Jarhead
''Jarhead" finally and powerfully comes into its own in the last 30 minutes. That's when Captain Anthony Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his fellow Marines realize that in the new techno-military fighting the 1991 Gulf War they are obsolete. Not expendable, not pawns,just . . . unnecessary. This unmans them far more than the enemy ever could. ''Are we evergonna get to kill anyone?" one platoon member wails, and that's the sound of a man brainwashed for the one task he isn't allowed to do.
War is hell, in case you hadn't heard, and hell in ''Jarhead" is other people -- that and lots of sand and boredom. Don't blame the Republicans or the Democrats, because they're thousands of miles away, and the primary directive in the desert, according to one character, is ''[expletive] politics." Sam Mendes's film is at least that true to Swofford's best-selling memoir, a story in which one expects the worst of everybody except one's fellow Marine, and even he had better be watched closely. The war itself? A shell game to protect the oil fields of the rich. That's a dirty shame, but there's still a job to do.
The bitter joke at the heart of the book was that Swofford and his scout/sniper platoon mates sat in the desert for months waiting to do something -- anything -- and that the conflict was over before they even had time to lock and load. All these men saw were dead bodies left behind by US bombing runs and oil wells lit by retreating Iraqis, burning into the night like giant, ecologically disastrous Bic lighters.
''Jarhead" gets the waiting, the worrying over faithless girlfriends and wives, and the deadly illogic of armed forces bureaucracy, but here's the problem -- so has every war movie of the past 30 years, and they had actual story lines. The film evokes ''Three Kings," ''Full Metal Jacket," ''Catch-22," and other touchstones of the genre without ever establishing its own identity. It's as if all the Vietnam flicks the Marines watch to jack themselves up for combat have leached into the movie's soul.
When Mendes (''American Beauty") does try something new, it backfires prodigiously. A boot-camp fatality early in ''Jarhead" is treated so cavalierly by Staff Sergeant Sykes (Jamie Foxx) that you're kicked right out of the movie. In reality -- and ''Jarhead" does play by the nominal rules of reality, at least until the final act -- there would be an investigation, a possible court martial, and some nasty media coverage, much as there was in the case of the drowning death of Private Jason Tharp at Parris Island this past February. Here everyone shrugs and moves on to the next obstacle course. Call this what you will -- righteous anti-military indignation, left-wing propaganda, sloppy filmmaking -- it simply doesn't square.
Once the men of STA Platoon bunker down in Saudi Arabia, ''Jarhead" settles in for an extended tour of movie duty. We get to know the men: truculent, articulate Texan Kruger (Lucas Black); Fowler (Evan Jones) the racist idiot -- from Framingham!; family man Cortez (Jacob Vargas); Fergus the Kid (Brian Geraghty); and so forth. Sergeant Sykes is their chief protector and tormentor, and Foxx solidifies his triumph in ''Ray" with a sharp, unshowy piece of work. The sergeant's a lifer, with the survival instincts of a desert reptile, and any human kindness he shows may or may not be camouflage.
The main characters, however, are Gyllenhaal's Swofford and Peter Sarsgaard's Troy -- a narrator and his friend, spotter, and fellow sniper. To be painfully honest, I can imagine real Marines looking at these Hollywood boys and laughing themselves sick. The grousing and macho mind-games feel honest, as does the mordant comic despair when Sykes orders the men to play touch football for reporters -- in 112-degree heat, wearing full gas-attack protective gear. But Gyllenhaal's Swofford, a scowling intellectual drawn to war for emotional reasons, is more muddled on the screen than he was on the page, and Troy, ostensibly the toughest nut of them all, turns out to be the neediest. The miscast Sarsgaard suggests a gifted actor approximating a Marine but never the real thing.
When Operation Desert Storm begins, ''Jarhead" at last becomes its own movie, beholden to none before it. The sand dunes become pocked with death and the nights turn into brightly lit downpours of premium crude. The men lose their bearings as they stumble in the dark, oil soaking poisonously into their skins, and if that's the only parallel Mendes draws with the conflict we currently find ourselves in, it's enough. At one point, a horse staggers out of the night into the Marines' firelight, flanks glistening with oil, as though seeking a Rider of the Apocalypse that, like everyone else here, has gotten lost. What does war even mean when the killers have nothing to do -- when the killing is done by men far away and high above?
That's an ugly and pertinent question, and when ''Jarhead" stops to consider it, the movie's strong stuff. When it tries to rub our noses in the testosterone paradoxes of life in the armed forces -- like that gleeful, defiant group dry-hump that ends the football game -- it's less convincing. Swofford's book has been attacked by some Marines as a betrayal and an exaggeration (and defended by others), but it's extremely well-written, and the fear and uncertainty at its core has the ring of emotional truth. The film dilutes that core with borrowed movie moments before belatedly finding its stride, and its failure to connect suggests that the time for fictional war movies may be past -- that we'd be better off letting a thousand documentaries bloom, such as the recent ''Occupation Dreamland" and Eugene Jarecki's terrific ''Why We Fight," due in theaters next year.
Anyway, all writers are entitled to tell the story of their own war, whether it's on the battlefield, in their head, or -- as is usually the case -- somewhere in between. Like it or not, Anthony Swofford did just that. Mendes, by contrast, tells the story of a Hollywood war, and it's simply not the news we can use.
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