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Movie Review: "Jarhead" – The Beauty of Brotherhood. The Ache of War.
The trailer features a song from Kanye West with a pulsating beat. Jamie Foxx looks sternly at one of his troops, exclaiming, “I love this job.” Oil fires explode in the desert. Marines “hoo-rah” in anticipation of gory battle. The 30-second commercials you have seen provide pretty much all the action and excitement you can expect to get out of “Jarhead,” the new film by Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition). This is a story of the internal lives of men of war. Men who transmogrify themselves to serve a thankless cause, a sacrifice that leaves them torn and frayed.
Mendes and writer William Broyles, Jr. adapted the film from the novel of the same name, written by soldier Anthony Swafford. Swafford is a third-generation enlistee who has suddenly found himself in the Marines; as his character in the film puts it, he “got lost on the way to college.” Now Swafford (Jake Gyllenhall) finds himself in the latrine of his Marines’ barracks reading The Stranger by Albert Camus and pounding liquid laxative in hopes of avoiding service. This early scene works well to set up the ennui, confusion, fear and isolation suffered by our protagonist, but the film does not quite live up to this poetically-charged moment. Mendes runs the viewer through a crash-course in basic training, showing how these men learn their trade while bonding as a unit, but the scenes feel hurried, which undermines his attempt to develop a sympathetic character with a complex back-story. The affect of the movie is so subtle that it feels almost out of place set against the (unseen) graphic atrocities of war.
A “jarhead,” as Swafford describes it, is the slang moniker Marines use to label themselves. It is literally and figuratively symbolic in that with their crew cuts they resemble jars, and at the same time, they are “empty vessels,” being filled by their new military experience, forgetting what they have previously known, becoming soldiers, men of service.
Swafford is part of an elite sniper group shipped to the Persian Gulf to serve in the war against Saddam Hussein. As he and his fellow jarheads await their deportment, they sit together watching “Apocalypse Now,” cheering ecstatically as the Wagner-fueled troops fly over the Vietnam coast, laying waste to the enemy. The men have been trained to thirst for blood. They have been sapped of their individuality, the jars filled with a robotic desire to execute.
Once shipped to the desert, Swafford and his men can only wait. In a confused land of sandstorms and oppressive heat, the troops are relegated to the fate of summer campers, whiling away long days discussing lovers left behind, tossing the football, masturbating (emotionally and physically) playing cards and dreaming of home. As trained killers, they are inherently conflicted. What they have learned to do, their duty, is to kill. However, one gets the feeling that all most of them want to do is return to the safety of home. But that safety has been leveraged. There really is no "home" anymore. Their unit is their family, and now they find themselves all dressed-up with nowhere to shoot. If there is no true service, then to what end has their sacrifice been made?
The film makes an effort to paint a psychological portrait of the boys that go into war and what it does to their lives. As Swafford says near the end of the film, “All war is the same. And different.” These men lose their individuality for the greater good of the unit.
It is a summer camp of the absurd and macabre. You long for these men. You feel their fractured lives and their sense of unity while still feeling completely isolated. They are fraught with irony – surrounded by many yet completely alone. Swafford’s character wants nothing to do with the taking of lives yet he feel incomplete and unused if he doesn’t. The horrors of war and the pain of self-discovery cascade on his young face like a rain of oil in the relentless desert. Mendes, he twice references two pantheon war films, Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, but, unfortunately for Mendes, the film falls short of the affect of either. And maybe that is his point. The film falls short of the manic action and horror of “AN” yet lacks the exacting psychological acuity of Cimino’s masterpiece. But this juxtaposition maybe enhances Mendes’ assertion that there are no easy answers in war and that men who suffer through them are generally left with more questions than realizations.
As they return home after the US victory, with which they had so little to do, Swafford’s unit is confronted y a Vietnam veteran who welcomes them home in a show of brotherhood. But after his initial excitement at receiving them, he becomes despondent and seeks a seat on their bus, a telling metaphor for the cruel fate these men suffer in the ironic group-isolation. He has lost his identity and seeks it out in these men who are the same but different. They are all jarheads, as Swafford says and always will be. And once home, attempting to piece together his fractured life, he realizes that he is they and they he, unscathed on the outside, yet deeply wounded. There is comfort in feeling part of something bigger than yourself. But at what cost?
