Jarhead is based on Anthony Swofford’s book about his experience of the Gulf war in 1991. He was a 20-year-old Camus-reading kid, heading for college, who enlisted and ended up as a sniper in an elite platoon, wandering the deserts of Saudi Arabia. Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) seems to be one of those rebel figures we’ve seen in Catch-22 and M*A*S*H, and Gyllenhaal has a Jokerish curl to the corner of his lips that suggests ironic disdain in his DNA. Indeed, Swofford hates life in the corps. He gets drunk and defies authority. But he’s no pinko-peacenik poster boy for the antiwar crowd. What bothers him isn’t wasted lives, but the fact that he hasn’t been allowed to waste lives. “I didn’t get to shoot my rifle once,” he complains. Swofford’s squad never engages with the enemy because it has no place in a war conducted by airpower.
I’m not sure Jarhead strictly qualifies as a war film. It offers the glib implication that Desert Storm was all about oil, but Mendes has little interest in the rights, wrongs or reasons for that conflict. That kind of moral stuff with messages has no place in a “war sucks” film. Jarhead simply sets out to show you what it was really like to be a young soldier in the first Gulf war. It opens with Swofford arriving at boot camp. What follows is a gruesome picture of army life, full of casual cruelty, porn-fuelled machismo, sadism and homoeroticism. Mendes wants us to get intimate with these men. But it’s a bit too intimate for my taste. Their masturbation, excrement and emotional breakdowns are all vividly displayed. Two hours in the company of blood-hungry, sadistic young men who scream things like ‘Yes, sir, I am a slimy, useless piece of faggot mucus, sir!” made me long for nice chaps in white linen who cry: “Anyone for tennis?” The film’s visceral power comes from its fine performances. Gyllenhaal has bulked up, and with the new muscle comes a new physicality and emotional strength to his acting. He no longer relies on his boyish charm and smile to win us over. But the best of the bunch is Jamie Foxx’s Sykes, a character Foxx takes beyond the cliché of the shouting, sadistic sergeant, forever barking at his men. Here is an eloquent man who loves the army, and is no simple-minded jarhead.
The second half is set in the desert, where the men go through endless, pointless training. “We fire at nothing and dehydrate,” says Swofford. Here, the tedium becomes a form of mental torture. It’s hard to do a film about boredom and not be boring, and Mendes just about pulls it off, mostly thanks to the cinematographer, Roger Deakins, who gives us the eerie spectacle of the oil wells of the Gulf burning like flares in a hell. But it could have been so much better. William Broyles Jr’s screenplay is short on humour, and the music — always a key feature in Vietnam films — is disappointing and trite. Soldiers in the desert try on their gas masks to the sound of T-Rex’s Get It On. It works well enough as reportage, but as drama something is missing: Mendes takes us into the life of the company, but we never get involved with the individual lives of the squad. It’s a series of incidents held together by a voice-over. War these days may merely suck, but it doesn’t provide the high drama it did when it was hell.
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Jarhead, Three stars
15, 123 mins