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U.S. marine sniper Anthony Swofford camped out for 175 days in the desert for a Gulf War One tour of duty that lasted four days, four hours and one minute.
And he didn't fire his gun. He didn't encounter the enemy either, although his company did come under attack - known in the military as friendly fire.
Not so much a "war is hell" movie, Jarhead can be filed under the "insanity of war" film heading. While it has echoes of Stanley Kubrick's trippy 1989 Vietnam drama Full Metal Jacket, Jarhead's black humour, surreal colours and occasionally heightened style put it in good company with films likes MASH, Catch 22 and, perhaps most strikingly, Apocalypse Now. Released on DVD this week, Jarhead makes no blatant or obvious antiwar statements, but it's hard to draw any other conclusion.
The second fine film about the first Gulf War - after 1999's Three Kings from David O. Russell - Jarhead is based on Swofford's own book detailing his experiences, and is seen through the eyes of the grunts who put their boots on the parched, dusty desert ground 15 years ago.
Some complained that director Sam Mendes - who is three for three in my book after scoring with a trio of very different films (American Beauty, Road to Perdition and Jarhead) - doesn't have much to say about this war, but the way he expresses the often inarticulate frustration and rage of the soldiers speaks volumes about war and politics and how the latter gets young fighting men (and now women) - and the civilians who get in their way - killed all the time. (Current Exhibit A: That little neocon misadventure in Iraq. GW2 from GB2. Can't wait for the movies that start to emerge about Dubya's war when it ends. If it ever ends.)
Jarhead opens like Full Metal Jacket, with a bellowing drill sergeant puncturing Swofford's eardrum - and lathering him in a really disgusting spit bath. "It was shortly after meeting drill instructor Fitch that I realized joining the Marine Corps might have been a bad decision,'' says Swofford, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, in the first of his two exceptional performances of 2005.
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We follow the jarheads - named after the "high and tight'' haircut that makes a marine's head look like a jar - through sniper training, conducted by Sgt. Siek (a superb Jamie Foxx), and on to the call, "We're goin' to f----- war.''
Some of the jarheads figure it's their time to "get some'' - or as a canny commander tells them, "Kick ass, take names and end this thing the day before yesterday'' - but others factor in the politics and reckon they'll only be over there two weeks, or so. If you recall the massive logistics of Operation Desert Shield, literally hundreds of thousands of troops amassed in Saudi Arabia waiting to kick Iraq out of Kuwait.
As Swoff and his fellow jarheads land in the desert, Mendes starts a count - "Time in the desert: 14 minutes. Troops: 5,000.'' By the time the actual "war'' begins, the time count is up to 175 days and there are 575,000 boots on the ground.
Mendes's film sharpens its edge and derives its darkest humour from the jarhead's slow descent into some kind of desert madness. They fight the boredom and the enervating training regimen; they cruelly taunt their mates with their conviction that all stateside wives and girlfriends are cheating on them. They get under each other's skin.
These are tightly wound, lean, mean fighting machines just itchin' to go jarhead on the Iraqi Republican Guard's ass. But that's not how this war goes. Swoff tells us: "We patrol the empty desert, we hydrate, we navigate imaginary minefields, we throw hand grenades into nowhere, we fire at nothing ... and we hydrate some more.''
There is no enemy to speak of. What little there ever was has already been obliterated by the best military hardware that billions of American taxpayer dollars can buy.
Jarhead has distinct touches of Apocalypse Now, particularly when Swoff and company actually head off into the desert in search of something. All they find are humans - civilians, it appears - fried to a crisp from bombs aimed from 30,000 feet. It gets surreal out there when it starts raining black gold - the Iraqi oilfields are on fire - and oil-slick animals and humans are stumbling around in the black night, illuminated by derrick fires off in the distance.
Mendes's company of actors is uniformly excellent - notable are Gyllenhaal's Swoff, the occasionally bemused, sometimes terrified, "sane'' one, and Peter Sarsgaard as his sniper partner who really does love this life.
Jarhead is notably sympathetic to the soldiers - even to a military trying to make sense out of politics and absurd rules of engagement - and Mendes is not interested in making an antiwar screed. It's a soldier's story about a different war for a different time.
As the jarheads say, "Welcome to the Suck.''
JARHEAD - original rating: 4 SUNS (out of 5); DVD rating: 4 SUNS