In his Gulf War memoir, Jarhead, former Marine Anthony Swofford argues that most of the war movies that are ostensibly anti-war -- Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon -- serve as pro-war to the troops on the ground. The visceral scenes of carnage, fanatically reconstructed to drive home war's cruelty, only rile up and energize the men who are entering that reality. But the film adaptation of Swofford's memoir, which goes to extremes to avoid politics of any kind, doesn't engender any emotion at all. As war movies go, it has little interest in saying that war is hell or virtuous. The strongest message that comes through is that war is tedious.
That the audience is left more indifferent than invigorated is due to the fact that director Sam Mendes and screenwriter William Broyles Jr. have chosen to take from Swofford's story all the vivid details of life in the military but none of the underlying human development. Like the memoir, the cinematic version of Jarhead follows the enlistment and eventual deployment of Tony Swofford (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) to the Middle East during the Gulf War. While going through early training -- all the standard scenes of grueling boot camp are included -- Swofford gets selected for Sniper Team Alpha, where he is paired with a gung-ho spotter (Peter Sarsgaard) and placed under the leadership of a typically demanding sergeant (a surprisingly ineffective Jamie Foxx). The rest of the film focuses on the anxious, frustrating time when Desert Shield became Desert Storm and Swofford's troop went from monotonously passing days and weeks in the barracks to patrolling the desert of Saudi Arabia.
The Gulf War was primarily won through strategic air bombings and missile strikes, producing few American casualties, so it provides much less dramatic fodder than the failures of Vietnam or the heroic battles of World War II. (Even the one compelling feature film about Desert Storm, David O. Russell's excellent Three Kings, relied on a concocted story about missing gold to maintain two hours of dramatic tension.) In his book, Swofford accomplished the impressive feat of holding the reader's attention through what was essentially an uneventful tour (he saw little combat action), largely on the strength of his prose and his reflective account of personal evolution from diehard Marine to jaded war veteran. It is not surprising that both literary features are missing from the film adaptation, but it is disappointing that Mendes and Broyles have not bothered to replace them with something else. Instead, we get a recital of the main events with little of the human element beyond the requisite scenes of Swofford and his fellow Marines crying over their cheating girlfriends or complaining about the general difficulties of being stationed thousands of miles from home.
This lack of emotional depth is a problem that has plagued Mendes' previous work (American Beauty, Road to Perdition). To those who have followed his career it will not come as a surprise that he tries to compensate through cinematography; the film's greatest strength lies in the visual portrayal of Army life in the Middle East. Shot by the acclaimed cinematographer Roger Deakins, Jarhead looks terrific, and there are some visually magnificent scenes that capitalize on the expansiveness of the desert landscape. But Mendes' brand of visual formalism seems least appropriate for a film about war, where messiness and unpredictability abound and human emotion is crucial to understanding the true effects of life on the ground. Without anything to suggest that these characters are evolving, we are left with little more than appreciation for their predicament and a rather woolly hope that things turn out for the best.
That the film engenders a certain amount of goodwill is largely due to Gyllenhaal, who makes for a surprisingly convincing soldier. I've never really warmed up to his overly sensitive screen persona in the past, but his sleepy eyes and delicate voice help to make his transition from boyish new recruit to first-rate Marine all the more persuasive. As his sniper partner, Sarsgaard brings his usually welcome dose of wry intelligence to a role that doesn't quite warrant it. As Sarsgaard plays it, his character is both the smartest man on the field and one of the least levelheaded, a contradiction that never truly feels genuine. The rest of the cast are typical war-movie caricatures: the gruff sergeant, the Bible-reading southerner, the married man with two kids, and so on. That none of them leaves a notable mark is just another sign that Jarhead has taken all the major characteristics of the films in the war-movie pantheon, to which it so obviously wants to belong, without finding a way to prove distinctive.
Ultimately, by refusing to engage with the political and emotional ramifications of the events it depicts, the film adaptation of Jarhead comes across as limp and tentative. They may alienate audiences, but political biases at least serve to hold a film together, to make the whole seem more than just the assemblage of its various parts. Mendes wants to depict the military in wartime without offending any sensibilities. Unfortunately, by insisting on such determined silence, he has produced a picture that doesn't communicate anything at all.
Sudhir Muralidhar is a writer living in New York.
