Jarheads Can Take It.

Rating: 5/10 (7 October 2006)

There's a scene in which Swofford and his fellow Marines are watching the scene in "Apocalypse Now" in which the Vietnamese village is attacked by napalm-bearing helicopters and the gooks are all blown to pieces in a shower of bullets and jellied gasoline. The Marines are cheering wildly and the killing. They couldn't be happier that the natives are being fried. That's what's supposed to happen to the enemy.
They missed the whole ironic point of the scene, of course. The world is simply not a Biblical one of clear good and evil. But if they missed the point, it's not simply because a lack of sophistication and a desire to destroy is part of their adolescent nature, but because they now belong to a system that reinforces that view.
I think I kind of missed the point of THIS movie myself. I'm not sure why it was made because it doesn't tell us much that's very new. The scenes in boot camp, I'm absolutely certain, were vital to the development of Swofford's character and those of his colleagues but it's not very new. We've seen it before in movies like "Full Metal Jacket." Not that it's filled with clichés -- the bragging Texan, the Brooklyn wise guy. Those are absent. It's just that there's nothing much to replace them. A football game that must be played in heavy chemical suits in 110-degree heat for the TV cameras looks, sounds, and probably is real enough, at least until the Jarheads start ripping off all their clothes while the cameras roll. Other incidents, like a truck full of parachute flares that explodes accidentally on Christmas Eve, are a little weak in credibility although, okay, maybe it did happen.
The film shows us that the Marines are bored to distraction while waiting to be deployed in a combat area. There is an interesting description of how latrine waste is dealt with. But it's a little more disgusting than it is funny. The antics of the bored aren't very funny to a mature audience either. And there's very little drama.
Jake Gyllenhaal I don't find to be a very appealing actor, although I haven't seen him in anything else. Peter Skarsgaard is fine, and so is the staff sergeant.
Chris Cooper, as a cheer-leading officer, is GENUINELY funny because he's not trying to be. He asks his troops something like, "What do we do with the enemy?" "Kill 'em!" "I must be going' deaf because I can't HEAR you!" "KILL 'EM!" "Eww, now I got a real (erection)." The movie needed more scenes like this. The first time most of us probably heard that routine -- I can't hear you! -- was either in second grade or at a summer camp in the Poconos. And here are these bemuscled Behemoths eagerly playing the same game, so steeped in a subculture that promotes blowing heads off and producing "the pink mist" that they don't realize the reptilian level at which their brains operate.
That's not to demean the Marine Corps. We need a Marine Corps, and in order to do the job they may have to do they must be trained to do that job without hesitation, in the unswerving belief that it is the right thing to do, the Biblical thing to do. And they're not "retards" or dummies who are easily brainwashed either. I taught at Camp Lejeune for a few years and was never disappointed in their cognitive abilities.
The problem isn't with the Marine Corps or with the young people who buy into the organization's values but with a larger and deeper system that makes the Marine Corps and its members necessary. It's a system rooted in human nature that knows no national boundaries and doesn't recognize uniforms.
But that raises Big Questions that a movie like this, of essentially ethnographic ambition, isn't designed to deal with. The spirit of Camus hovering overhead notwithstanding, the movie is careful to avoid controversial considerations. Skarsgaard says, "**** politics. We're here, and that's that." What we get out of this movie is a picture of day-to-day life as it was for Swofford. And the photography is splendid. Otherwise, it left me a little unfulfilled.