JACOB'S LADDER
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1990 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Eerie Gordian knot of a horror film
requires a lot of thought, but finally pays off in the car on
the way home from the theater. Give it a chance to sink in.
Murky photography used to even better advantage than in
FLATLINERS. (Do not read the spoiler note at the end of this
review if you have not seen the film.) Rating: +2 (-4 to
+4).
Within the space of a few short months Bruce Joel Rubin has had two films he has written released. Each deals with death. GHOST had a few heavy horror moments but they were counter-acted by a lot of lighter and more pleasant moments. "Pleasant," however, is not a term applicable to any single sequence in JACOB'S LADDER. While it probably has the more intelligent and demanding story, JACOB'S LADDER is a Gordian knot of unpleasant concepts. It is a story of disturbing horror requiring some effort and detective work to come to any consistent interpretation and then open to multiple interpretations. This is one weird movie.
It is October 6, 1971, and a company of American soldiers in Vietnam is getting ready to move into battle. Suddenly something is going very wrong. Some of the men are convulsing; others are running around fighting as if an enemy, whom we do not see, is right there on top of them. One of the soldiers, Jacob (played by Tim Robbins), is bayonetted in the stomach and left for dead. Flash forward several years and Jacob is a postman living in a surrealistically squalid New York City. Sights that the audience finds ugly or even terrifying seem commonplace in Jacob's everyday existence. But things are happening that are not commonplace for Jacob. Something is stalking Jacob, or perhaps someone who can call up faceless demons. And, as if that were not enough, the world seems to be deteriorating and people are mutating in some mysterious ways that only Jacob sees. Jacob is even a little unstuck in time as images from the past flood on him as if they are the present.
This is an unpleasant and uncomfortable horror film to sit through, be warned. It improves a great deal on thinking about it afterward. Just as is true with many of the individual scenes of this film, so too when the entire film is over we are tantalizingly unsure of exactly what we have seen and how it is to be interpreted. Adrian Lyne, who directed FLASHDANCE, FATAL ATTRACTION, and 9-1/2 WEEKS, photographed this film in murky, muted colors, much as FLATLINERS was photographer, but his visual style picks out the squalid and the disturbing. Murky colors are an intelligent ploy to get around audience insistence on color photography but still have mood effects that one usually can get only with monochrome. I rated this film a low +1 leaving the theater, but it improves greatly on reflection and at this point I would rate it a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
*****HEAVY SPOILER WARNING****
*****ONLY FOR THOSE WHO HAVE SEEN THE FILM****
As early as when Jacob is dropped off at the locked subway station, I started thinking this was a re-working of Ambrose Bierce's "Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge." I left the theater assuming that was correct. However, that would imply that the entire future is fictional. But Jacob's entire knowledge of The Ladder is from the future. Yet Jacob has already seen the convulsions that are explained only by The Ladder. If the convulsions are real, we must interpret The Ladder as real. If The Ladder is real then some of the future is really happening also. Suddenly the story is less like the Bierce and much more like CARNVAL OF SOULS, where the soul survives and assumes it is still alive and the living take it for a living soul. The faceless demons could even be a direct borrowing of the carnival dead in CARNIVAL OF SOULS. Well, if you're going to borrow, borrow from the best.
Mark R. Leeper
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