Jarhead: Movie, DVD & HD DVD Review (2005)

(Originally published 2005)

The new Sam Mendes movie, "Jarhead," takes us back to a past that feels oddly like the present. There's good reason for that. In the film, we’re in the Middle East, Bush is in office, and we’re fighting a war that few seem to understand.

The difference? The Bush in question is the senior Bush, Saddam Hussein is in power and the war being fought is the Gulf War.

From screenwriter William Broyles Jr., himself a former Marine who based his script on Anthony Swofford’s best-selling account of his own experiences in the Gulf War, the movie features almost no combat. It’s a psychological drama first, with fiery oil wells, exploding bombs and burned corpses not at the center of the action, but rounding out the periphery to help create the grim mood.

This is a war movie in which the action either is about to happen or already has happened, so it runs counter to most of today's big-budget war movies in that it refuses to pepper the proceedings with the sort of bloodshed that plays out nightly on, say, the evening news.

Instead, Mendes recalls elements of Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” in that he draws the movie inward, focusing on the Marines--or the jarheads, as they're called here--who are sent abroad to fight a vague enemy. What they face instead is a months long waiting game, with the real fight coming down to fending off boredom and the enemy growing within.

The film stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Swofford, who "got lost on the way to college" and finds himself at boot camp, where he is predictably humiliated by an abusive drill sergeant before getting shipped to Saudi Arabia.

There, he’s recruited by the cigar-chomping Sykes (Jamie Foxx) to become a sniper along with Troy (Peter Sarsgaard), his sketchy partner with the unfavorable past, and a group of other men, the lot of whom have such deep reserves of testosterone, they should be tapped to snuff the current energy crunch.

With no action to be had on the ground, the men find themselves fighting the war unraveling in their heads. What’s happening at home? Are their wives and girlfriends being faithful, or are they cheating on them with other men? Mounting evidence of the latter tears some apart--particularly Swofford, who begins to lose it--just as they’re at last called upon to fight.

But what fight is in this war for them? The Gulf War was fought mostly by air and these men are on foot. It’s the mounting frustration that comes with the dawning realization that their time in the desert may have been for nothing that gives “Jarhead” its final blast of irony. Indeed, as far as some of these men are concerned, that they were not allowed to fire even one bullet into one Iraqi’s head proves the biggest cheat--and the movie’s greatest, ugliest complexity.

What are audiences to take from it? For Mendes, the questions he raises are best left unanswered on the screen, where audiences can draw their own conclusions. For some, that also will smell like a cheat, but for others, the questions Mendes offers will be provocative and disturbing enough.

Grade: B