Jacob's Ladder

Jacobs Ladder

Directed by Adrian Lyne

113 minutes

If you’ve heard of the phrase Jacob’s ladder, then this gives you some kind of meaning to the film of the same name. Jacob’s Ladder (1990, Adrian Lyne) is a physiological horror with Tim Robbins playing the character, Jacob Singer. The film starts in the Vietnam War where Jacob is an American Solider. Visually and acoustically the film hasn’t dated, it is pretty damn menacing. Comrades are shot, if not wounded, while Jacob himself, is stabbed in the stomach with a bayonet. At this stage it seems logical to make the assumption Jacob is dead or at least, rescued. Flash forward to a little later, and it is 1975. Jacob is still alive and sitting on a subway wearing a New York postal uniform. As he tries to leave the subway in a normal, orderly fashion the station becomes a series of endless tunnels. Jacob cannot find his way out and is nearly killed (again) by a train. Every event now, in Jacob’s life is fighting and coming to terms with his presence state.

One-way of looking at Jacob’s Ladder is through time and the characters who define that. Jacob at present lives with his girlfriend Jezzie (Elisabeth Pena). Jacob is a post traumatic solider with a guilty conscience and Jezzie is unsympathetic towards Jacob’s panic attacks, which is a little odd. But then, in different stages of time, as in the past, Jacob was married with children and talks about Jezzie as a made up character from his dreams. This is confusing when these truths occur in the narrative space. But after a while you learn that Jacob has a cloudy mindset and cannot distinguish between past and present. In one tensely present moment, Jacob witnesses his friend blown- up, but his friend has already been killed in Vietnam.

Jacob’s Ladder is a bombarded with flashbacks and psychological black outs, once you get used to, it gets tedious. It also requires you to go with the narrative and trust Adrian Lyne like you would with David Lynch. But unlike the dream like nature of Lynch it is quite heavy handed and leaves you with too much closure, not to mention any opportunity to be symbolically charged or get its point across. Lyne takes on mental illness through posttraumatic stress, which is nuanced and convinced through Robbins. Sometimes you feel sorry for Jacob and then other times, he’s selfish, absolving his grievances.

This is a film that uses a twist to resolve and add closure. Whether this is clear, or not, it got to the point that it lost impact and boredom comes. When you step back a little and revaluate Jacob’s Ladder in today standards, not that films these days are employing the same mindfuck style (yes, it is a genre!), it has dated. Personally, we’re too savvy for Jacob’s Ladder. In the sense, too prepared. I mean watching Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999) or The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999) now, I recon I would get the ‘twist’ better than when I first saw these films at the time of release. Perhaps because of this I battled to fully enjoy Jacob’s Ladder and know to never trust a character with a cloudy personality or a narrative that isn’t in chronological order. Dead give away!