director
Sam Mendes
screenwriter
William
D. Broyles Jr.
based on
the book by
Anthony
Swofford
producers
Lucy Fisher
Sam Mendes
Douglas Wick
cinematographer
Roger Deakins
music
Thomas Newman
editor
Walter Murch
cast
Jake Gyllenhaal (Anthony Swofford)
Peter Sarsgaard (Troy)
Jamie Foxx (Staff Sgt. Sykes)
Tyler Sedustine (Harris)
Jacob Vargas (Cortez)
Laz Alonso (Escobar)
Lucas Black (Kruger)
Brian Geraghty (Fergus)
Evan Jones (Fowler)
Chris Cooper (Lt. Col. Kazinski)
Dennis Haysbert (Major Lincoln)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 123m
u.s.
release: 11/4/05
video
availability: TBA
official
website
other sam
mendes films
reviewed on this website:
- american
beauty
- road
to perdition
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Anthony Swofford is here to
tell us that war is hell even without the war. In his 2003 Gulf
War memoir Jarhead, Swofford wove an entertaining
yarn about him and his fellow Marines sitting out in the sand,
waiting for exhilarating and ennobling combat that, for them,
never came. Swofford's account is compelling despite the lack
of war in his war story, because he's an insightful narrator,
placing you inside the heads of men high on their own testosterone,
werewolves howling for blood. Jarhead is about what happens
when they don't get blood. What does the warrior do without a
war to fight? What happens to all his gruelling training, designed
to turn him into a ruthless and efficient life-taker?
Following this anti-narrative,
the movie Jarhead is bound to disappoint those who want
it to be a rousing let's-get-the-Iraqis epic and those who want
it to be a clearcut horrors-of-war cautionary tale. It exists
aside from politics. Its Marines are men who joined up, even
the youngest of them, well before Saddam showed predatory intentions
towards Kuwait. Despite its setting, it doesn't have much to
do with the current war. One of the soldiers grouses that they're
only there to protect corporate oil interests, only to be told
that it doesn't matter -- they're here, they go where
they're sent, it's part of the job description. Later, soldiers
are told exactly what positive sound-bites to spout to visiting
reporters, and when a couple of the men balk at this "censorship,"
their staff sergeant (Jamie Foxx) reminds them, in effect, that
the Corps owns their asses.
Thus, Jarhead is only
anti-anything insofar as it's honest about the experience of
becoming a cog in a machine. As a depressive riff on Generation
X's first war (there's an odd dream sequence set to Nirvana's
mopey "Something in the Way"), it's exceptionally well-crafted.
Director Sam Mendes (American
Beauty, Road
to Perdition) seems smitten with the subject of American
disillusionment and its attendant melancholia. A despairing family
man, a betrayed hit man, and now an eager young warrior thwarted
in his desire to fight for his country -- Mendes is building
himself quite the menagerie of emotionally stunted men for whom
violence solves little. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Swofford with all
the soulful torment he showed in Donnie
Darko, somehow seeming sensitive even as he's
baying for war and hooting along with the Wagner chopper-attack
sequence in Coppola's Apocalypse Now. (I can't
blame him there; the sequence remains one of the most complexly
electrifying ever filmed.)
The movie spends some time
looking back on previous war films, not just Apocalypse
but The Deer Hunter and (in its opening boot-camp scenes)
Full
Metal Jacket. It makes sense, though, because
these are the films that Swofford and his fellow grunts grew
up with; they're part of what guided them into the service. When
Swofford and his team of elite snipers arrive in the desert,
though, they're given no outlet for their aggression. For them
-- if not for other Gulf War vets whose stories lie outside this
movie's margins -- the war becomes an extension of their sexual
discontent. They waste many hours drinking, goofing around, obsessing
about their possibly unfaithful girlfriends back home, and taking
the matter of their immediate urges into their own hands. The
Corps itself becomes a frigid girlfriend who won't put out after
the elaborate cocktease of boot camp. Some of the men (including
Swofford) go nuts from boredom, if only temporarily. Others,
like Swofford's spotter and buddy Troy (Peter Sarsgaard), seem
to have it together but might be less squared-away than they
let on.
The theme of Jarhead
is not war but denial and frustration. The climax is an absurdist
anti-climax: Swofford finally gets orders to look through his
sniper scope at an actual enemy. If he gets to pull the trigger,
he'll finally be a true Marine; he'll also become a killer, something
a man can never un-become. Marines, of course, are trained to
kill, not to clean out desert latrines or get drenched in oil,
both of which indignities we see Swofford and the others suffer.
Many war movies are about scared soldiers who don't want to kill,
but only kill when they have to. Jarhead is about the
soldiers who want to kill -- who saw those movies and
fell for the feral glamour of combat. They don't know they're
in a whole different kind of movie.
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