Sam Mendes' "Jarhead" is a war movie without the war. The trailers set viewers up for a guns-a-blazin' Hoo-rah! smackdown, but Mendes, the man behind "American Beauty" and "The Road to Perdition," is more interested in making a movie that captures the essential frustration of being in a combat zone and not being able to, you know, fight. I guess this could lead to an interesting movie, but, alas, Mendes does not make one. The truth is that "Jarhead" is a mess. It's a stunningly inert meditation on the trials that face an American soldier during wartime. The tone of the movie is strangely detached and disinterested. We see shocking events, but the movie is so ambivalent that any emotional impact is lost.
The movie is based on Anthony Swofford's bestselling 2003 memoir about his time in Iraq during Desert Storm in 1990. The book skirted the political issues surrounding the war and instead focused on the toll having to wait to fight a war can take on a testosterone-charged young man. Part of the problem is that Mendes and screenwriter William Broyles ("Cast Away") stay so faithful to the apolitical tone of Swofford's book that they lose countless opportunities to score any dramatic points. Instead of being able to make any grand statements about the morality or effects of war, the movie just falls back on documenting the day-to-day tedium of being a marine, which the movie documents all too well. By the end, I was as fidgety and bored as the trigger-happy marines in the movie.
Jake Gyllenhaal ("The Day After Tomorrow") stars as Anthony "Swoff" Swofford, a young enlistee who is not entirely sure he wants to devote his life to the Marine Corps. The movie is told from his point of view, and we're treated to long, torturous voiceovers explaining the ins-and-outs of being a jarhead. Gyllenhaal plays Swofford as, for the most part, a blank slate — which doesn't do anything to lend the movie any gravitas. He's too insulated, too guarded to ever really engage the viewer. Swofford is supposed to be our guide through this strange new world, but he never really connects with the audience. Gyllenhaal never makes us see the brutality, absurdity or exhilaration of war; he's just a guy telling a story.
The other performances are similarly guarded. Maybe Mendes wanted everybody to underplay, but it certainly seems like nobody is having any fun with their roles. Even Jaime Foxx ("Ray"), clearly gunning for an Oscar nomination as Staff Sergeant Sykes, who enlists Swofford to be a sniper in his unit, seems to be kept on a pretty short leash. Peter Sarsgaard ("Flightplan") plays Swofford's spotter Troy, a man who was born to be a jarhead, but soon finds himself without a war. Chris Cooper ("The Bourne Supremacy") also pops up playing one of those lunatic-in-fatigues-who-can't-stop-screaming characters that are unique to war movies. None of these characters makes much of an impression, because Mendes shuffles them in and out of the action so quickly that it's tough to keep track of who's who.
There really isn't much of a narrative structure to the film, which quickly grows tedious. I'm sure this is a deliberate choice from Mendes because he wants to focus more on the characters, but the characters are so uninvolving, I found myself wishing for something, anything, to happen. Instead, all the audience gets to see is rage turned inward. When the movie eventually erupts into the kind of overt violence we've been waiting for, it feels curiously restrained and anti-climactic.
On a technical level, the movie is rather flat. It copies the same washed-out look we saw earlier, and to much better effect in David O. Russell's far superior 1998 Gulf War film "Three Kings." The filmmakers didn't go to the Middle East to shoot the film, which was a mistake. The movie was shot in California and it shows: the sky feels too clipped and gray. There is no sense of scope or majesty to the desolate landscape. You always feel like you might catch a glimpse of Studio City over the large sand dunes.
What is most disheartening about "Jarhead" is how it manages to tap-dance around the political issues of the first Gulf War as well as those connected to the one we are in right now. How can you make a movie during a war and not have an opinion about it, one way or the other? The movie makes numerous allusions to movies from the Vietnam era (we see clips from "The Deer Hunter" and "Apocalypse Now"), but Mendes seems so eager to channel the spirit of these movies, he seems to forget what made them great: they took a stand about the morality of war. Hell, even the old RKO serials from the '40s had a flag-waving glee about them.
Mendes is too cool, too detached, to even try to muster up some old-fashioned patriotism. Instead, he falls back on showy, hackneyed, Philosophy 101 visuals, like a sky raining oil and young men standing alone in the desert. Mendes, arguably the best and brightest director of our era, a man with his finger firmly on the pulse on the American consciousness, has been reduced to standing around, saying, "Isn't it ironic?"
Grade: C
