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'Jarhead' aspires to, but never quite achieves, greatness

By BOB LONGINO
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Great war films are big, bold, ambitious, unsettling, rousing and, certainly, frightening.

"Jarhead," a rollicking, head-spinning, often enticing jaunt into the first oily, scorched-earth Gulf War, aches to be those things. It seeks to yell like Gunnery Sgt. Hartman in "Full Metal Jacket" and go a little mental like Capt. Yossarian in "Catch-22." It wants the look, feel and effect of "Saving Private Ryan," "Apocalypse Now" and "The Thin Red Line."

Universal Pictures

'Jarhead'

The verdict: Big, bold and ambitious, with good performances. But it's a war movie that's never as great as it wants to be.

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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But while "Jarhead," based on Anthony Swofford's best seller about his modern-day experiences in the Marines, has its moments, it never quite attains its loftiest goals. One of its faults is that the film tries too hard. Visual moments are just that — prepackaged visual moments. But at least the film is reaching for something other than a quick box-office strike.

A jarhead is a Marine, and ours is baby-faced Jake Gyllenhaal, who plays Swofford, a 20-year-old trained as a sniper for the 1990 invasion of Iraq. Little does he realize going in that, thanks to massive U.S. airstrikes, the foot soldiers will see little if any action.

Gyllenhaal is joined by a parade of strong personalities, including Peter Sarsgaard as a group leader with plans of career enlistment and Alabama-born Lucas Black as a trust-no-politico rebel. There's also Oscar winner Jamie Foxx, who plays the "Oo-Rah" staff sergeant leading these men from live-ammo training to long days of boredom in the seemingly endless Asian deserts.

Theirs is a world of gas masks that don't work and anticipated battles that never happen. At its best, "Jarhead" gets at the isolation that makes men paranoid, especially about what wives and girlfriends are doing back home.

It all makes the men go a little crazy, with drunken parties, naked revelries and boys-will-be-boys branding-iron rituals. "We turned the inside of our tent into a circus," Gyllenhaal says in voice-over narration, "'cause inside our circus we are safe."

Then, after a perfect pause, he adds, "We are insane to believe this."

"Jarhead" is never gung-ho, but it's also not obviously anti-Bush, like David O. Russell's blistering "Three Kings."

This film is more about survival — physical and mental — in the heat of the desert and in the head-wringing psychology of the military. And sometimes the movie is about guys who are Marines, but would probably rather not be.

"Like most good and great Marines, I hated the Corps," Gyllenhaal's Swofford says in narration that underscores the film's tone. "I hated being a Marine because, more than all of the things in the world I wanted to be — smart, famous, sexy, oversexed, drunk, [expletive], high, alone, famous, smart, known, understood, loved, forgiven, oversexed, drunk, high, smart, sexy — more than all of these, I was a Marine."

Director Sam Mendes (an Oscar-winner for "American Beauty") pushes the film's artistry, staging scenes amid the end-of-the-world, red-and-black glow of torched Kuwaiti oil fields.

But his ambition also backfires.

One of the film's better scenes has the men at training camp watching "Apocalypse Now," singing along to Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" and jumping up and down as Francis Ford Coppola's helicopters make a frontal assault on a Vietnamese village.

It's a great scene, a riveting scene — except Mendes shows so much of "Apocalypse" that a moviegoer can begin to wonder why "Jarhead" on its own hasn't been nearly as compelling as Coppola's film.

The actors are uniformly good, especially Gyllenhaal and Sarsgaard, who both get to unleash momentary mental breakdowns. But the performer in the film is undoubtedly Chris Cooper, who has only two scenes as a lieutenant colonel.

When the first round of troops lands in Kuwait, Cooper wades into the film with fiery words and a staggering swagger. He's mesmerizing. You'll miss him terribly the moment he exits.

Sadly, like several aspects of "Jarhead," Cooper's absence makes a big, bold, ambitious war film only so-so great.