the best seats in the house. We end up viewing it all from outside the protagonist's head. If the story puts us into the head of someone who doesn't know what's going on (Memento, Mulholland Drive) - the world is still the world.

What you don't see is a film about twisted perception, combined with multiple timelines, combined with magical powers that change the laws of space and time. Except for this one, which is about as joyful in tone as a murder suicide.

The Jacket wants to bend it like Beckham. That's where it goes off the reservation. Jack's another Leonard Shelby trying to figure who he is, stuck in and out of dreams, and possibly moving through time. That's at least three different disorienting elements, three rules thrown to the dogs. As an audience member, I found the experience sometimes frustrating, sometimes agonizing. It was only later in the film, when the revelation of certain elements closed some of those windows that I found myself enjoying the ride. Unfortunately, that's a long time to wait, too long to make the film work as a Friday-night opener.

But even as a failed experiment (pardon the pun), this film has a certain ambition. Adrien Brody is nicely cast as a wiry, sad, likable loner. Kris Kristofferson turns in what some may call another ham-handed, easy, job as the bad guy - but for my money, he helped make the film watchable. In a lot of films, including the Blade series, Kristofferson has made a career out of playing curmudgeonly good guys, the feisty old geezer who drives a pickup truck with a gunrack and a rebel flag - but who saves the day whenever he can. Here, he's cruel and sadistic, and it makes for an interesting performance, especially later when we don't know whether to strike him down or feel sorry for him.

The real surprise comes from the women in this film. It's the women who offer the most dynamic variations of humanity. Dr. Lorenson (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is an effective combination of professional reserve and compassion. She's as much a prisoner of boundaries and limitations as any of the inmates she monitors, and as secretly eager to make a run for it. Jean Price (Kelly Lynch) is a hard but protective mother, balancing a drug and alcohol problem with her love for her daughter. Little Jackie Price (Laura Marano) is the little girl, trapped by her dependency on a mother who is out of control, who sees something special in Jack's eyes.

The film's best performances, in my opinion, come from Keira Knightly, playing a woman who befriends Jack, the wandering loner, not because she wants to be his friend, but because she feels a compulsion to do so, a compulsion that goes against her better judgment, though not her instincts. Knightly, who should have been typecast as Elizabeth Swan in Pirates of the Caribbean, is an amazing actress whose every move is from one character to the next. The film before this, she played a sex-warrior version of Guinevere in Arthur. In her next film, she plays Domino Harvey, a cold, charming and British bounty hunter. The leap between those two roles is no less sprawling than her leap back to Victorian politics in the upcoming Pride and Prejudice. This woman simply won't stay still. Meg Ryan must be biting her nails to the bone.

Knightly's incarnation in this film, as JP, is amazing. She's so bitter and stand-offish, yet warmly human beneath that mess she calls a personality. She's what Wynona Ryder might have become if Girl Interrupted hadn't been her only move from Little Women to Mr. Deeds. JP looks out on the world through hot little goth-lovers' eyes, more angry than evil, more fractured than focused. She makes a great counterpart to Jack's lonely eyes and sad little grin.

This is a film worth watching, particularly on video or DVD, where you can sit through the cheap camera tricks of director John Maybury, who clearly enjoys the effects more than the story. I found myself liking the film, despite the tedium of its tricks, because of the performances and the possibilities of what it might have become had it been rewritten a few more times. If you have the patience for that sort of thing, you may enjoy this film. If you're looking for the "thrill ride of your life," keep looking.