Movie Review 2: Jarhead

By Ron Wilkinson Nov 5, 2005, 17:11 GMT

Jarhead (the self imposed moniker of the Marines) follows “Swoff” (Gyllenhaal), a third-generation enlistee, from a sobering stint in boot camp to active duty, sporting a sniper’s rifle and a hundred-pound ruck on his back through Middle East deserts with no cover from intolerable heat or from Iraqi soliders, always potentially over the next horizon.  Swoff and his fellow Marines sustain themselves with sardonic humanity and wicked comedy on blazing ...more

A kinder, gentler war movie about a kinder, gentler war--but that doesn’t make it worth watching.  In this sanitized version of Kubrick’s immortal “Full Metal Jacket” the US led war for oil takes on a Buddhist spin: you wait and wait and wait, then...Nothing.  Jake Gyllenhaal does a good job portraying Anthony 'Swoff' Swofford, a young marine recruit who realizes too late that joining the Marines was a terrible mistake.  But he takes it well, in spite of the accidental training deaths and good-humored branding with the hot iron.  Much better than, say, Vincent D'Onofrio’s Private Lawrence in “Jacket” who ends up using his lifer Marine sergeant for target practice in the latrine.

Part of the problem with “Jarhead” is that everybody is too clever to be in a war, even a war in which they are extremely unlikely to be killed.  The officers and non-coms have more in common with Jay Leno than John Wayne and even the deaths during training and by friendly fire seem bland compared to the insanity of the real thing.  The film comes off more like reality TV than a story that moves the characters emotionally from one place to another.

The essence of the story is the more things change, the more they stay the same.  The fact is, the film tells us, that even though the real in-person blowing out of brains was at an all-time low in the Gulf war, emotional impacts were felt anyway.  After the Marines return home, one of their less stable comrades doesn’t make it; he is dead of undisclosed causes in a short time.  But the bald fact is this guy would have been dead anyway, probably even sooner, if  he hadn’t joined the military.  It is hard for the audience to make a distinction between the lingering emotional wounds of war and the pre-existing emotional wounds that cause citizens to become soldiers in the first place.  In something like “Apocalypse Now” there is no such misunderstanding.  People go in sane and come out either dead or deranged.

The failure to address these issues will eventually spell the demise of this short-lived shopping mall fare.  This film will open to big box office results in the first few weeks but the thrill will wear off.  There is no emotion to sustain the action.  Although it is frequently hard to understand how the military would cooperate with some films that are so brutally honest in their negative portrayal of that establishment, it is  easy to see how recruiters would love this one.  It makes the biggest tragedy of war seem to be the soldiers’ significant others at home succumbing to seduction by the guys next door.  The soldier who cuddles up with the corpse is an outcast, whereas the dead Viet Cong soldier in “Full Metal Jacket” is accepted as one of the guys.  Is it possible for an army to be mentally balanced and still kill?  “Jarhead” sheds little light on the question.

This movie will not continue the tradition of adventure and experimentation director Sam Mendes started with his previous two films, “Road to Perdition” (2002) and “American Beauty” (1999), but it will sell and it is inoffensive.  It manages to take a politically correct stance against war without damning it outright.  Good enough work by Gyllenhaal, Jamie Foxx and Peter Sarsgaard, but they all deserve better than they received at the hands of writers Broyles and Swofford.  We’re still waiting for the Gulf war “Apocalypse Now.”

Access media from 'Jarhead' or read another review of the film.