The drill instructor sequence from “Full Metal Jacket,” Stanley Kubrick’s take on Vietnam, has informed many a war movie since, but perhaps never as transparently as in the opening for “Jarhead.”
The D.I., a short muscular man with a bizarrely pudgy face, walks back and forth in the faces of the two lines of newly bald soldiers screaming obscenities, smacking heads and doing whatever else he can to deflate the souls of the training Marines. When he slams Tony Swofford’s (Jake Gyllenhaal) head into a chalkboard after Swofford explains that he made his way into the Marines because he “got lost on the way to college, SIR!” there is the sinking feeling that we’ve seen all of it before.
Swofford was a real guy, and this movie is based on his Gulf War memoirs. I haven’t read them, but to get it out of the way, the main reason “Jarhead” ultimately fails is that it is too disjointed a narrative. It has all the polishes and posturing of a film that should keep us perpetually involved, but we feel restless, unmotivated.
In 1987 Roger Ebert wrote that “Full Metal Jacket” is “more like a book of short stories than a novel.” The same could go for “Jarhead,” which he liked. It was directed by Sam Mendes, who has a history of making great-looking movies (“American Beauty,” “Road to Perdition”), and this one is no exception.
The desert is photographed crisply, and we can see and feel its heat and desolation. There are some arresting images, too: Marines’ boots clomping through sand blackened by fire to reveal white sand underneath, oil rigs burning in the distance and oil raining from of the sky. “Jarhead” features some top-notch acting, too, from Peter Saarsgard, Chris Cooper and Jamie Foxx. Even the dopey Gyllenhaal steps up to the plate.
But isolated moments and pretty pictures don’t make a film. Mendes is a master at creating good scenes, but here he just can’t seem to make any sense out of them. Early on, there is a scene in which Swofford skips out on training by faking the stomach flu, and instead sits on a toilet and reads Albert Camus’ “The Stranger”.
This may at first appear to be a cheap way to signify that Gyllenhaal’s character is an “outsider.” The way it plays out, though, it becomes apparent that Mendes is attempting to posit Swofford as a sort of existential hero. Like Camus’ stranger, Swofford is a man that seems to appear out of nowhere, seems to not know how he ended up where he is. Sadly, this doesn’t do much more than reek of bad character development.
The parallels don’t end there. Swofford gets angry that his Marine tags keep coming back with his religion marked as “Christian” when he so clearly asked for “No Preference.” Later when he’s cleaning the latrines, the sun gets in his eyes, and he goes a little crazy, nearly murdering a fellow jarhead. But unlike Camus’ character, who remains unrelentingly amoral, Swofford realizes his mistake and slumps into a typical and uninteresting sentimentality for the remainder of the film.
It is not the only one of Jarhead’s messages that doesn’t register. Before heading off to Iraq, the soldiers gather for a screening of “Apocalypse Now” and cheer on the planes as they drop bombs on innocent Vietnamese. This is supposed to be cleverly ironic, and we are to shake our heads (laugh?) as these guys miss the anti-war message. But the device falls flat if, like me, you are in a theater full of people who give Jarhead the same treatment.
It’s a different type of anti-war movie. Instead of speaking to the pointlessness of war by showing its atrocities, Jarhead contends that Desert Shield/Desert Storm was pointless because it was mostly just a bunch of sitting around. Fair enough, but does that mean the audience has to be as bored as the characters?
And what the Marines do to cure their boredom is often embarrassing and sometimes disgusting. It is sadistic, the way these men treat each other and each other’s bodies as well as their attitude toward their situation. It’s another of the filmmakers’ lessons for us: this is what being stranded in the desert does to people. This is what we train our armed forces to be.
But I submit to Mr. Mendes: how can we be against a war if we don’t care about anybody in it?