Jacob's Ladder

Horrorphile

follow this blog

1040 followers

3571 daily readers

rank of 1

E-mail Subscription

Receive an e-mail notification of new posts on this site:

Jacob's Ladder

February 4th 2011 01:10

WARNING! CONTAINS SPOILERS!

It’s the mid-70s, and New York postal worker Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins), a Vietnam War veteran, is suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. His reality doesn’t appear to be what he believes it to be, as his days – and dreams/nightmares - are increasingly being invaded by flashbacks to his first marriage to Sarah (Patricia Kalember), including the ghost of his dead young son Gabe (Macaulay Culkin, curiously uncredited), and his last tour of duty in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, 1971. His new partner, Jezzie (Elizabeth Peña), tries to help Jacob keep a grip on sanity, much to her frustration. Jacob’s reality and his confusion are desperately entangled.

Tim Robbins as Jacob

“The most frightening thing about Jacob Singer's nightmare is that he isn't dreaming,” is the tagline for Adrian Lyne’s superb portrait of one man’s madness and spiritual resignation as he passes through the dark corridor of purgatory and back-and-forth through several realities. Jacob’s Ladder (1990) works on many levels, but at movie’s end ultimately suggests only one: the genuine living nightmare that war is a hell where strangers kill strangers, trust know one, and die alone and afraid.

Elizabeth Pena as Jezzie

Producer/writer Bruce Joel Rubin first penned his screenplay in the early 80s, but the script languished for nearly a decade (with several big directors trying to get it green-lit) before Ghost (which Rubin produced) proved a Hollywood ghost story could make big bucks, and Alan Parker's stylish, provocative, and very successful supernatural period piece Angel Heart (1987) convinced the big boys. Adrian Lyne secured the director’s chair, along with complete creative control and final cut (Lyne turned down The Bonfire of the Vanities to direct Jacob’s Ladder and lost his first choice, Tom Hanks, to the movie … what a relief!)

Danny Aiello as Louis

Patricia Kalember as Sarah

Rubin’s tale is chiefly inspired by three existing texts/visions; the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is read aloud to the dying or the recently deceased, and is intended as a guide through the experiences after death, during the interval between death and the attainment of spirituality; the Bible’s Book of Genesis story in which a patriarch, Jacob, envisions a ladder ascending to Heaven, a metaphor for prayer, where angels assist the human soul in their departure from their earthly bodies, guiding them safely past their demons; the Oscar-winning short film, La Rivière du Hibou (1962), which was famously used as an episode of The Twilight Zone and re-titled An Occurrence at Owl Bridge, in which a condemned man, during the Civil War, is about to hanged from a bridge, but imagines his elaborate escape, only to be revealed that this fantasy has occurred in the moment just before the noose snaps his neck.

Pruitt Taylor Vince as Paul

As richly thematic as Rubin’s tale is, director Adrian Lyne brings a huge amount of imagination to the table. The shifts between Jacob’s fractured realities and his living nightmare are brilliantly executed; just what time and space is genuine? The sub-plot of the abuse of an hallucinogenic drug known as BZ, but in the movie labeled The Ladder, which supposedly was administered to US soldiers in Vietnam to provoke insatiable aggression is the controversial spine of the beast. Jacob is experiencing flashforwards as well as flashbacks, he is grappling with several possible existences, when the terrible truth is as gut-wrenching as it is hopeless and tragic; preposterous, yes, but undeniably poetic.

Jezzie as demon lover

Tim Robbins is good, and looks suitably bewildered, especially during the movie’s fantastic freak-out scenes, in particular the house party where Jacob’s sanity slides from his fingers as he watches his lover apparently fornicating with a monstrous flapping demon beast which impales her with a massive horn, and also later when an injured Jacob is hospitalised he witnesses his descent into a hellish morgue. The grotesque Hieronymus Bosch-inspired imagery is one of Jacob’s Ladder’s more memorable elements. All the special effects were done in-camera (now days this kind of movie would be saturated with CGI), and achieve a startling and disturbing realism.

Elizabeth Peña is excellent as Jacob’s girlfriend-cum-demon, as his Danny Aeilo as Louise, his chiropractor-cum-angel, and Pruitt Taylor Vince as Paul, one of Jacob’s distressed war buddy veterans. There’s also a young Ving Rhames and Jason Alexander in minor roles. Along with Lolita (1998) this is Lyne's best movie. I’d love to see a director’s cut of Jacob’s Ladder, as Lyne was obliged to cut twenty minutes (mostly from the movie’s last third) after test audiences stated they found the movie overwhelming.

Jacob's Ladder McCaulay Culkin and Tim Robbins

Jacob’s Ladder is a rare Hollywood movie that deals with life and death in an almost abstract perspective; a real treat for those with acquired tastes wanting a little spiritual and chemical deconstruction of mortality and the afterlife, spiced with a sensual, phantasmogorical horror.

Here’s the trailer:

Here’s a fantastic scene which shouldn’t have been deleted, but was:

Vote

subscribe to this blog

follow this blog on Orble

start your own blog

[ Link ]

Posted By: Bryn - Category: movie reviews

Related Posts:

Relate This Post

[ Previous - AMER TEASERS! ]

[ Next - POSTER GALLERY 17 - SILVERFEROX ]

Comments

3 Comments. [ Add A Comment ]

Comment by Matt Shea

February 4th 2011 03:21

I've been looking for a chance to review this myself, Bryn, and have also been waiting for the Horrorphile treatment. I love this flick - it's up there with the scariest I've ever seen.

Comment by Kenna

February 4th 2011 17:44

No Myth Fitness
Movie Roar

Bryn,

This is one of the most controversal movies ever made. I never thought of it as a horror movie, more of an eye-opener.

The BZ bomb is a real Pentagon nightmare, 10 times more powerful hallucinogenic than LSD. Chemical warefare at it's worst in the 1960s. US Military personal volunteered to take the chemical, unbeknownst devastating results. Mental blackouts for days.

On a more happier note: I love the chiropractor in the movie!