Review of Jarhead (2005) by Markb. — 07 Nov 2005

Just before sending the boot camp recruits, training completed, off to the Persian Gulf, their superiors screen the famous "Ride of the Valkyries"-themed helicopter attack sequence from Apocalypse Now, in order to get them psyched up for combat.

..and then shut the film off. They needn't have bothered; the naive young Marines (or "jarheads") could've sat through the rest of Francis Ford Coppola's seminal Vietnam War classic (up to and including the legendarily bizarro Marlon Brando/Martin Sheen talkathon) and the guys would still have been heavily pumped for blood because, as Dallas Observer reviewer Robert Wilonsky insightfully observed, the action sequences in war movies have a visceral, electrifying effect that all the antiwar messages and subtexts in the world can't undo.

(This is also why unscrupulous real-life salespeople quote Wall Street, Glengarry Glen Ross and Boiler Room as gospel even though all three are deeply moral films that detest their protagonists' sleazy behavior.

..and why prison inmates love crime movies and CSI reruns despite the fact that crime almost never pays in these works.) It's already been stated in many places that Sam Mendes' deeply disturbing but highly satirical film is structurally very similar to Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, except that the drill instructor (Scott MacDonald) is (deliberately, I think, on Mendes' and screenwriter William Broyles Jr.

's part) a lot less larger than life than Jacket's R. Lee Ermey--or Louis Gossett Jr., for that matter, and there are no pathetic, overweight screwups to provide diversion for the others. All that the recruits know about war they saw in the movies, and just as Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July signed up for Vietnam because of the patriotic rush he got watching John Wayne films, so many of these kids jumped in because they wanted the sensations they saw in Platoon or Apocalypse.

But the main sensation they ended up experiencing was boredom (even the Mideast terrain they and we see is nothing but white, grey and beige!); this film is the two-hour cinematic equivalent of the famous cartoon/T-shirt/bumper sticker in which one vulture says to the other vulture, "Patience, my a-s! I'm gonna kill something!" Thematically, the war movie that Jarhead finally resembles the most is M*A*S*H (the hard-edged Robert Altman movie, of course, not the sentimentalized TV version) because the practical jokes that the boys pull on each other to ward off insanity become more and more elaborate and mean-spirited.

..to say nothing of increasingly desperate and even homoerotic, right down to symbolic gang rapes and deliberate attempts to scare off, repulse and offend the few women that appear and to break up each other's relationships with wives and girlfriends back home.

I really liked the way that the characters (an excellent cast led by Jake Gyllenhaal, in a career-redefining role; the multitalented Jamie Foxx, proving that last year's Oscar was no fluke, and best of all Peter Sarsgaard, erasing memories of his absurd characterization in Flightplan) realistically took turns being alternately voices of sanity, total psychos and total jerks.

The final 10 minutes may strain a bit too heavily for profundity and poignancy, especially since Mendes and Broyles (adapting Anthony Swofford's book) have already asked the central question of Jarhead so powerfully and provocatively: which is worse, to train young men to become killing machines and then turn them loose.

..