JACOB'S LADDER
A film review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1997 Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE:
JACOB'S LADDER is a horror film in the purest sense of the word: it horrifies us, not just with what we see, but with what we come to understand about what we see. Most horror films are about death, or more recently, the giving and receiving of violent pain. LADDER is about life *and* death, which is what sets it so far above almost every other horror movie ever made. It drains the viewer dry, emotionally and viscerally, but does it with real feeling and technical virtuosity.
Tim Robbins plays a young man named Jacob Singer, and we learn about his life in quick, hard flashes. He was married once and had a child, but then was sent to Vietnam and had some unspeakable experiences there that crippled him in spirit. Now, back in the States, he works in New York City at the post office and has a girlfriend (Elizabeth Pena, in a very good and very difficult role).
Jacob is obviously intelligent and gifted, but his psychic scars from the war (where he obviously did not belong) are ripping open on him. ("After 'Nam I didn't want to think," he says.) He's seeing demonic creatures in broad daylight. Maybe he's suffering from post-traumatic stress flashbacks. Or drug-induced hallucinations. All he knows is that he's scared.
Things get even odder. One of his former war buddies dies in what seems to be a car-bombing, but not before dropping hints that perhaps the bunch of them were guinea pigs for some kind of experimental drug in 'Nam. And then things become even more horrific. He remembers being wounded in the war and getting on a medevac copter, but...
>From about the 40-minute mark on out, the movie stakes out territory that I have not seen any other movie attempt successfully -- at least not to the level of emotional purity that this movie does. We are not passively observing Jacob Singer's mental breakdown (if indeed that's what's happening): we're sharing it. Jacob's state of mind is the real theme of the movie, and it's reflected in the nervous editing rhythm that takes over in some of the scenes. Sometimes we're not totally sure how we got from one scene to the next -- there are several flashbacks to his earlier family life that don't make sense the first time we see them but that disentangle themselves later -- but we never feel like the movie doesn't know what's going on.
Tim Robbins is never less than excellent in showing us Jacob, a man whose intelligence is not going to provide him with an answer to anything he sees. The real answer is in his feelings. Also, I mentioned Elizabeth Pena has a tough job to do in this movie, perhaps no less difficult than Robbins'. She plays a smart, rather headstrong character who only has a limited amount of patience, but plenty of love, and there are some scenes where she has to walk a fine line between being selfish and being blunt-nosed. Danny Aiello also has an interesting supporting role, as a gentle chiropracter, who offers an occasional word of advice to Jacob.
So much of the movie cannot be discussed here without ruining it, because up until the very end we are given one way of interpreting what we see. And then the final scene arrives and changes *everything*, and provokes a very uncomfortable question: What is all of life, anyway, but perhaps a kind of desperate squirming in the face of a dead universe? And how do the dead know that they *are* dead? The final shot, the more you think about it, may even open more doors than it closes. JACOB'S LADDER may very well be the first real thinking man's horror movie.
Three and a half out of four hospital wards.
syegul@ix.netcom.com EFNet IRC: GinRei http://www.io.com/~syegul another worldly device...
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews