The latest George Clooney/Steven Soderbergh puzzle movie, “The Jacket,” may seem fresh and challenging — provided you’ve never seen “Memento,” “Shock Corridor,” “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” “Jacob’s Ladder” and/or “Donnie Darko.”
The script borrows from so many previous trippy films about memory, lunacy and time travel that it has trouble finding its own voice. When it does, it tends toward the sentimental, the sensational and the unintentionally amusing.
Still, compared to most of this year’s American movies (several of which generated such shame that the studios wouldn’t screen them in advance), it’s at least watchable. The excellent cast, including Mackenzie Phillips and Brad Renfro in throwaway roles, has a great deal to do with that.
Adrien Brody, doing the best work of his post-Oscar career, plays a very confused Gulf War veteran, Jack Starks, who whimsically declares that “I was 27 years old the first time I died.” Indeed, it would seem that we saw him killed in Iraq in 1991, but then he turns up in a Vermont psychiatric ward in 1992-93, and he appears to expire again.
Then he suddenly turns up in 2007, when he witnesses the results of his behavior 14 years earlier. The little girl who befriended him (Laura Marano), in spite of the protests of her mother (Kelly Lynch), has grown into a spacey but accommodating waitress (Keira Knightley) who rescues him from spending Christmas Eve on the street.
For long stretches Jack appears to suffer from amnesia; only a series of violent flashbacks provides hints about turning points in his life. He can’t quite remember if he shot and killed a policeman (supposedly it’s the reason he’s been committed), and he suspects a menacing physician (Kris Kristofferson) of pumping him full of drugs and locking him away in a morgue drawer.
“I have to find out how I died,” says Jack. The question is eventually answered, not entirely satisfactorily, as he goes back and forth in time, getting to know one of the doctor’s sympathetic assistants (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and communing with another, more deluded patient (Daniel Craig), who fears that the four horseman of the apocalypse are pursuing him.
Clooney and Soderbergh are listed as co-producers on “The Jacket,” but the film’s director is John Maybury, who won some acclaim for his deliberately grotesque Francis Bacon biography, “Love Is the Devil.” The script is the work of Massy Tadjedin, who was encouraged by Maybury to beef up Craig’s role by adding elements of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.”
The result is the most developed and dynamic performance in the movie. Craig, who was Bacon’s brutish lover in “Love Is the Devil,” is riveting in his scenes with Brody, capturing the character’s vulnerability and barely contained desperation. He’s addicted to delivering an anachronistic mantra, weighing the differences between freaking out and tripping out, that sounds like a cry from the 1960s.
If the other roles had been this carefully fleshed out, “The Jacket” might have risen above its glib plot and recycled riddles.