Midway through Jarhead, a newly initiated
group of Marines question
the legitimacy of the (first) Gulf War they are (almost) fighting,
and Troy (Peter Sarsgaard) says: “Fuck politics, we’re
here now, that’s all that matters”. The line sums up the
film rather accurately; being in the position to ask some awfully topical
questions, but instead opting to bury its head in the Iraqi sand.
Jarhead, then, is a film about the frustration faced by soldiers in the Information Age, all ready to ‘get some! get some!’ with none to be found. Frustration, of course, comes hand in hand with boredom, and it can be questioned the extent to which director Sam Mendes chose to subject his audience to the same aggravation. If the aim is to screen the sense of boredom within the modern solider, it does so well, but when the film attempts to cut deeper with the mental state of its characters, it limps.
The first half of the film sees Mendes ticking off the film’s muses; there’s a version of Full Metal Jacket’s Gunnery Sergeant Hartman giving the new ‘maggots’ a verbal mistreatment, only, not nearly as filthy, humorous or memorable. There is the pressures of Military Training (again, more effectively done in Full Metal Jacket) Military bullying / mistreatment (more notably done in Buffalo Soldiers). The Marines even watch Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, spectacularly missing the anti-war undertones, screaming with testosterone overload, humming along with Wagner’s Flight of the Valkyries. Strangely, Mendes gives Chris Cooper (as Lt. Col. Kazinski), a minor role, just giving him enough time to talk crudely about his cock (“I just got a hard-on!”). The uncouthness of ‘bored-men-waiting-for-war’ is over-emphasised, giving heed to one loathsome party sequence after another (bettered in Three Kings).
The characters themselves are confusingly two-dimensional, Anthony Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) makes a dubious central character, neither struggling to overcome any real obstacles nor finding catharsis from his situation. If the audience are to be drawn to him, his sense of morality and strength should be appraisable, rather than virtually nonexistent. To draw comparisons to the film’s supposed contemporaries, Apocalypse Now’s Captain Willard is lost inside war, pushing himself further and further into ‘the shit’ to find his answers, and even Full Metal Jacket’s Private Joker finds humour and solace in questioning the ironies of war.
Oddly, not Swafford, but Troy (the always dependable Peter Sarsgaard) provides the moral strongpoint for the film, trying to keep his marine-colleagues from killing each other, and questioning (albeit fleetingly) their value in the war, and to America. The films most poignant moment sees Troy begging Major Lincoln (Dennis Haysbert) or the authorisation to kill an Iraqi General, before spectacularly bursting into tears. For Jarhead’s misses, there are also hits; the burning oil fields, the distressing display of the ‘crispy critters’, the friendly fire, the board of shame (the marines make a photo collage of their unfaithful girlfriends / wives). Notable also, is Jake Gyllenhaal flexing some acting muscle, in one scene picking on a weaker recruit before manically ordering the recruit to shoot him in the face.
Jarhead has attracted criticism being a missed opportunity to say anything memorable (or indeed, anything) about the current divergence in the Gulf, and quite rightly so. The audience waits for the battle-hungry soldiers to get their comeuppance, and for the film to take a cautionary standpoint, but it never really does. The desire to illustrate the fragile state of mind of the solider is admirable, but has been bettered already with Terrence Malick’s beautifully nebulous The Thin Red Line. We can forget the homoeroticisms and Freudianism of half-naked men ecstatically pulling out their unused weapons and spraying their ammunition into the sky, but the real disappoint comes with Sam Mendes; asking us to ‘look closer’ at emotional complexities in his brilliant American Beauty, yet with Jarhead he seems to ask us to; ‘look at Jake Gyllenhaal’s buffness’’, which perhaps is not so profound.