Jarhead - Austin American-Statesman movie review

'Jarhead' focuses on the boredom, not the battle

By JOHN DeFORE
Austin American-Statesman

"Jarhead" goes nowhere. It rarely rouses the senses or challenges the soul, and it has little to teach us either about its characters or the world in general.

But if those are faults that tend to get a movie deemed unsatisfying, they're also, arguably, qualities perfectly appropriate to this film's subject, the Gulf War. After all: If Desert Storm failed to dent the American psyche enough to prevent a sequel just a few years later — or to accomplish its goals and make that sequel unnecessary — why should we expect a movie about it to disturb us like a Vietnam memoir or move us like a World War II epic?

Universal Pictures

'Jarhead'

3 out of 5 stars

Director: Sam Mendes
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Jamie Foxx, Lucas Black, Chris Cooper
Run time: 115 minutes
Release date: Nov. 4, 2005
Rating: R for pervasive language, some violent images and strong sexual content.
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Marine Anthony Swofford, author of the book "Jarhead," didn't choose his perspective on Desert Storm — it just happened to be the one he lived — but his tale of boredom, impotence and ambivalence fits the conflict in the same way that other wars are encapsulated by more engaging films. "Three Kings" is more enjoyable and has more to say about American policy, but it's hard to believe that this film isn't a truer reflection of the war's effect on those who fought it.

Screenwriter William Broyles Jr. and director Sam Mendes have adapted Swofford's book into a series of episodes that for the most part reject the idea of narrative momentum. Things do happen to characters that affect them, but in general these men are simply treading sand, hoping desperately for their chance to kill someone while the filmmakers allude to other war movies.

The most telling of those allusions is also among the most affecting scenes here: While awaiting assignment, our platoon of macho twentysomethings screen "Apocalypse Now" and cheer its massacres with orgasmic enthusiasm. The bloodlust in these faces, and their willingness to ignore the film's obvious condemnation of what's happening onscreen, is terrifying.

Remove the unifying stimulus of that film, and the Marines do display some hints of individual character. One Texan airs his misgivings about being shipped overseas to protect some fat cat's oil wells; one sadistic grunt shows such a predilection for atrocity that you know he'd be more at home in Abu Ghraib.

If our protagonists are multidimensional, though, it's mostly thanks to the actors playing them. Peter Sarsgaard is immediately recognizable as a man with secrets and contradictory impulses, laying the groundwork for a revelation the script makes late in the game; Jake Gyllenhaal, as Swofford, is morally lost in a way that runs much deeper than the reason the screenplay gives him. (He, like almost all his peers, is haunted by the idea that his girlfriend is cheating on him.) Jamie Foxx is solid in a less conflicted part, as the sergeant training these recruits to be scout snipers.

In the absence of forward movement or deep meanings, the movie does for us what the Marines are doing for themselves: It finds diversion in the moment. There's a fair bit of comedy here, from the now-traditional scene of obscene mistreatment in basic training to the hormonal roughhousing invented to pass time in the desert.

As combat gets under way (mostly far from this platoon) the diversions become gruesome, as when the men stumble across a convoy that has been firebombed, leaving charred corpses everywhere. Appropriately, though, for an in-and-out televisual war where almost all the real devastation was suffered by non-Americans, this scene doesn't horrify the Marines so much as give them something interesting to look at for a while.

Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins work to give us something to look at as well. For much of the movie, they evoke the desert by making the screen even more washed-out than it is already; nothing conveys desperate boredom like a thousand shades of khaki. Toward the end, though, they hit on a remarkable image that has been shown before (memorably by Werner Herzog) but lends this film the operatic scale its plot deliberately lacks: Swofford and company enter sabotaged fields where sand and sky are filled with spewing oil and towers of flame loom nearby.

It's a magnificent inferno, and an image to haunt viewers' dreams — one little hint that, even for soldiers who never see combat and come home barely wiser, every war is a window to hell.