JACOB'S LADDER (1990) A Film Review by Ted Prigge Copyright 1998 Ted Prigge
Director: Adrian Lyne Writer: Bruce Joel Rubin Starring: Tim Robbins, Elizabeth Peņa, Danny Aiello, Matt Craven, Jason Alexander, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Patricia Kalember, Macaulay Culkin, Eriq La Salle, Ving Rhames
Adrian Lyne's "Jacob's Ladder" came out almost a decade ago and I doubt anyone has figured it out yet. It's a giant enigma of a film. Everything in it contradicts something else. The plot structure is at once manipulative and dizzying, and the entire film is like a horror film for the Vietnam Vet crowd. It's a combination of bizarre images from hell and a sad, murky drama about a man who has lost all capacity for telling what is reality and what isn't. And dammit if it isn't totally engrossing from start to finish.
Yes, "Jacob's Ladder" is extremely manipulative, but it's one of those films that's manipulative for a very good reason. Many films are manipulative just so they can pull one over on the audience (ahem, "The Usual Suspects"), and those are fine and dandy, but "Jacob's Ladder" is one that does it not so for the sole sake of being clever and challenging, but so that it can correctly take us inside the head of its protagonist, a Vietnam Vet who's real life and halucinations from the War are on the verge on destroying him psychologically.
The film follows three different time lines: the actual events of his experience one night in Vietnam, when his platoon was attacked, it seems, and members began to react to something that is unexplainable; his life years after the war when he begins to experience psychological problems; and his various hallucinations. The protagonist, Jacob Singer, is played by Tim Robbins, in his first major dramatic leading role, as a sad man who's life probably would have taken a different route if he had never went to Vietnam. He was an English professor, but following the war, lost his son (a young Macaulay Culkin), then his family, left his profession, and began working at the post office.
When we meet him in what appears to be the main timeline (which appears, I think, to be sometime in the mid-to-late 70s), he's washed-up, living in a danky apartment with a woman he works with named Jezzie (Elizabeth Peņa) who seems to love him but may be just tired enough of his psychological problems. When the story begins, we see his daily paranoia: he fears he's being chased by some faceless enemies, once in the subway station, and another time on the streets in broad daylight.
Then his life really gets out of hand: his doctor and a member of his platoon (Pruitt Taylor Vince) are blown up in their cars, and following the latter's funeral, the members get together and discover they all experience the same delusions. They wonder if something happened to them in Vietnam, and they all hire a lawyer (Jason Alexander, in a great piece of dramatic acting which easily seals his post-"Seinfeld" career as being sunny)...but everyone but Jacob backs out for some unknown reason.
It gets even weirder. He gets a nasty fever one night following a party, and is saved in a horrifically scary scene where he has to placed in a bathtub with ice cubes so his temperature will come down. He discovers something about his Vietnam record that makes no sense, but may after all. And a new timeline is introduced that brings true emotional depth to the film, something including his dead son, which is concluded in a scene that's nearly as cathartic as the final scene in Andrei Tarkofsky's sci-fi masterpiece, "Solaris."
This is all deftly handled by a script by "Ghost" scribe Bruce Joel Rubin that is frightening, engimatic, and filled with sadness, all at the same time. His story really works because the lead character, Jacob, is a real human being, and he's extremely likable. We really feel something for his character not only because he's naturally a real nice guy, but because through everything, we're right there with him. We understand very little, and so does he. We're as shocked by the bone-chilling hallucinations as he is. And when information that contradicts everything he has come to know comes into light, we're as freaked out as he is.
If anything doesn't work in this film, it's the unearthing of a conspiracy involving experimental chemicals during the war, something which is brought to light during the final moments of the film, to give it more clarity and realistic balance. This does so, but the film didn't really need this anyway. This is a case where the story is so strong, and the filmmaking is so amazing that something that was already publically well-known as this didn't really need to surface to make it a "statement." This is too good a film to be reduced to such a thing, and it's a good thing that it is kept as only an afterthought and not the true center of the film.
Adrian Lyne, whose films master in sexual perversity and obsession ("Fatal Attraction," "Indecent Proposal," and the new version of "Lolita" are blurbs on his oeuvre), marks that he's a powerful director with this film who can deal with issues of paranoia and disturbing everday ignorance while still telling a wonderful story. His images are unnerrving and stupefying. So's his entire movie.
I'm still not sure what to make of this film. Was it all a dream, or was it all happening for real, or was there something else I'm not thinking of? It's decision to not come to a neat and clarifying close that explains everything, no matter what the facade was, is one of the film's true masterstrokes. It's one of those films you discuss on end, using small clues in the film as the basis for far-out theories, like "12 Monkeys," the film that spurned months and months of discussion of what it meant to anyone who cared.
But if you want to see the real power of this film, you don't really need to figure out what the meaning is. "Jacob's Ladder" is one of those films that is not powerful because it's challenging and tough to figure out, but because it's psychologically emotionally stimulating. Some thing were better left unresolved.
MY RATING (out of 4): ***1/2
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