A War Movie With No Heroes

Rating: 8/10 (10 December 2005)

"Jarhead" is not a war movie in the accepted sense, even though it follows the adventures of its lead character from Camp Pendleton to the Saudi desert and into Iraq as part of Desert Storm in 1991. Instead, director Sam Mendes has created perhaps the first post-Vietnam film of war without heroes.
The movie is the story of one man's descent into Hell. That man is Marine Anthony Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal), who realizes his mistake as soon as he is assigned to a company of screw-ups who welcome him "to the suck," Marine jargon for their otherwise beloved Corps, by pretending to burn a crude USMC brand into his leg. Swofford recovers but is chronically sick. As he reads the existentialist masterpiece "The Stranger" in the head, trapped by destiny and his Staff Sergeant (Jamie Foxx), who uses artifice to rekindle Swofford's interest in the Corps, at the same time tossing Camus away, replacing the book with a sniper rifle.
"Jarhead" steals its most rousing war scenes from Coppola's "Apocalypse Now," which it quotes in a film-within-a-film scene, with the Marines being shown the Vietnam war classic at their base movie theater. As Robert Duvall's helicopters prepare to unleash their rockets on a village, and Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" is just about to reach its crescendo with the Marines in the audience humming loudly along, suddenly the lights come up and the projection halts. A voice over the loudspeaker advises the soldiers they are shipping out forthwith. It's a classic case of coitus interruptus, and the only consolation is the tinny voice urging them all to "Get some!" But these jarheads won't be seeing real action any time soon. Instead, they stage in the desert, train and fight only boredom.
Meanwhile Swofford is fast-tracking into insanity. Despite the Staff Sergeant's reminders that Swofford, now a Marine sniper, is part of a team, there is no esprit de corps. It is as if all camaraderie was killed back at Camp Pendleton, when a Marine was accidentally shot during training, a chilling foreshadowing of more senseless dying to come. Repeatedly, Swofford is filmed apart from his fellow grunts, separated by a tent flap, or venturing alone to parlay with some Arab men in the desert. Swofford knows some Arabic, but this intellectualism serves only to further isolate him from his fellows, many of whom are portrayed as stupid. Even the Marines' own government issued gas masks isolate the men from each other.
If the viewer has any doubts that Hell is the destination, these are swept away when "The Mother of all Battles" finally begins and Swofford's unit heads into the Iraqi desert to get some. The hauntingly original cinematography of war in the oil fields of Iraq, with burning oil wells, soot-covered sand, and even an oil-soaked Arabian steed, leave no doubt that this is Hell. In one scene, Swofford wanders off and finds the burnt body of an Iraqi, with whom he sits, assuring the charred corpse that they both have had a rough day.
Swofford accepts his situation with the existentialism of the hero of "The Stranger," Meursault, who kills one more Arab in Camus' book than Swofford will during Desert Storm. While Foxx acquits himself well as the Marine Staff Sergeant, he fails to bring anything new to the cigar-chomping persona with sadistic tendencies, who has become so familiar to audiences from such disparate films as Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam War ode "Full Metal Jacket" and Ridely Scott's "Aliens." Sykes confides in Swofford his personal reasons for choosing to stay in the Marines by pointing to the desolate landscape of burning oil wells. Foxx's character fell in love with war and never wants out. He even speaks in vintage Vietnam War military slang: Americanized French and Vietnamese words, picked up no doubt in Indochina a quarter century earlier. Despite Swofford's acceptance of his fate, he wants only to finish his tour of duty and muster out of the Corps.
When Swofford and his sniper teammate return from a mission to discover their unit celebrating insanely in the desert night, we are treated both to an homage to Coppola's inspiration for "Apocalypse Now," namely, Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness, and to a visceral vision of the breakdown of civilization. These half-naked Marines, dancing wildly in the firelight, could, for all their apparently unreasonable savagery, be the very cannibals of the Congo described in Conrad's book. After the war, Swofford loses the high and tight Marine haircut that spawned the term jarhead, and returns to civilian life, but he can't lose the suck, that's with him till Death do them part. Semper Fi.