 |
 |
PLOT: A young "jarhead" recruit climbs the ladder to Marine sniper and is shipped to Saudi Arabia in the first Gulf War. There he and his fellows sit for 120-plus days in 120-degree heat, itching to kill someone, never getting the chance -- with psychologically devastating results.
And now for something completely different -- a war movie about how not killing is hell.
Jarhead, taken from the book by Anthony Swofford, a veteran Marine sniper from the first Gulf War, takes what might seem the easiest soldiering job in the world and tells you something profoundly different.
Easy? The hardest thing was waiting 120-plus days in the desert while enough troops amassed to overrun Kuwait. When these Marines finally did get marching orders, enemy targets had already been bombed to Hell.
These were trained killers, itching to kill, bursting at the seams and inclined to turn on each other when they weren't allowed to kill. For Jake Gyllenhaal (Swofford) this is a remarkable chance to show some chops far afield from the mixed-up romantic indie roles that have become his trademark, and he comes through bigtime. You really get the sense that he enters the movie a boy and comes out a messed-up man.
At first, director Sam Mendes comes to the task seemingly content to remake Full Metal Jacket. "Swoff" arrives in boot camp for the usual hazing from his fellows and equally-brutal treatment at the hands of drill Sgt. Siek (Jamie Foxx, who has the good luck to be in a role that's impossible to overplay). As it happens, Mendes does a stark and effective homage to Kubrick.
|
But it's when the boys and Sgt. Siek are sent to Saudi Arabia to wait out the troop buildup that would be Operation Desert Storm that his signature style comes into play. Belieing the macro scale of 500,000 troops sitting it out in the desert for four months, Mendes zeroes in on our frustrated snipers in their tents with the same attention to tiny significant details he brought to American Beauty -- witness the scorpion-fight Swoff and company bet on in their boredom, an arthropod metaphor reminiscent of the anthill scene in The Wild Bunch.
Eventually their boil-over takes on pathological dimensions. They obsess sadistically over the unfaithfulness of each other's Stateside wives and girlfriends (and the girlfriends invariably oblige; this is not a movie that's kind to women). In arguably the movie's most harrowing scene, Swoff loses it and turns a gun on the most feckless of his comrades, a misfit played by Brian Geraghty.
And then they get sent into "battle," a misnomer, given the devastation that greets them everywhere. Now it's Swoff's "spotter" Troy (Sarsgaard) who unravels.
Jarhead is not unsympathetic, nor noticeably political (in interviews, Swofford has declined comment on today's Iraq war). His perspective is moving, regardless.
BOTTOM LINE: Apparently non-wars are hell too. Jarhead opens like Full Metal Jacket redux, with Jamie Foxx as the insane drill instructor. But it belongs to a surprising Jake Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, unravelling in the desert, turning to scorpion-fights and porn for entertainment, and eventually turning on each other.
(This film is rated 18-A)