Movie Review |
Semper Guy: Jarheadby M. Faust |
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You can’t possibly miss the reference. If you have any interest at all in seeing a film with a title like Jarhead (the half-mocking, half-defiant term Marines use for themselves), you’re going to have seen other films about the experience of military training. And you’re certain to recognize that the opening, in which a line of new arrivals at boot camp are chewed a collective new one by their astonishingly profane drill instructor, is pulled directly from Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.
But this is not some low-budget knockoff, the kind of film you might expect to find stealing from its betters: it’s based on the best-selling memoir by Anthony Swofford, whose unit was one of the first to arrive in the deserts of Saudi Arabia for the first Gulf War, and directed by Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition) with the aid of a lot of top-flight talent, including cinematographer Roger Deakins, editor Walter Murch and composer Thomas Newman, multiple Oscar nominees all.
So you have to take the Kubrick reference, as well as later nods to Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, as a throwing down of the gauntlet, a sign that this is going to be it’s own kind of movie about an archetypal experience.
To its credit, Jarhead does stake out its own territory, as a story of grunt experience stripped of context. It’s particular to the first Gulf War only because that’s when Swofford served. But it has no political agenda, offering just enough of pro and anti-war rationales in the chatter to add to the confusion Swofford found so central to his experience.
Swofford is played by Jake Gyllenhaal as a young man of obvious but as yet undeveloped intelligence, with a copy of Camus’ The Stranger he struggles to read during latrine visits. He and his comrades don’t get into battle until the final quarter of the film, which offers its most richly visualized and valuable recreations: this was the “video game” war that was reduced to our eyes as an exercise in machines vaporizing sterile structures, so a film offering a ground’s-eye point of view is valuable for that reason alone.
Up to that point, though, Jarhead is about a different facet of Marine life, the daily grind of young men, drowning in testosterone to begin with, trained to kill, pumped up to maximum aggro—and then left to wait in a strange, alien environment. The script by William Broyles (Apollo 13), himself a former Marine, tries to make a plot out of Swofford’s largely non-linear book, but it’s better in its pieces than as a whole. The ongoing frustrations of daily life register strongly, if you just don’t bother trying to follow the longer threads of character relationships. The eternal problem with military movies is that young men with shaved heads and identical clothing tend to look alike.
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