Great acting doesn't save 'Jacket'

"The Jacket" is a dark, bleak film rife with harsh screeches and brutal, stabbing flashes of memory. Sounds normally peripheral are unnaturally loud, like breathing or the buckling of straps. Director John Maybury employs numerous extreme close-ups of eyes and mouths. The jagged, tuneless music complements the cramped, cheerless tone of the film perfectly. If any of these things in large quantities make you uncomfortable, then this film may not be to your liking.\nHowever, if you enjoy a certain feeling of discomfort while watching a movie, then "The Jacket" fills the bill splendidly. This is the story of Jack Starks (Adrien Brody), a Gulf War veteran with no known past or family, who is discharged from the army after being shot in the head by an Iraqi boy. Suffering from retrograde amnesia, he wanders the roads of Vermont and eventually stops to help a mother (Kelly Lynch) and her daughter, Jackie (Laura Marano). While fixing their truck, the girl becomes fascinated with his dog tags, and Jack, in a nice-guy flourish, gives them to her.\nLater he hitches a ride from a young man (Brad Renfro). Just as they are pulled over, his memory fails him and he finds himself standing trial for the cop's murder. After being found not guilty by reason of insanity, Starks is yanked from prison to a psychiatric ward and eventually to a basement, where he is pumped full of drugs and then shoved into a morgue locker for hours at a time.\nWhile inside the locker he discovers that he can travel forward in time, where he meets a grown-up Jackie (Keira Knightley) and begins to unravel the mystery of his own death. This is the point where the movie begins to suffer from its main affliction: ill-blended elements. "The Jacket" is like a dish that, while not quite turning out right, still tastes pretty good since all the ingredients are there. The wrongful imprisonment elements do not entirely gel with the time-travel elements (let alone that the time-traveling requires a complete suspension of disbelief), and when the inevitable romantic elements come knocking, one is not quite sure what to think.\nThat's not to say that "The Jacket" is not entertaining. It is, but Maybury fails to weave the components together as seamlessly as they could have been. Instead we get loose ends and plot holes galore. This movie is enjoyable only on a number of substantial suspensions of disbelief. \nThe acting is better than average. Brody, engaging as usual, with a face seemingly designed to be sad, is alternately earnest and dazed as his character undergoes everything from head trauma to drug treatments to solitary confinement in the worst sense. Knightley is especially impressive as a lonely, hopeless young woman with no trace of a British accent. \nA complicated and engaging drama, "The Jacket" could be great if only it didn't have so much to make up for.