The Jacket

The Jacket is a 2005 American science-fiction psychological thriller film directed by John Maybury and starring Adrien Brody, Keira Knightley, Kris Kristofferson and Jennifer Jason Leigh. It is partly based on the 1915 Jack London novel The Star Rover, published in the United Kingdom as The Jacket. Massy Tadjedin wrote the screenplay based on a story by Tom Bleecker and Marc Rocco. The original music score is composed by Brian Eno and the cinematography is by Peter Deming.

The Jacket premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 23, 2005, and was released in theaters in the United States by Warner Independent Pictures on March 4, 2005. It grossed $21.1 million on a budget of $28.5 million and received mixed reviews from critics.

Plot
Gulf War veteran Jack Starks (Brody), having suffered a near-death experience while on active service, returns to Vermont in 1992, suffering from periods of amnesia.

Back in the United States, he is blamed for the death of a policeman and incarcerated in a hospital for the criminally insane. Subject to experimental treatments there, which involve him being shut inside a morgue casket while tied in a straitjacket, he eventually learns to travel through time and is able to offer help to various people.

Background
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". The true story is that of Ed Morrell, who told London about San Quentin prison's inhumane use of tight straitjackets.

Box office
The Jacket opened on March 4, 2005, and grossed $2,723,682 (~$ in ) 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.

Critical response
On Metacritic, it had a score of 44% based on reviews from 35 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".

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."