Jarhead: Marching to Nowhere

Peter Sarsgaard and Jake Gyllenhaal on duty.

(UNIVERSAL PICTURES)

In Jarhead, the new movie about a Marine recruit in the first Gulf War, soldiers watch a war movie to build their fervor for deployment. As helicopters swoop over a Vietnamese village to the rousing “Ride of the Valkyries” in Apocalypse Now, they begin to cheer and sing along, their enthusiasm swelling to a euphoric frenzy. I imagine Marines might do the same thing years from now watching the Humvees in Jarhead roll across the desert to the heavy thud of hip-hop. The soundtrack is different, but once again a movie about the psychological costs of war has succeeded, in at least one scene, in making a real, historical war look like fun—a sick, manic kind of fun, but fun nonetheless.

The film is based on Anthony Swofford’s eloquent and devastating memoir about serving as a sniper in the Marine Corps during the Gulf War. It was adapted for the screen by William Broyles, Jr., a Vietnam veteran whose son has served in Iraq. Broyles, who wrote the TV show China Beach, has smoothed out Swofford’s book, putting it in chronological order and jettisoning the part about the author’s traumatic postwar adjustment, a shame, for that was the most meaty and interesting part of the book.

Swofford is ably played by Jake Gyllenhaal, who has grown up considerably since depicting a lovelorn store clerk in The Good Girl. He is a 20-year-old recruit who reads Camus on the can. He tells his drill sergeant that he “got lost on my way to college”—and the sergeant slams his head into the wall. The boot camp and training scenes are pretty typical for a war movie, with rough-and-tumble Marines making wiseacre quips and suffering slapstick humiliation. However, the filmmakers have thrown in a gratuitously ugly scene of a recruit getting killed during training, a surprising lapse in an otherwise restrained film.

On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded oil-rich Kuwait, and the United Nations responded by authorizing “all means necessary” to eject Iraq. The United States shipped over 500,000 men and women to the Gulf, including Swofford’s unit. This was a new kind of war, fought by remote control, the enemy taken out both by “surgical strikes” and by sheer tonnage of bombs. The first 38 days of Desert Storm, the war was fought exclusively from the air. But the grunts on the ground didn’t know that. While the American public was feasting on images of precision-guided munitions methodically eliminating targets, troops were told to maintain a state of “suspicious alertness” in an empty desert. They were highly trained, highly equipped, and pounded daily with bloodthirsty rhetoric while being assured that a million Iraqi National Guard were waiting over the next berm.

Once the men get to the desert, the film changes dramatically, becoming a more interesting and less typical war movie. It has a kind of a Chekhovian stillness as the men kill time in the desert, arguing, lusting, and slowly unraveling amid boredom and fear. In this stifled atmosphere, the actors get a chance to really show their mettle. Peter Sarsgaard magnificently underacts as Swofford’s fellow scout Allen Troy, a laconic Michigander. His quiet, steady performance slowly burns through the film. Jamie Foxx, as Staff Sergeant Siek, stands out for his quiet brilliance. As he walks his men through a disorienting forest of burning oil wells, the fear and confusion flickers subtly under his hard exterior. These men are surrounded by an excellent supporting cast including Lucas Black as Chris Kuhn, who bitterly criticizes the war in a Southern drawl, and Brian Geraghty as an overeducated and skittish private.

Visually the film is a tour de force, directed by Sam Mendes, whose previous credits include the Academy Award-winning American Beauty and the highly underrated Road to Perdition. Where those two movies were visually rich, Jarhead, filmed mostly in the Mexican desert, is drained of color. The desert disorients and oppresses the characters, who are constantly dwarfed by the strange moonscape around them.

What makes Jarhead stand out from other war films is that basically nothing happens. Our heroes never get off a shot, and this makes them crazy. “I never got to fire my rifle,” Swofford bitterly remarks at the end. When they finally move out from the rear, the Air Force has already obliterated the enemy, and the men creep through a caravan of burnt-out vehicles, deeply disturbed by the carnage. “They were trying to get away,” one character whispers, as they stare at blackened corpses. The most visually arresting parts of the film are when they walk through burning oil wells as a viscous liquid rains down on them. They move through this panorama of waste and death with mounting disgust.

It took the allied forces less than two months to pummel the Iraqi army, which was hopelessly outmatched. The government estimated that more than 100,000 Iraqi soldiers died, versus 148 U.S. battle deaths. In the book we see the characters return to civilian life and struggle to understand their experience, desperately trying to outrun its emptiness—a spare and intelligent meditation of the effects of the war. But the film offers only a few abbreviated vignettes, and Mendes can’t resist the temptation to try to end with a conclusion that I found clumsy. It mucked up the book’s chilling lack of catharsis.

Mendes claims he didn’t want to make a movie that was prowar or antiwar, and he succeeded, but his disinclination to take sides may have made the movie slippery and tepid. Don’t look to Jarhead for any illumination on the present war. Like American Beauty it is at heart a parlor drama, a very good and somewhat strange parlor drama. It explores the geography of one man’s psyche, and that is all.

—Elizabeth D. Hoover is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.