JARHEAD
½ (one and a half stars)
Welcome to the suck.
Running time: 115 minutes. Rated R (profanity, violence, strong sexual content). At the Empire, the Lincoln Square, the Kips Bay, others
AFTER a review of Anthony Swofford’s 2003 Desert Storm memoir “Jarhead” appeared in The Wall Street Journal, one old grunt wrote to the paper, “I remember hearing exactly the same stories about Korea and Japan from the NCOs when I went in, and I admit that I passed on my own versions of those legends to the replacements who came through Vietnam. Of course, gullible civilians were always fair game.”
Apparently not much happened to Swofford when he was in the Marines in the Gulf, and his disappointment is palpable in Jake Gyllenhaal’s portrayal in the movie of “Jarhead.” Swofford wanted some hard-core guts-and-glory, and if he didn’t see some he’d create it in his head. The rest of us who served in Gulf War 1.0 (I was a lieutenant in a unit attached to the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment in northern Saudi Arabia) were glad the war turned out as uneventful as it did.
Swofford and director Sam Mendes, who comes nowhere near even getting the uniforms right, approach this non-story about inaction by passing the time with macho posturing, pornographic fantasies and feverish imaginings borrowed from other war movies. I’m not saying “Jarhead” exaggerates. I’m saying it lies from beginning to end. The opening drill-sergeant scene, which is set in 1989, the year I joined the Army, is pure fiction that plagiarizes “Full Metal Jacket”‘s famous profane tirades. But drill instructors were forbidden to use profanity years before 1989. Then Swofford watches a Marine killed during a training exercise that uses live machine gun fire. This does not happen. The military doesn’t waste lives on pranks. I was once severely reprimanded because one of my soldiers twisted an ankle while jumping off a truck.
But the movie wants to drum up some gorgeous horror and grim ironies. Troops keep going dramatically bonkers when they aren’t even under fire. Peter Sarsgaard plays a whiny sniper who tries to sound tough by saying, “Welcome to the suck” but pitches a hissy because air power erases his target.
Also, the Marines party. At a Christmas blowout, they guzzle liquor out of a five-gallon fuel can, play loud music, light fires outdoors. I say again: This did not happen. Saudi Arabia is a dry country, and even if you could sneak in a little liquor no officer or senior sergeant would allow his men to get drunk in a combat zone. In the same scene a guy roasting weenies sets off boxes of flares, but ammo and flares are not left lying around to provide amusing hijinks. And you don’t light fires or make noise because you don’t want the enemy to know where you are.
There seem to be no officers in Swofford’s company, and the only leader around much is a staff sergeant played by Jamie Foxx. Like all of the other characters, he talks exclusively in profane tough-guy movie patois. Real military talk (since profanity is banned, at least officially) offers more interesting opportunities for satire: It’s an anodyne techno-corporate speak straight out of “Office Space.”
The Marines’ women back home are portrayed as massively, even belligerently, unfaithful. This is a notion taken from movies about WWII, which separated men from their sweethearts for years. In “Jarhead,” every swinging Richard has been dumped after eight weeks in country. But the war did not instantly transform our girlfriends and wives into sluts. I never heard of anyone being dumped while he was in the Gulf.
Marines did not play football in full anti-chemical suits in 112-degree weather; men would have been collapsing and perhaps dying because it was so hard to breathe in the gas masks.
Do I quibble over details? Details are all the movie offers. There isn’t a story, just Gyllenhaal’s shirtless strut and small groups wandering through the pretty vistas, as if this highly mechanized war were fought on foot, like the American Revolution. Toward the end we zip through a Greatest Hits package of what you already knew about the war: the Highway of Death, the burning oil wells. That’s it.
Only for a few bland moments does the film deal in reality; lower ranks did indeed burn the human waste of their superiors and troops were given mysterious anti-nerve gas pills and a waiver to sign. (I pretended to swallow mine every day, then threw it out.) It’s also true that military men cheer through the bloodiest parts of anti-war movies. But what’s it worth to watch Gyllenhaal watch “Apocalypse Now”?
e-mail: kyle.smith@nypost.com