It's hard to find specific fault with Mendes' adaptation of Anthony Swofford's best-selling memoir about serving in the first Gulf War. The film looks great, has a few solid performances and strikes me as a fairly accurate representation of the daily life of deployed American soldiers. It's also pretty thoughtful, too, unafraid to ask Big Questions about the American military machine and to depict men in uniform as complex, nuanced individuals.
But the 2 hour movie is just plain boring. Excruciatingly, at times. Choppy, frequently pointless and populated by a mainly-forgettable ensemble of background characters, Jarhead doesn't even seem to care about maintaining a viewer's attention. The entire enterprise is oddly distant and disengaged, not only from any sort of real emotion, but from reality. You would think Mendes was making a historical curio, rather than a movie about an important world conflict that's still going on in the present. The overall effect is like eavesdropping on a veteran discussing his wartime experiences at the table next to you in a diner. You hear a couple amusing anecdotes and get some surface details, but you miss how the story ties together while the noisy kids next to you whine for more ice cream.
In some ways, I guess that makes sense for an adaptation of a memoir. Our lives don't tend to unfold in screenplay format. Any retelling of actual events from a real life are bound to feel a bit more unpredictable and spontaneous and disconnected than a tightly-conceived fictional script. But screenwriter William Broyles Jr., rather than even try to fit Swofford's recollections of near-combat experiences into the framework of a story, has simply pulled out the best bits of the book and strung them together. The film lacks not only basic structure - there is no beginning, middle or end - but any kind of dramatic tension. The characters sit around and wait for a while, then they go for a walk, then they wait some more, roll credits.
We meet 20 year old Anthony (Jake Gyllenhaal) in basic training at Camp Pendleton. He's selected for a special scout-sniper program by Staff Sgt. Sykes (Jamie Foxx), who will lead his small unit when they are selected for the first wave of Operation Desert Shield. And once the film arrives in the desert, basically, nothing else happens.
None of this is really a knock on the movie. In many ways, it's the whole point - Marines train hard and get fired up, and then don't have any anything to do. These Marines are trained not simply to do a job, but to kill. To kill without mercy and without thought. That's the entire job of being a soldier - to be able to kill or not kill depending on what a superior officer tells you at a certain time. To turn homicidal instinct on and off like a light switch. And Jarhead seems to challenge this idea at its very root. Once a man has been trained to kill, has practiced the maneuvers and mechanics of killing for hundreds of days on end, there is no going back.
And it's this contradiction that drives all the conflict of Jarhead - men trained and prepared to kill are sent to a hostile area and told not to kill anyone. It's a feeling of intense uselessness and frustration coupled with an existential melancholy. Men with the skills and desire to kill, with millions of dollars of weaponry at their disposal and nothing to do, train by fighting invisible enemies. They run around in the hot sun for hours, and practice taking off and putting on their chemical warfare suits on the off chance Saddam decides to use some chemicals against them.
Swofford and his fellow soldiers, including his best friend Troy (Peter Sarsgaard), spend their days hydrating, training and masturbating. Among one another, they secretly yearn for the "pink mist," the cloud of blood and brain appearing behind a target's head that lets them know the work is done. It's gruesome, yes, and at times sadistic, but Mendes and Broyles try to make it understandable. These men don't want to kill. They just want to do their jobs. Their jobs just happen to involve killing.
Interesting ideas all, and Jarhead has many more insights to share. I liked how Chris Cooper's Lt. Col. Kazinski addresses his men like a motivational speaker at a high school assembly. Is something still condescending if everyone present knows it's supposed to be condescending? And though the film never really addresses the socio-economic situations operating behind the Gulf War, or any Middle East foreign policy at all really, it's not exactly apolitical either.
The military of Jarhead is like any other massive, beurocratic organization. It gets the job done, but at a tremendous cost and in a tremendously chaotic manner. The movie doesn't argue against military intervention, so much as it makes the case that in order to justify using the United States military to accomplish a goal, it must be an extremely important goal. In other words, any time several hundreds of thousands of high-spirited, heavily-armed and well-trained young American males are hastily shipped off to another country, there will be long-term ramifications. (NOTE: I say "males" because there are no female soldiers in the movie and because it comes from an entirely male perspective. Not because I don't think there should be female soldiers or anything like that. As long as I personally don't have to fight, I don't care who the hell they let in there. Take everyone who wants in, I say.)
With all this going on behind the surface, I just wish there was more happening on the surface. And I don't mean big actions scenes. Jarhead isn't an action film, and Swofford saw absolutely no action in the Gulf (he never fired his rifle until the war was already over). I mean conflict. Drama. The things that drive movies from Point A to Point B. Jarhead consists of a lot of sitting around, a lot of walking, a lot of uninteresting, profanity-laden inanities shared between soldiers. Like the actaul soldiers during wartime, Jarhead spends 98% of its time hanging out and bullshitting around in the desert. Captivating viewing, it ain't. Roger Deakins stunning cinematography helped to maintain my interest, and Jamie Foxx stands out as the only member of the ensemble to create a truly memorable, three-dimensional character (and that includes Jake Gyllenhaal).
A lot of people complained about this in Mendes' last film, Road to Perdition, that it was a nice-looking film with some good ideas that was unwatchably stifled and dull. It's mannered, yes, and a bit deliberate, but that film's about 20 times more entertaining than Jarhead. At least Perdition feels cinematic. This latest one feels like an audio book that keeps skipping after the first 2 chapters.
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