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Jarhead
Operation Desert Storm roars past a Marine sniper and his company, leaving them bored and bewildered by the unreality of modern warfare. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Jamie Foxx and directed by Sam Mendes
History will regard the first Gulf War, when America repelled Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, as a prologue. First codenamed Operation Desert Shield and subsequently Desert Storm, it was a conflict that seemed to augur a new age of military dominance for the US, in which the world's only superpower would use its air superiority to destroy its enemies with minimal loss of life to its own armed forces. Closely adapted from a memoir by Marine Anthony Swofford, Jarhead tells the story of this conflict from the perspective of the author (played here by Jake Gyllenhaal). To the West, it was a strange and abstract war, a distant CNN event, mediated and medicated. Jarhead reveals it to have been an equally unreal experience to the men on the ground. This is a story about heading off to fight a war and not finding it, what that does to the self-worth of trained killers, how their boredom and frustration drives them toward madness under the desert sun. As Swofford, Gyllenhaal has his work cut out. The Marine is not the bookish soldier-writer of, say, Neil Simon's Biloxi Blues, the reluctant intellectual conscript and company wallflower. The son of a Marine, Swofford finds self-worth in sniping and he is hungry for the "pink mist" that puffs from the skull of his distant victims. He reads Camus and he wants to kick ass too. When the Marines watch the 'Ride Of The Valkyries' sequence from Apocalypse Now to psyche themselves up for conflict, Swofford's whoops along. He may be our wry narrator but he is also a bully and a wannabe killer. Gyllenhaal plays him with rangy, heavy-shouldered physicality, his over-developed trapezius and deltoid muscles framing the actor's expressive brow, a human battering ram with nothing to batter against. As they wait for the war to begin, the Marines goof about in the desert, cooking up hooch, playing ball in their chemical suits, and seething with jealous speculation about the infidelities of their girls back home. It's all pretty funny, a sequence of hoary anecdotes from the corps peppered with coarse Marine slang: hands are "dick skinners", the mouth is a "cum receptacle", the service itself is "the suck". Backing up Gyllenhaal here are Jamie Foxx as a God-fearing staff sergeant and Peter Sarsgaard as Troy, a soldier desperate for a kill before he is drummed out of the service. When the company eventually heads off into the conflict, it's into a hellish desert landscape of burning oil fields and charred Iraqi remains. They wander the aftermath of a war and return home comparatively unscathed. How different the memoirs of the current occupation of Iraq will be! Suicide bombers, the torture at Abu Ghraib, the nervous slaughter of families at checkpoints - it is unlikely that the current Jarheads would echo Troy's observation, "Fuck politics. We're here. All the rest is bullshit." That history has raced beyond the events of Jarhead undercuts the sterling work done here. For director Mendes, it is less mannered than his Road To Perdition, although his attempts to frame it as part of an American trilogy along with American Beauty are pretty bold. The director continues to shoot beautiful films with absent hearts, Gyllenhaal establishes himself as the intelligent leading man, a position wilfully abdicated by Johnny Depp in preference for eccentric supporting roles. Verdict Deliberately anti-climactic and merely the prologue to an on-going main event, Jarhead is best appreciated as a low-key, minor film, a well-observed black comedy about the lot of the US marine. |
