After running out of life options, Anthony Swofford (Jake Gyllenhall)
has just joined the Marines. Under the tutelage of his commanding
officers (including a pronounced Jamie Foxx), hazing from his fellow
enlistees, and the promise of eventual freedom from the armed forces,
Swofford loses himself in the experience of being a soldier. As Saddam
Hussein invades Kuwait in 1990, Swofford and his squad are shipped
over to the Middle East to await activation. Baffled by his new
surroundings and unable to experience the violence of a soldier's life
like he was promised, Swofford wanders though the first Gulf War
disillusioned, bored, and angry as he waits for the meaning behind the
madness to sink in.
There's a missing rhythm to Sam Mendes' "Jarhead" (IMDb
listing) that upsets the flow of the film in numerous ways.
Bringing Anthony Swofford's military memoir to the big screen,
"Jarhead" was probably crafted with good intentions, but the final
product feels like Mendes shot a script with every 5th page missing.
Mendes' strength has never been in his screenplays, treading lightly
over the words in his films "American
Beauty" and "Road
to Perdition." However, Mendes is a primo visual stylist, and
"Jarhead" is an absolute buffet of eye candy. Collaborating with
cinematographer Roger Deakins, "Jarhead" aspires to send the audience
on the road to hell through the experiences of Swofford as he makes
his way from boot camp to the thick of Iraq. Mendes alternates between
lush, surreal vistas of the arid, forbidding desert to the tight, hot,
claustrophobic realm of the Marines, keeping the audience as
discombobulated with the landscapes as the characters are. Mendes
doesn't take any shot for granted, and his determination to shoot the
hell out of this "Full Metal Jacket Jr." is commendable. A standout
sequence is found in the bleak, poisonous desert soon after Hussein
orders the oil wells set ablaze: as oil falls down on the squad like
summer rain, Mendes visually summarizes that all-important moment of
insanity that Swofford is trying to convey, where the situations found
in the Gulf War were even more bizarre than anything the Marines were
prepared for.
If Mendes paid as much attention to his characters as he did to his
photography, "Jarhead" would've been easily as profound as it aspires
to be. The isolation and deliberate distance paid to Swofford and his
experience makes sense. Here is a kid stuck is a situation he regrets,
hoping that the longer he closes his eyes, the quicker he'll be home
again. Mendes grasps that critical maturation in the characters from
dumb civilians to demoralized soldiers well, but the movie still plays
very sneaky chess with the characters, missing important beats of
development and relationships that confuse the story in the long run.
With a film that essentially is about the journey of the soldiers, and
no plot to speak of, the absent pieces add up quickly. Swofford's
behavior is a main point of contention, as he bounces between madness
and complacency with mystifying ease. The fuzzy math also applies to
his partnership with sniper colleague Troy (Peter Sarsgaard), with the
two either tight friends or bitter enemies, depending on the scene. As
"Jarhead" builds to a climax, Mendes' job is to get the characters and
the audience on the same level, so the payoff of Swofford's life after
the war feels real and cuts deep. The feelings never arrive; Mendes
fumbles the script and creates even more distance between the soldiers
and their mindsets.
"Jarhead" is a competent war film, detailing the era when computers
and precision wrestled away the fighting from the grunts. Mendes is
after the impotency (often literally) of the modern soldier, not the
bigger political parallel of war in Iraq (though he does slip into
speechifying and underlining here and there). In book form, Swofford's
pathway was personal and focused. Regardless of how lush and fully
realized the imagery is, "Jarhead" as a movie is stuck permanently in
basic training.
Filmfodder Grade: C+