The Jacket

After miraculously recovering from an apparently fatal bullet wound to the head, Gulf War veteran Jack Starks returns to Vermont in 1992, suffering from periods of amnesia. While walking, he sees a young girl, Jackie, and her alcoholic mother in despair beside their broken-down truck. Starks and Jackie quickly form a bond; she asks him to give her his dog tags, which he does. He gets the truck started and continues on his way. Shortly after, a man driving along the same highway gives Jack a ride and they get pulled over by a policeman.

The scene changes: Starks is found lying on the deserted roadside near the dead policeman, with a slug from the policeman's gun in his body and the murder weapon nearby. He testifies that someone else was at the scene, but is not believed because of his amnesia, is found not guilty by reason of insanity and incarcerated in a mental institution.

Starks is placed in the care of Dr. Thomas Becker, a psychiatrist, and his staff. In December 1992, Starks is forced to undergo an unauthorized treatment designed by Becker: he is injected with experimental drugs, bound in a straitjacket and placed inside a morgue drawer as a form of sensory deprivation. While in this condition, he is able to travel 15 years into the future and stay there for a short time. He meets an older version of Jackie at a roadside diner where she works. He suspects this happens because Jackie is the only memory he can ever fully hold on to. She does not recognize him, but takes pity on him and offers him shelter for the night. While in her apartment, Starks comes across his own dog tags and confronts her. Jackie, frightened, tells him that he can't be Jack Starks, as he died on New Year's Day in 1993, and asks him to leave. Subsequently, Starks is transported back to the future on several occasions in the course of his treatment and, after earning Jackie's trust, they try to figure out how to make use of the time-traveling so as to remove Jack from the hospital and save his life.

Early on January 1, 1993, knowing that his time is running out, Starks is briefly taken out of the hospital by Dr. Beth Lorenson, who he has finally convinced of his time travel experiences and knowledge of future events. She drives Starks to the childhood home of Jackie and her mother, where he gives the mother a letter he has written, which outlines Jackie's bleak future and warns the mother that she is fated to orphan Jackie when she dies after falling asleep with a lit cigarette in her hand. When he returns to the hospital, Starks experiences a flashback to the head wound he suffered in Iraq, simultaneously slipping on the ice and hitting his head. Bleeding profusely, he convinces two of the more sympathetic doctors to put him into the jacket one last time.

Starks returns to 2007, where he finds that his letter to Jackie's mother has made all the difference. Jackie now has a better life than in the previous version of 2007. She is no longer a waitress, is dressed in a nurse's uniform, and has a noticeably more cheerful outlook. They reprise their first 2007 meeting: she sees Starks standing in the snow and initially drives past him, but backs up when she notices his head wound. She stops and offers to take him to the hospital where she works. While they are in the car, Jackie receives a call from her mother, still alive and well. They drive on, the screen fades to white and we hear Jackie's voice ask, "How much time do we have?", which she has asked him before. As the credits roll, the answer to the question is given by the words of the song "We Have All the Time in the World" sung by Iggy Pop.

The Jacket shares its title, and the idea of a person experiencing extra-corporeal time-travel while in an intolerably tight straitjacket, with a 1915 novel by Jack London. The novel was published in the United Kingdom as The Jacket and in the United States of America as The Star Rover. Director Maybury has said that the film is "loosely based on a true story that became a Jack London story".^[4] The true story is that of Ed Morrell, who told London about San Quentin prison's inhumane use of tight straitjackets.^[5]

The Jacket opened on March 4, 2005, and grossed $2,723,682 (~$4.08 million in 2023) on opening weekend, with a peak release of 1,331 theaters in the United States. The film went on to gross $6,303,762 domestically, for a total of $21,126,225 worldwide.^[3]

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 44% of 162 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 5.4/10. The website's consensus reads: "The Jacket is a case of creepy style over substance."^[6] On Metacritic, it had a score of 44% based on reviews from 35 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".^[7]

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave it two out of four stars and wrote: "You can sense an impulse toward a better film, and Adrien Brody and Keira Knightley certainly take it seriously, but the time-travel whiplash effect sets in, and it becomes, as so many time travel movies do, an exercise in early entrances, late exits, futile regrets."^[8]

• La Jetée, a 1962 French science fiction featurette in which sensory deprivation and strong memories lead to time travel.

• The Jacket at IMDb
• ‹The template AllMovie title is being considered for deletion.› The Jacket at AllMovie
• The Jacket at the AFI Catalog of Feature Films