The Jacket
Starring Adrien Brody & Keira Knightley
The basic premise of this movie is that Adrien Brody plays a vet from the first Gulf War, and due to a war injury he can’t always remember stuff correctly, or at all. After returning to the states, he is witness to a murder, injured again, and subsequently blamed for the murder. Due to his can’t remember issue, he’s sentenced to time in a mental correctional facility instead of a normal one, where he is experimented on during the night by being drugged, placed in a straight jacket, and inserted into a morgue drawer. You know, the kind they put the dead bodies in.
I hadn’t ever heard of this movie before, which is funny because in one of the commentary thingies the director says the studio insisted they cast Keira Knightley in it for the name recognition. I have news for anyone – if you’re producing a weird Indie film about experiments in a straight jacket, having Keira isn’t going to help your box office draw. In fact, I feel kind of bad because the director had met with several good unknown American actors that he wanted to cast in the role that Keira took, and it’s sad to me when someone who already has the fame is placed in a role that a struggling actor could really use. If I thought this were the type of movie that was made by having a big name actor in it, I would maybe feel differently. But I would be surprised if this movie had any success in the theater, or if it even had a wide release.
None of this is to say that it’s necessarily a bad movie, I liked the concept, I’m just not sure how I felt about the execution of it. I am borderline going to say that the whole thing was a giant Indie Film Syndrome. I mean, I saw this movie something like two weeks ago and every time I think about it, I just think “huh?” And not in any kind of good way, like sometimes you do after a David Lynch movie, more like a whole it didn’t make sense kind of thing. It’s not even that the plot is hard to follow once you see what is going on, I guess I just wanted more explanation. Like why the experiments are happening, what the end goal of them is, or is the doctor just evil? And how come no one being experimented on has complained, if what they go through in the jacket is so bad? You would think that if several people in one institution complained about this, someone important would listen. But maybe I just have unrealistic expectations of the world.
I think part of the purpose of the movie was to freak you out, like pray on people’s fear of small spaces, but I never really felt tense when I saw them rolling Adrien Brody into the body drawer, or even the shots of him in there. I guess it’s possible I just don’t have that fear, cuz to an extent, if you’re putting me somewhere when I’m supposed to be sleeping, I will probably just sleep.
Another thing that struck me as amusing is that there are several deleted scenes, with the writer commenting about them, and at one point she says “I think this is to show…” or something along those lines. Honey, if you *wrote* the script, you should probably not be saying you *think* this is what’s going on. You should know the motivation of the scene and the characters in it. Or else you wrote from a place of Indie Film Syndrome and just thought it would be cool.
See this movie if: I wish I could say I recommended this movie. For the record, I watched it at someone else’s house, so it was on their Netflix list and not my own. It’s not a good thriller, doesn’t really portray something life changing, and I don’t think the acting is super phenomenal. If you want to see Keira do an American accent, I guess you should see it.
My Rating: 2.5/5
Six Degrees of Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
Keira Knightley was in Bend it Like Beckham with Johnathan Rhys Meyers
Johnathan Rhys Meyers was in August Rush with Kerry Russell
Kerry Russell was in Waitress with Nathan Fillion
Nathan Fillion played Caleb in Season 7 of Buffy
