leeper@mtgzy.att.com (Mark R. Leeper) (11/08/90)
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
att!mtgzy!leeper
leeper@mtgzy.att.combaumgart@esquire.dpw.com (The Phantom) (11/17/90)
JACOB'S LADDER
A review in the public domain
by The Phantom
(baumgart@esquire.dpw.com)
The Phantom went into JACOB'S LADDER expecting something along the
lines of FLATLINERS; a fairly standard mainstream thriller with some
horror touches -- enough to give moviegoers a few thrills, possibly even
a few gross-outs, but no more than an occasional slightly crazed look or
boiled rabbit. After all, the director, Adrian Lyne, is a master of the
mainstream, commercial film -- with FLASHDANCE, 9 1/2 WEEKS, and FATAL
ATTRACTION to his credit, Mr. Lyne is nothing if not knowledgeable about
what sells, and he of all people would know that while audiences do like
the occasional scare, the real money is in making films that are, at
heart, conventional and predictable above all else.
So imagine the Phantom's surprise when he found that JACOB'S LADDER
is as close to a full-tilt serious high-tech monster psychological
thriller as we are likely to get until MISERY opens this Christmas. As
Lyne took the audience through his rollercoaster-ride of a film, the
Phantom marveled at the camera work, the lighting, the eerie music, and
all of the classic horror touches that abounded throughout the film.
Despite what the studio wishes you to believe, JACOB'S LADDER is not
another GHOST, and it's not another FATAL ATTRACTION. JACOB'S LADDER is
a classic, traditional horror film the likes of which we haven't seen in
a good long while.
That said, the Phantom should also point out that JACOB'S LADDER is
not a hard-core horror film like BRAIN DEAD -- an excellent low-budget
film that it resembles in more than a few ways. When all is said and
done, horror gives way to explanation and resolution, and truth be told,
the film's ending is embarrassingly bad. But the festival of exposition
doesn't begin until the last ten minutes of the film (to kick it off,
one character literally stands facing the camera and explains the entire
film to an audience which Mr. Lyne and the studio apparently believe
has been standing in line for popcorn for the preceding two hours). And
by that time the Phantom was not only able to forgive Mr. Lyne for
giving in to convention -- the quaint American cinematic tradition of
supplying a sensible and rational ending to everything -- but also for
directing two of the most awful films of the eighties (the Phantom
wasn't a particular phan of FATAL ATTRACTION, but at least it didn't
provide another nail for the coffin of cinematic intelligence as did his
two prior efforts).
JACOB'S LADDER begins in Vietnam, where we first meet Jake as he
and his platoon get involved in serious combat. But shortly Jake
awakens on the subway, bound for the Bergen Street station and home.
Was the Vietnam episode a dream? Is the dirty, ill-lit subway car a
dream, and is Jake still in fact in Vietnam? Though this last
possibility can be dismissed by any New Yorker, who would know only too
well that Jake's "G" train was a real-life nightmare from which few
Brooklyn-ites can awaken, much of JACOB'S LADDER proceeds in just this
fashion. Much of the time we never really know whether Jake is awake or
asleep, or if the demons and strange goings-on he sees are really
happening. And just when we're sure that Jake is finally back in
"reality," Lyne pulls the rug out from under us once again and we're off
on another loop of the coaster ride.
For phans who have seen the excellent low-budget sleeper BRAIN
DEAD, this will sound very familiar. But where BRAIN DEAD achieved many
of its nightmarish effects through the use of graphic gore and a
generous helping of red dye #2, in JACOB'S LADDER Lyne relies on
chipping away at tiny bits of normality -- a very effective and
disturbing technique. Instead of putting a headless zombie on the
subway, Lyne strews trash all over the floor and lets the lights flicker
just so. But the trash doesn't look like trash you would expect to see
on the subway, and the lights have a tendency to go out at just the
worst times. The train itself is deserted but for a woman and a
homeless person sleeping on a bench, but the woman doesn't respond to
Jake when he asks whether or not they've passed Bergen Street, and to be
honest, she doesn't look quite right. In fact, she looks like she might
have stumbled out of the theater auditorium next door, where she could
plausibly have played an extra in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. And though
Jake is prepared to ignore the homeless person entirely as he leaves the
train, something on the bench moves. We just get a glimpse of it, and
we don't know what it is -- but what it isn't is *right*.
There's a lot that's not *right* in Jake's life, and throughout the
film we find Jake clinging desperately to what he believes is reality.
Yet it is a reality that is built on a very shaky foundation -- Jake's
mental health. The well-written script (by Bruce Joel Rubin, who wrote
the immensely popular GHOST) hints at possibilities: Jake might be
suffering from a mental breakdown. He might be suffering from the
effects of his tour of duty in Vietnam. He might be hallucinating,
possibly because of drugs he took -- or drugs that were given to him
without his knowledge -- while in the Army. And finally, he might be
dead. It is to both Rubin and Lyne's credit that they make the last
possibility the most plausible, for throughout much of the film it
appears that Jake may be slowly descending into hell, and the demons he
sees appear at least as real as does Jake himself.
Of course, the Phantom would never give away just what exactly is
happening (there is a definite "something," alas, for as the Phantom
mentioned, unlike BRAIN DEAD, JACOB'S LADDER is at heart a mainstream
film) -- guessing is half the fun. But suffice it to say that things
are almost never what they appear to be, and that while Lyne has us on
the rollercoaster he rarely misses an opportunity to unnerve us, to
confound us, and every once in a while to just plain scare the popcorn
out from under our seats. There is more than a little ERASERHEAD in
this film, and Lyne sends shivers down our spines in just the way Lynch
did: by creating a world in which stockings draped over a shower curtain
rod can look sinister; in which people's heads shake back and forth much
too quickly; in which a chiropractor might be an angel and a surgeon a
devil; and in which almost nothing seems quite right.
Well, not true. Although in Jake's world everything seems just a
little off, in our world there are more than a few things that are
exactly right. For one, the music (by Maurice Jarre) is wonderful,
eerie and atmospheric when it needs to be and a delight the rest of the
time. Lyne uses sound and lighting effects to great advantage, but he
never over indulges so that the audience becomes aware of his camera
tricks. And his rips in reality -- the touches of horror that he
sprinkles throughout the film -- brought tears of joy to the Phantom's
jaded eyes. Phans who saw THE EXORCIST III remember that many of its
"special effects" were perfectly ordinary objects used in a disturbing
context. When George C. Scott hears that his friend was murdered by
having all the blood drained out of his body, we are horrified both
because the script is so rich and the description is so good, and
because we see over a dozen small beakers, all neatly aligned on a tray,
that are filled with blood. Lyne's effects are like that, and JACOB'S
LADDER succeeds as a horror film where films like LEATHERFACE fail:
while gore is easy, it is rarely scary. JACOB'S LADDER may not be a
hard-core horror film like HELLRAISER, but in many ways Lyne shows us a
more convincing vision of hell than Barker -- with his team of special
effects technicians -- was able to.
The performances (especially Tim Robbin's as Jake) are convincing,
the script is generally intelligent, well-written, and without too many
pointless diversions (though there are some), and the film -- like all
of Lyne's films -- looks great. It is not a horror film from first
frame to last, and phans who sneak out of GRAVEYARD SHIFT and into
JACOB'S LADDER expecting more of the same (though the Phantom would have
difficulty understanding why anyone would *want* more of the same) will
be disappointed. JACOB'S LADDER needs a little time and space to
develop in its own way and at its own pace, but the Phantom thinks that
phans who see it and are willing to accept its sometimes illogical
twists and turns will be pleasantly surprised. And phans who enjoyed
BRAIN DEAD will almost assuredly enjoy JACOB'S LADDER, for there but for
the grace of a major studio and $20 million dollars is something very
similar to Charles Beaumont's glorious Twilight Zone-like script.
Good psychological horror films are so few and far between that the
Phantom urges phans to see JACOB'S LADDER while they wait for the giant
rats to leave and MISERY to arrive. When Chucky returns this Friday for
a rehash of the very clever and original CHILD'S PLAY, the Phantom will
be in attendance, laughing and throwing popcorn with the rest of the
audience. But he probably won't be scared or disturbed or even very
intrigued; JACOB'S LADDER was able to do all of these things with
remarkable skill, and so the Phantom recommends it very highly indeed.
: The Phantom
: baumgart@esquire.dpw.com
: {cmcl2,uunet}!esquire!baumgartnpr4j@watt.acc.Virginia.EDU (N. P. Rousseau) (11/30/90)
JACOB'S LADDER
A film review by N. P. Rousseau
Copyright 1990 N. P. Rousseau
(The following is probably only for people seriously obsessed with
JACOB'S LADDER, and definitely only for people who have seen the
movie.)
"If you're afraid of dying, and you're holdin' on, you'll see
devils tearin' your life away. But if you've made your peace, then the
devils are really angels, freein' you from the world. It all depends on
how you look at it." For me, these words spoken by Louie (Danny
Aiello), and paraphrasing Meister Eckhart are at the heart of the movie.
Bruce Joel Rubin (writer and associate producer) sets up the story
in such a way that we need only accept two relatively tame ideas in
order to accept the movie as a whole. First, dreams can seem real
enough to be confused with reality, and second, very long dream time can
take place in very short real time. Though this may give Rubin and
Adrian Lyne (director) a Teflon shovel, by allowing them to simply
attribute any inconsistency to the inconsistent nature of dreams, I'd
argue that they don't include anything in the film unworthy of serious
consideration and analysis.
Most reviews I've read throw out references to "An Occurrence at
Owl Creek Bridge," as if to say Rubin's idea is unoriginal. Many
Shakespearean plays involve a confusion of dreams and reality (A
MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, for example) and since Shakespeare stole almost
all his plots, maybe originality shouldn't be the issue. Good artists
borrow, great artists steal. Rubin, like Shakespeare may simply be
taking an idea that "oft was thought, But n'er so well expressed."
While flashbacks have long been standard fare in literature and
film, the one aspect of "Owl Creek" that might be considered original is
its use of flash-forward. William Golding (Nobel Prize in Literature,
1983) uses a similar technique in his novel FREE FALL. The main
character in Golding's novel is only alive for a few minutes, during an
unsuccessful parachute jump. From the moment he realizes his chute
won't open, the book becomes a flash-forward in the mind of the
protagonist, similar to "Owl Creek." Suffice it to say that these ideas
have been around, and the question remains, what do Rubin and Lyne do
with them?
In the book of Genesis, Jacob, the younger son of Isaac has a
vision of a ladder between heaven and earth, on which angels ascend and
descend. With a single biblical phrase, Rubin sets up the major premise
of the movie. We're stuck on earth, we won't be here forever, where do
we go next, and how do we get there? Again, Rubin's not the first to
use this metaphor, but since Calvin's references to Jacob's Ladder
seldom involve LSD, this could be a new angle on an old symbol.
The Ladder may just be our ticket from here to eternity, but to
eternal what? The hippie chemist's ladder takes us straight down to the
primal fear, the base anger, while Gabe's staircase at the end of the
movie seems to have a brighter destination. With this dichotomy in
place, the trick seems to be to be able to tell the difference between
up and down, or heaven and hell, since as Louie tells us, the devils
might really be angels, or vice-versa, depending on how you look at it.
Since Meister Eckhart and Woody Allen haven't solved this problem, we're
likely to be sympathetic with Jacob's (Tim Robbins) predicament.
Jacob's son Gabe, with a name reminiscent of Gabriel, the messenger
angel seems to wear a white hat (after all, he's the only son with light
hair, and the only one without a spherical, bloated, demonic face). He
asks Jacob to tuck him in, tells him not to go back to bed with Sarah,
and has Jacob leave the door open, a little more.
Jezebel (Elizabeth Pena) pretty much wears only black, as we might
picture her biblical namesake. She's a "heathen," who doesn't go much
for church names, and tells us that Jacob is with her because he sold
his soul for a good lay. Faust sells his soul for knowledge, while
Jacob seems to sell his to be spared knowledge, with its pain and
responsibility. Jezzie is often kind and comforting to Jacob, but also
seems to have a dark side. Following the "Who *are* you?!" scene, she
tells Jacob he can rot, and she's present in the hospital in hell scene,
even preparing the syringe for his forehead. In her last scene with
Jacob, she pleads with him not to go to talk with the hippie chemist,
the act which finally allows Jacob to "make his peace, freeing him from
the earth."
Louie wears white, has a bright, circular light over his shoulder,
and looks like an overgrown cherub. In fact, he looks like an angel, as
Jacob tells him every time he sees him. Louie is the only source of
stability and sanity in Jacob's jump-cut life. He goes to Louie when
things are out of alignment, and Louie straightens them out. Louie's a
life saver, and he knows it. He even rescues Jacob from the hospital in
hell. So why is he named for the very first angel to descend the Ladder
from heaven to hell? Just coincidence, I guess. (You could never
convince me that a single name in this script was not considered and
reconsidered ad nauseum, so that while possible, coincidences are rather
unlikely, as are other chronological and logistical inconsistencies).
We're willing to believe that Jacob, on his deathbed, and with the
possible assistance of the chemically isolated dark side of LSD (BZ, if
you prefer) could invent a believable, post-Vietnam life for himself.
In dream-time, it could last six years, or the time between leaving
Vietnam, and getting a call from Paul Grunigan, his similarly-spooked
battalion buddy.
What helps me buy post-Vietnam life with Jezzie, and working at the
Post Office is that he might have started working there and met Jezzie
before going to Vietnam. We know that he spent six years studying for
his Ph.D., and then went to work for the Post Office, thereby angering
his wife Sarah enough to throw him out. ("What can I tell ya, Louie?
After Nam I just didn't want to think.") Jacob might have invented
Jezzie and the Post Office out of thin air, or possibly they were based
only on the knowledge that he was having marital trouble with his wife,
and that when he got back from Vietnam, he wanted to find a job where he
didn't have to think.
But if he knew something about working at a Post Office, and had at
least met Jezzie before Vietnam, then his elaboration on these two items
into the post-Vietnam life he envisions, seems more plausible. Could he
have worked in a Post Office part-time, to earn a little extra money as
a graduate student, met Jezzie, and then while in Vietnam, reflected on
the blissful mindlessness of the Post Office? The scene in bed with
Sarah would then take on the quality of a memory, rather than a
dream--while living with Sarah, and working at the Post Office before
Vietnam he had had a dream about living with Jezzie (or cheated on Sarah
in his mind, as she puts it--a nightmare, burning with ice and guilty
thoughts). Later on, during his dying moments in Vietnam, he
elaborates on his memory of this dream and comes up with the whole
post-Vietnam dream.
I admit that this Post-Office-before-Vietnam theory is not wholly
satisfying (for one thing it takes some of the punch out of that line
about not wanting to think after Nam, if he'd worked at the Post Office
before Vietnam, presumably for different reasons). What I like about
this theory, though, is that it sets up a consistent formula where
things from the real world--facts, events, people--are used as
springboards for Jacob's elaborated dream world. For instance, sometime
before the battle, Jacob has considered getting a mindless job after he
returns, leaving his wife, going to see a chiropractor about his back
pain, and as a philosopher, thought about heaven, hell, and the
afterlife. These real world thoughts are the fuel for his dream world.
Even after the battle, and Jacob's stabbing, elements from the real
world enter his dream world. Lying on his back, staring up at faces
from the dance floor of a Brooklyn apartment is like lying on the jungle
floor, looking up at the faces of his rescuers. The disco light shining
in his eyes from the apartment ceiling is like the sun in his eyes as
he's waiting for, and ultimately hoisted up to, the helicopter. Having
a 106 degree fever, and going into shock in the bathtub is like the
shock and fever he'd be likely to experience with an abdominal bayonet
wound. Being jostled around and beaten up in the car with the D.O.D.
goons is like the helicopter ride to the mobile army surgical hospital.
And finally, the circular lamp over the couch in Louie's office is like
the surgical lamp over the operating table, in the final death scene
(also like the lamp over the operating table in the hospital in hell
scene).
We're less willing to believe that facts, events, and people in
Jacob's elaborated dream world in 1971 match up with real world facts
after 1971. For instance, that a real song from circa 1975 (Voulez-vous
coucher avec moi), or a real baseball card from circa 1973 (Rich
Gossage) could be part of Jacob's deathbed dream in 1971. Other
chronology problems include Gabe writing a letter to Jacob in Vietnam
(the one Jacob takes out of the cigar box), when Jezzie reveals to us
that Gabe died before Jacob went to Vietnam. The last problem could be
explained by something like Jacob shipping off to boot camp, receiving
the letter from Gabe, Gabe dying, and Jacob shipping off to Vietnam,
depending on how far you're willing to stretch things.
Logistical problems include why was he drafted at all, at roughly
twenty-eight (twenty-two after college, plus six years of graduate
school), with a wife and two (or three) kids? Why was he only a Private
First Class with all his education (although the degree in the cigar box
was only for a Masters, not a Ph.D.--maybe he never finished his Ph.D.)?
How come the D.O.D. goons who were hassling Jacob and his battalion
buddies hadn't hassled or even killed the hippie chemist, who knew the
whole story and obviously had the most damaging evidence against the
army? Since the last problem occurs only in the dream world, you could
argue that it doesn't need to make real world sense.
The entire scene with the hippie chemist is a little hard to take,
all at once. It's reminiscent of the scene in ANGEL HEART around the
boiling cauldron of gumbo, where Mickey Rourke is forced to confront
similarly painful facts about his past. In the ANGEL HEART scene, lines
like "elaborate incantations in Latin and Greek" just don't ring true,
and similarly in JACOB'S LADDER, lines like "it was starting to get ugly
in the States. Hell, you remember" and "a bad trip, and believe me,
I've had my share, could not compare to the fury of the ladder" don't
live up to the consistently good dialogue throughout the rest of the
movie, and tend to sound written, rather than spoken.
The hippie chemist scene was a tough one. We had to empathize with
the chemist and Jacob, and process a lot of information and chronology,
all in about three minutes. Rubin set himself up a monumental task, and
the degree to which he succeeded is arguable. The scenes that follow
this one, however are even more challenging, and here Rubin seems in his
element. The cab ride ("Where's your home?"), Sam the doorman ("Dr.
Singer. It's been a long time."), the empty apartment, teeming with
life (protractor, compass, apple pie, and television snow), the thunder
storm, the "Sonny Boy" melody drifting in from the music box in the
hallway, and THE SOUND OF SOLAR WINDS all lead up to Jacob's discovery
of Gabe at the foot of the stairs. Rubin, Lyne, and Maurice Jarre
(music) all collaborate to create a moment at this reunion of father and
son that either crystallizes or shatters everything that came before it.
As the spiral of Gabe's staircase becomes the spiral of the fluorescent
surgical lamp, we are either prepared for the final revelation, or we're
not. It worked for me, but I can see where some might be lost on the
ascent. The lights are bright, the solar winds loud, and the height is
dizzying.
* * * * * *
Peter Rousseau rousseau@virginia.edu