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Daily News
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Sundance Warms to The Jacket
Despite its string of high-profile producers and a March release date via Warner Independent, Adrien Brody war drama leads opening weekend buzz parade.
Monday, January 24, 2005
By Pam Grady
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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Busy actor Adrien Brody
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As the first weekend of the Sundance Film Festival drew to a close, no single film had yet sparked the kind of buzz enjoyed this time last year by Napoleon Dynamite and Garden State. However, Aaron Ruell, one of the actors who helped make Napoleon the sleeper hit that it was, returned as the director of an entertaining two-minute short entitled Mary. This time, Napoleon's Internet-date obsessed brother sends up holy visitations and anti-psychotic drugs, screening in advance of Greg Whiteley's moving documentary New York Doll.
Among the press, one of the hottest tickets has been The Jacket, British director John Maybury's genre-hopping drama starring Adrien Brody as amnesiac Desert Storm vet Jack Starks, who, when he is wrongly sent to a hospital for the criminally insane and subjected to an especially cruel and bizarre treatment, finds himself traveling through time. With Maybury, Brody, and co-stars Keira Knightly and Jennifer Jason Leigh on hand for a huge press day Saturday and no public screenings until Sunday, seeing the movie at Friday's press screening was imperative.
Emotions ran high as dozens had to be turned away from the overbooked screening. A second screening was added for later that night, but not before an emotional war of words broke out between a journalist for a high-profile West Coast daily and a reporter for a prestigious East Coast weekly, after the West Coast writer took what she thought was an abandoned seat – the only seat left in the theater.
‘Can I sue you if you get me fired?’ the New Yorker wanted to know, as the two debated the ethics of what she had done until a true gentleman in the crowd offered to surrender his own seat.
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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Director John Maybury
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One of the happy surprises in The Jacket is actor Daniel Craig as a fellow mental patient who befriends Jack Starks. Following his breakthrough role as painter Francis Bacon's rough-trade lover in Maybury's previously acclaimed Love is the Devil, Craig’s small but memorable work here is bound to introduce him to a whole new set of fans. And that’s before any glimpse of his other 2005 Sundance offering, Layer Cake, in which he plays a suave drug dealer.
To prepare his actor for their roles in The Jacket, Maybury handed out various assignments. Adrien Brody, for example, spent time in an isolation tank and was asked to isolate himself from his co-stars to better inhabit a character; Starks spends much of the movie trapped in the visions that come to him as he lays drugged and strapped in a straight jacket and shoved inside a morgue drawer for hours at a stretch.
Meanwhile, Craig – who is virtually unrecognizable in The Jacket as compared to his appearance in Layer Cake - was the first and only choice of Maybury for the role of the only truly insane character in the movie, Mackenzie. “I wanted an actor of great subtlety,” Maybury explains. “Dan has those insane kind of wolverine blue eyes."
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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The versatile Daniel Craig
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Maybury worked with screenwriter Massy Tadjedin on conflating two characters from a previous draft of the screenplay into Mackenzie, with Craig specifically in mind for the role. Then, to help his actor get a fix on the man, the filmmaker played him tapes of Beat generation writer Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, Kerouac's inspiration for his legendary novel On the Road's irrepressible antihero Dean Moriarity.
"I wanted an approximation of Kerouac and Cassady,” Maybury explains. “With the long sideburns and dyed black hair, it was to make him look like Kerouac, but the persona was very much Neal Cassady." Indeed, Craig effortlessly evokes both men.
For Brody, who on Tuesday will announce this year's Academy Award nominations before returning to New Zealand to continue work on Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong, his latest journey to Sundance is a nostalgic one. In 1996, he came to Park City for the premiere of Ten Benny, an ultimately little seen drama in which he played a shoe store clerk who borrows money from a loan shark with disastrous results.
"It took probably, all in, 300 grand to make, including everything," remembers Brody. "You can't really get much made at that price any more. It was a good film and it was exciting to be part of it and to come to a place like Sundance and have that kind of movie mission for a young, unknown actor."
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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The Lovely Keira Knightley
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Brody couldn't help but notice all the changes that have taken place in the interim, with the festival now as much of a market for the independent divisions of Hollywood studios as it is for guerrilla filmmakers. But, he stresses, this is not necessarily a bad thing.
Among The Jacket’s 13 credited producers are Peter Guber, Mark Cuban, George Clooney and Steve Soderbergh, while Warner Independent Pictures – which is scheduled to release the film on March 4th – also co-financed. "For the most part, I think it's a good thing, because there'll be more movies being made that have to appeal to less broad of an audience,” Brody argues. “There will be more interesting characters like the one that I play in this. It's an interesting phenomenon."
The Queens native goes on to draw parallels between his beloved isle of Manhattan and the way Sundance has changed over the last decade. "Things become more corporate and the bigger businesses move in."
Brody sounds wistful as he talks about how much he enjoys visiting the Maui Film Festival. "It's much simpler and more independent film oriented,” he observes. “It's not a big business. It's not a film marketplace. Sundance has become a place to buy movies, but that's part of the business. It is a business."
That is true to a certain extent, with buyers out in full force looking for the next big thing in indie movies, and the mini-majors like Warner Independent on hand to display their latest wares. But for the majority of festivalgoers - including most if not all of the journalists in attendance - it is still all about the movies.
Wherever one goes, the conversation revolves around, ‘What have you seen? What have you heard?’ A Scottish reporter, for example, describes Brick, a high-school murder mystery starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as ‘The O.C. meets film noir,’ which, depending on how one feels about The O.C., is a questionable endorsement.
Receiving more mixed reaction is Thomas Vinterberg's Dear Wendy, a black satire on the American obsession with guns that he co-wrote with the notorious Lars von Trier. While the premiere audience at Eccles Theater burst into wild applause at the conclusion of Saturday's premiere, conversation about it afterward was more muted, with one filmgoer pondering, ‘What was that?’
| On the other hand, Pretty Persuasion, a high-school satire starring Evan Rachel Wood as a manipulative teenager who brings a sexual harassment suit against a teacher, is garnering high marks for Wood's precocious performance. With another week to go, there is still plenty of time for many more audience favorites to emerge or, as Adrien Brody puts it, for young artists and filmmakers to get exposed to a wider world. | |
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