Jarhead
This movie has received some flak for not being a regular war movie, for not having a satisfying arc. That’s crap. How many more war movies do we need in the mold of the legion that have come before. Life does not have a satisfying arc, it has moments and experiences and sometimes those moments and experiences end up a frustrating, painful mess. This one is very personal and its whole point is its pointlessness. We should all hope that our personal frustrating dead ends are directed by Sam Mendes, scored by Thomas Newman, and in particular, shot with the keen artist’s eye of Roger Deakins. It’s hardly a navel-gazing exercise, but the crux of the film is what do you do with a focus you never could employ?
Jake Gyllenhaal plays a fresh Marine, Anthony Swofford (who wrote the book), who was recruited to be on a special sniper team for Desert Shield in 1990-1. He spends 175+ days in the desert of Saudi Arabia, the last portion of which is actually the brief war Desert Storm. While it would seem an easy platform from which to criticize the current sequel to that short conflict, Mendes is tightly focused on showing Swofford’s experience in the sand and that alone. The intensity of the experience can never really be transmitted; a thousand war movies doubtless only scratch the surface. What’s remarkable are the highs and lows, the brutality, the bloodlust, the camaraderie, the surreal sights only possible in such a landscape of destruction. The insanity from close quarters, constant low level tension, and silence from home builds as you watch.
SUVs with American flag stickers don’t want you to see this movie - it makes it look like they want our boys to live this life. Horrifyingly, the audience was laughing uproariously in the first 20 minutes at scenes of cruelty and nastiness of all sorts. I was glad by the end they had sobered up. The soldiers had moved into a mental space with a desperate desire to deal death, not to kill, not to defend, not to destroy, but only to do something. Such rigorous training, awful conditions, tense waiting, and the necant interruptus is painful even to us peaceniks watching.
I walked out of the theatre simultaneously grateful that there are people who are still willing to volunteer to endure such ravages of humanity, and completely sick that any situation should come to the point that it is necessary. The testosterone necessary to fuel this lustful horror roils my stomach. At the same time, I was hypnotized by Deakins camera, making the blasted desert and salty nothingness as beautiful as he made the prison walls in the Shawshank Redemption. My personal god of production design, Dennis Gassner, created this oily, sandy, taped up world so fully for me, it felt alien to see tile and chrome; I could smell the fake smell of air conditioning and the uncomfortableness of normalcy. The story was sobering, moving, and hard to watch, but I was deeply moved by its terrible beauty.
MPAA Rating R-pervasive language, violence, strong sexual content
Release date 11/4/05
Time in minutes 115
Director Sam Mendes
Studio Universal Pictures
