..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Full Mental Jacket

"An insult to the brain," meaning an injury brought on by a blow to the head, is one of those perfumed bits of medical terminology that approaches poetry.

Think, too, of phrases like "exquisite tenderness," describing the lingering sensation of pain-pleasure that comes after a particular nasty bruise (or, for men, a kick to the testicles). John Maybury's The Jacket, which debuted at Sundance 2005, is a twisting, thinly plotted yet visually vigorous thriller about memory and hope.

The press screening in Park City, which I missed after my own bruising scrape, a last-minute fall on the ice, held its own brainy injuries, with a New York journalist almost coming to blows with an elderly San Francisco journalist who took his seat, insisting her interview with the director and members of the cast the next day was more important. Among those who managed to gain precious admittance to the jammed screening, the wan joke ran that The Jacket was an insult, a crass failure, and hadn't earned even that modest scuffle between East and West.

Which is a minute illustration of why film festivals can be dangerous to your critical health: it's the movie, silly, not the gossip. In its thematic essentials, The Jacket has the timbre of a movie made by co-producer Steven Soderbergh (who joins 17 other credited producers). Yet Maybury, who began his career as a painter and worked with the late Derek Jarman as set and costume designer for 1977's Jubilee and editor of 1987's Last of England, is an antsy visualist. For shorthand, the story partakes of tricksiness that's a little 12 Monkeys by way of its precursor, Chris Marker's La Jetee.

Opening in 1991, The Jacket opens with Jack Starks (Adrien Brody), a US Marine Sergeant in the first Gulf War, almost dying from a gunshot wound to the head. Suffering memory lapses, he returns home to Vermont, where a good deed in the snow while hitchhiking a few months later, involving a broken-down pickup, a drunken mom and an 8-year-old girl named Jackie spirals into a small-town murder charge. Starks is found not guilty, but is sent away to a hospital for the criminally insane, where a Dr. Becker, played by Kris Kristofferson, a gorgon of medical malpractice, face riven with crevasses, lined deep with guilt and grief, experiments on his patients with hallucinogens and restraints. Starks' bursts of memory, and eventually, what may or may not be actual time travel, comes when he's bound, drugged and slid into a drawer in the morgue in the hospital basement. (This tightly coiled gimmick, the reserve implicit in this cool-to-the-touch summa of claustrophobia, seems Soderbergh-esque at any distance.)

Brody plays Starks as a bundle of tics and fevers, but Maybury's style is more intent than M. Night Shyamalan's, who used Brody's itch-to-twitch in a mostly long-shot performance in The Village. His memories open out into a new vista, in the year 2007. At a diner, Starks meets Jackie (Keira Knightley, capably, snappily, channeling the damage of an early 1970s Jane Fonda characters), a waitress who takes him in like a hurt pup. Back at her apartment, where she lets him spend a chaste Christmas Eve, clues to his past, and several possible futures, pile up. (Their later encounters have a shuddery sensual urgency.)

Maybury, who considers himself part of England's "experimental avant-garde," is quoted in his film's press kit as saying that Soderbergh told him he "wanted to bring filmmakers like myself, Todd Haynes, Harmony Korine-filmmakers who are on the fringes not just of mainstream filmmaking, but on the fringes of independent filmmaking-and to bring us into the mainstream, to give us access to Hollywood studios, star actors and stuff like that." And it is good to see "stuff like that" applied to the narcotic lavishness of Maybury's formal eclecticism, whether in his art installations, or video work like his 1994 Remembrance of Things Fast, which he draws images from for the hallucinations in The Jacket, or the lovely autumnal flicker images that play under the end credits (which reminded a colleague of some of Stan Brakhage's work). His 1998 Love is the Devil: A Study for a Life of Francis Bacon is a luscious, poisoned feat of emulation of that painter's leering, lurid, lush figurative work, and one would hope that Maybury's eccentricity would be up to loosing The Jacket's mangle of genres-time travel, noir, twisted romance, amnesia thriller-not just a Silly Putty Moebius strip of internal contradictions tricked up by rat-at-tat iterations of color bursts and ambiguous recollections. The highest compliment I can offer a movie like this is that I'd like to see it again.

The Jacket is nowhere near the disaster some writers will be typing about, nor is it any sort of insult: in the end, it means to be about kindness, selflessness, knowing when to make one more baby-step, one more small gesture outside one's self, one's projections, one's delusion that everyone lives in the very same world that plays out in our heads. Brian Eno's score is familiarly Eno-ish, and a striking world is created on Canadian and Scottish locations. Peter Deming composed the widescreen images, with the wide eyes behind Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive (as well as three "Scream"s and three Austin Powers movies).

Warner Independent also tried out a new promo technique I haven't seen before; my Chicago neighborhood was littered with tear-off pads of 11x17 posters tethered to El stanchions and schoolyard gates with the legend: FREE POSTER.

Lost Embrace

Lost Embrace (El abrazo partido) is a pleasingly literary mingling of comedy, sex and yearning. It's the kind of exquisitely measured mix of time, place and conflict that should provide the answer to people still asking, "Why don't people make movies like Woody Allen used to?"

Adult, witty, horny, and rife with history-about contemporary Argentina, a never-seen Israel of 1967 and a Polish homeland far away-Daniel Burman's generous slice of Buenos Aires life takes place mostly in a shopping mall filled with small stores, a kind still prevalent on the main commercial streets of that teeming city. The bittersweet center of the movie is the struggle of young Ariel (Daniel Hendler, who won a Best Actor nod at the 2004 Berlin Film Festival) to find the legacy of his missing father, to escape a life in his mother's lingerie shop, and perhaps get his Polish citizenship papers in order to escape the economic damage of that country and become a European. Passionate, generous, this memorable, beautifully structured movie (co-written by Bs.As. novelist Marcelo Birmajer) keeps giving more little morsels until its final frame, with extra emotional weight for those who understand German or Yiddish. [For reasons beyond my personal algorithms, the IMDB entry for Lost Embrace suggests that "If you like this title, we also recommend... 3 Ninjas (1992)."]

March 10, 2004

- Email Ray Pride