A film in need of restraint gets out of hand

In The Jacket, a new time-travel psychological thriller directed by John Maybury, Adrien Brody plays Jack Starks, a soldier in the first Gulf War who miraculously recovers from a bullet wound to the head, after which things get really strange.

Trudging down a snowy Vermont road, he comes upon a stranded, inebriated woman (Kelly Lynch) and her cute-as-a-button daughter, and repairs their pickup truck. Then, after being set up for a murder that he did not commit, Jack is sent to a gothic state mental hospital, where a sinister doctor (Kris Kristofferson) orders him drugged, restrained (in the garment of the title) and locked in what looks like an oversize filing-cabinet drawer, from which Jack is able to propel himself into the future (approximately two years from now). There, he meets an unhappy waitress played by Keira Knightley, whose British accent has disappeared and whose hair has been dyed brown.

At this point, I will refrain from further plot summary, not because I'm worried about spoiling any surprises, but because to relate plainly and without embellishment what happens in The Jacket would make it sound more preposterous than it is. Make no mistake, this movie is terribly silly, but it's not completely terrible. It starts out trying to be craftily clever -- with lots of fast, disorienting visual effects, echoey music and intimations of politics and paranoia -- and ends up artlessly dumb. In other words, it improves as it goes along.

Maybury, working from a busy screenplay by Massy Tadjedin, shows a fondness for extreme close-ups that is sometimes effective but more often bewildering. For a while, I thought the whole picture was going to be reflected in Brody's eyeballs, and at another point I wondered if the audience was being directed to admire the work of Kristofferson's dentist. In its less hectic moments, though -- scenes in which the camera pulls back far enough to allow Brody and Knightley to occupy the frame together -- the movie achieves a nice mixture of tenderness and foreboding.

What is foreboded is pretty hokey stuff. All of the business about the Gulf War and the intimations of loony-bin political allegory on the model of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest are red herrings, and the movie's premise is overloaded with gimmicks. Because the very idea strains basic canons of logic, time travel requires either extravagance on the order of Back to the Future or elegance, as perfected by Chris Marker in La Jetee in 1962. The Jacket is not the first attempt to update the eerie power of that film, which is composed entirely of still images and lasts less than half an hour, but it joins Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys as a warning to leave well enough alone.

But Brody, stoop-shouldered and wary, remains an engaging presence, and his understatement is soothing in a picture crowded with maniacal overacting. The wonder of it is that Jennifer Jason Leigh, playing a kindly counterpart to Kristofferson's vengeful villain, is not the worst offender. That would be Daniel Craig, as a ranting maniac -- there's one in every ward, at least in the movies -- whose most delusional ravings turn out to be the only things that make sense.

Or maybe not. The Jacket wants to be a clever, puzzling metaphysical whodunit, with a dose of spiritual uplift thrown in for good measure. Since it is too sloppy to work as a brain-teaser like Pi or Memento, the slide into sentimentality comes as something of a relief, even as it leaves behind a tangle of false leads and loose ends.