Don't get strapped into 'The Jacket'

By Jack Garner
Gannett News Service

THE JACKET (R) Two Stars (Fair) John Maybury's dark and twisted gothic tale about a man's struggle to make sense of a senseless world. Adrien Brody and Keira Knightley co-star for director John Maybury. Warner Independent, 102 minutes.

Adrien Brody stars as Jack Starks, a Desert Storm soldier who gets part of his head blown off during combat in Iraq.

The story then shifts to rural Vermont where Starks is walking down a lonely highway. Did he survive? Is this a dream?

But then Jack has two successive encounters — one with a drugged-up woman and her daughter, standing alongside a malfunctioning automobile; the other with a lone driver who gives him a lift. Before the day is over, a patrolman has been killed and his highway friends are gone. Starks is charged, deemed criminally insane and institutionalized.

By the way, one of the few professions more mistreated than journalists and lawyers on film are mental health professionals. The mental hospital here is a grimy, ill-lit stone edifice right out of "The Snake Pit." And the head shrink (Kris Kristofferson) seems more demented than his patients. His "treatment" consists of putting patients in straightjackets (hence the title), and then locking them into the dark confines of morgue drawers for hours on end.

Supposedly, they reach some sort of mental clarity under such conditions, if you can believe that. The process leads Jack into an improbable denouement with the woman and her daughter encountered earlier in Vermont.

If Kafka is your idea of a good time and you like your stories grueling and convoluted, well then, "The Jacket" may be a proper fit. The rest of us may want to leave the garment on the rack.

Rated R, violence, nudity, sex, profanity.