Unfit For Combat

Lost Claus: Anthony Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Troy (Peter Sarsgaard) in Jarhead. Courtesy MongrelMedia.

It’s a good year to be a Jake Gyllenhaal fan. Especially if you’re a fan of the toothsome young actor’s newly buff physique. Festival audiences have already thrilled to his make-out sessions with Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain (which gets general release in December), and, in Sam Mendes’s Jarhead, one gets to see Gyllenhaal frolic in little more than a Santa hat. Well, two of them, actually — though the second is used in ways only Mrs. Claus would be familiar with.

This scene occurs about midway through this Gulf War drama, when a group of Marines stationed in Saudia Arabia decide to let off a little steam during the holidays. It’s a scene common enough to many recent American war movies: the rank and file, bored or made loopy by battle, dislocation or drugs, replace combat with kindergarten.

Gyllenhaal plays Anthony Swofford, a 20-year-old elite scout/sniper from a broken family with a cheating girlfriend back home. In boot camp in California, Swofford is assigned to a platoon of “retards and f----ups,” in the words of one recruitment officer. He befriends a fellow scout/sniper (Peter Sarsgaard, quickly becoming his generation’s John Malkovich, all louche delivery and fish-eyed stare) and comes under the command of a gruff staff sergeant (Jamie Foxx). Things steadily go downhill — or uphill, depending on your tolerance for the alternately homoerotic and homophobic training methods of the American military, or Hollywood’s depiction of them.

The men are thrilled when they are finally sent to fight; after travelling from California to Saudi Arabia, they get off the plane as exuberant as frat boys at their first kegger. Their catchphrase (and the movie’s tag line): “Welcome to the suck.”

Diversion tactic: Bored Marines in Jarhead resort to desert football. Courtesy MongrelMedia.

But there is no war. The soldiers do nothing but play football in their gasmasks, stage scorpion fights and go on tedious, irrelevant patrols. When a mission finally does arrive, the different military corps squabble over who gets to fulfill it. Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins depict the desert as a place both magical and horrifying. Charred corpses sit in the drivers’ seats of bombed-out vehicles. The sky rains oil. A terrified, riderless horse appears and then vanishes, an apocalyptic omen. Eventually, Swofford and his fellow soldiers face the fact that while they sought purpose in the Marines, the Marines won’t provide that purpose. War won’t provide that purpose. Nothing will.

Jarhead will likely remind viewers of another Gulf War movie: David O. Russell’s Three Kings. Russell’s film is superior to Mendes’s in every way. Where Three Kings was visually original, Jarhead looks like a Hummer commercial; where Three Kings was trenchant, Jarhead is disingenuous. If Russell wore his politics on his sleeve, Mendes, it could be said, wears a tank top. The latter could have made some trenchant analysis of the current Iraqi conflict, but aside from one character voicing platitudes about the role of oil in the conflict, Jarhead has frustratingly little real-world relevance.

Existential epiphany is at the root of the best-selling memoir on which the film is based. Written by the real Anthony Swofford, Jarhead the book is a pitiless, gripping account of his own experience in Operation Desert Storm. But Mendes seems uninterested in larger issues of spiritual malaise. For one, he never manages to truly get into Swofford’s head. Gyllenhaal has great charisma, but Mendes keeps him at a distance. The occasional voice-over — visceral lines ripped from the book — is almost always about the war or the Marines, but very rarely about the man. Swofford is a black hole, indistinguishable from the other black holes in his company. When he cracks up or feels pain, we feel nothing.

Mendes seems quite taken with early passages in Swofford’s book, when superior officers screen Apocalypse Now to stir the Marines’ bloodlust. Swofford’s point was that, regardless of what a Coppola or Kubrick might argue, no war movie is ever anti-war. War movies make violence beautiful, suffering noble and tedium romantic.

Jarhead is a war film that wants to be about war films — to make some kind of statement about how such movies inure us to battle or, more insidiously, program us for it. But Mendes lacks the skill or the courage to make a film that metafictional, or even that incisive. He packs the film with allusions to other war movies (Full Metal Jacket, Officer and a Gentleman, The Deer Hunter), but the effect is one of homage, not criticism. Jarhead may not fetishize killing per se, but it is obsessed with the transformation of men into killing machines. The soldiers’ bodies are lovingly photographed, hazing rituals are sexualized, weaponry is celebrated; there isn’t a whiff of irony about any of it. It’s difficult to imagine Jarhead rousing anyone to murder, but it’s as much a military recruitment vehicle as Top Gun was. Welcome to the suck, indeed.

Jarhead opens across Canada Nov. 4.

Jason McBride is a Toronto-based writer and editor.