Stunning yet distant war film

Rating: 7/10 (13 January 2006)

Jarhead, based on the memoirs of Anthony Swofford, is a technically superb yet thoroughly distant film. Based on a book whose whole premise is a literal catarthism of personal experience, Jarhead the film is let down by a lack of perspective or individual expression.
The film starts well enough as Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) orates in voice-over the feelings associated with being a Marine, both during and after active duty. This monologue, conducted over a black screen, promises so much  this will be a film which tells story whilst extolling human emotion there in the heat of the battle (or non-battle as the case is in this film). Instead Mendes and scriptwriter William Broyles Jr dispense with narration. Understandably, narration bogs a film down, but here, where the account is based on an individual's own story, the audience yearns to know what is going through a 20-year old's mind as he prepares for war. This absence of a singular voice turns Jarhead into just another war movie: showing beefed up, frat-boy jocks displaced in a foreign land. While we can see the antics of the boys in the desert we are curiously at arms length from them. We do not inhabit the space that Swofford occupies as we are not 'inside' his head at all. Therefore, to the audience, Swofford the protagonist is just another grunt.
The film is something of a post-modernist take on war films themselves. It unashamedly name drops the most famous war movies, either directly, with shots of the troops viewing Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, or indirectly, with an obvious homage to Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket at the start of the film. In his book Swofford called war movies 'pornography for soldiers' and here Mendes shows us the grunts woop-wooping the infamous helicopter strike from Apocalypse Now. For these boys, all they want is action. For a brief moment, a scene so often marked as portraying the Americans as "evil white men", as so famously put by Pauline Kael, is flipped on its head. The seductive might and power of the American military is being triumphed and the audience becomes one with the soldiers. Yet again, this scene would have been best served by a voice-over from Swofford explaining his thoughts (I have not read the book, but he apparently talks of wanting to rape and pillage the villagers from that scene). If Mendes is already name-dropping and using Apocalypse Now as a reference point, why not follow Coppola's use of narration (so brilliantly written by Michael Herr)? It's a sore point of distance that lets down what could have been a great movie instead of just a good one.
The performances are all strong. In fact as pieces of acting, both individually and as an ensemble, Jarhead is excellent. Jamie Foxx stands out as the brash Staff Sgt. Sykes, a tough but warm leader, while Gyllenhaal and Peter Saarsgard (as Troy, Swofford's sniping partner) also perform well. Gyllenhaal's character would have been more memorable had we been allowed deeper into his mind, but as such it is Lucas Black as Kruger, an unusually politically aware Texan, who stands out. His nuanced performance as someone obviously more aware than he appears helps make up for Gyllenhaal's spectre-like Swofford.
While the script might not be watertight, Mendes excels in cinematography and editing. The Marines are stripped of colour as the desaturated images of boot camp and the desert make them appear pale and ghostly. Mendes' staging of the burning oil fields is the film's highlight; the Marines walk in bright sun towards a black sky, slowly becoming enveloped in crude oil. Mendes has used CGI in this section of the film, but it looks great. As a collection of images, Jarhead is brilliant. Audio quality is excellent too  the various aural instances help invoke the feel of military life in the desert.
Mendes may have purposely avoided any comment about the current war in Iraq, oblique or obvious, to allow for better box office figures in the US. That's a cynical point of view however. This is Swofford's story and yes, there are scenes or dialogue that could references to the current situation  at one point Swofford says in voice-over, "we are still in the desert"  but his point is not directed at the US, it's directed at his platoon and their enduring memories of the conflict. This is a movie about the Gulf War, nothing more. Anti-war media and commentators hoping Mendes would use this film as a protest platform will be disappointed. In the end, Jarhead is a good war movie, but one without a voice. It's a well-made, high quality film. It just fails to stir the emotions and make a genuine connection with the audience. For all its technical and visual brilliance, that is a real shame.