Review: Jarhead

I've had this in my Netflix queue for as long as it's been available on dvd, but kept shuffling it down in order to watch previous seasons of shows like The Sopranos, The Shield, and others. I happen to like Sam Mendes as a filmmaker pretty well. I know plenty who hate American Beauty, but while I thought it might have missed the mark at the end, I enjoyed getting there quite a bit. Road to Perdition was a very good adaptation of a pretty good graphic novel--with the cast and the team around him, Mendes actually elevated the material, though it was never deep and more of an elegantly lumbering thriller--an odd beast, I'll grant you.

Jarhead also boasts an excellent team, from one of the greatest cinematographers in Roger Deakins to one of the greatest editors, Walter Murch. It's based on an acclaimed memoir by Anthony Swofford and it deals with a war that hasn't been covered much in film, the first Gulf War. And it doesn't work.

I mean, it works on a C+ or B- level, if we're giving grades. It's entertaining throughout and no one gives a bad performance. But I really didn't care about Jake Gyllenhall as Swofford. His face only gives the obvious, whatever is called on explicitly in the scene, but the scenes have no nuance or surprise or ambiguity. War turns decent young men into animals, and we know this by now, but while I have no doubt most or all of what's depicted in the film happened to Swofford and his fellow Marines, I just didn't believe it that much in the film. The guy who really wants to kill and ends up playing with a dead Iraqi body has exactly the stupid, Cro-Magnon face of a guy who you would picture doing that. Peter Sarsgaard as Troy has the face of an intelligent, serious if disillustioned young man, and he gives you what you expect, but his character is this way from the start, and his late freakout is a nice scene but comes almost out of nowhere, just like Swoff's freakout earlier comes. It's just sort of sensationalist, when most of the movie has few events to sensationalize. In fact, that's really kind of the point of the book, that these young men were trained to be not just soldiers but snipers--specialized killers--and they never get to put their training to use. So Mendes seems kind of unsure what to do--he isn't willing to emphasize the boredom, for obvious commercial and dramatic reasons--so the little there that's interesting is played up like it's Apocalypse Now, and it's just not. It's more like a frat party.

There's very little in the way of a political stance in the film. As Troy says early on, "Politics is bullshit. We're here now," which is the right way to look at one's actual deployment, but it trims off some meat that could have added to the story. The movie is not a satire, nor is it an antiwar film. It's about a guy who makes a mistake and joins the Marines and has some intense times and loses his girlfriend, who is never more than a snapshot. A lot of talented people, including Mendes, put their talents to producing something very minor, and I honestly wonder how it got approved, what Mendes said to get it in production.