Jarhead is a superbly well-made mediocre film. It’s a frustrating example of the whole being less than the sum of the parts.
The parts are all very fine indeed. The film looks spectacular. The skillful, disciplined cinematography, by Coen brothers favorite Roger Deakins, is impressively expressive without being showy (unlike, say, the shallow pyrotechnics of Three Kings). It’s the first major post-Saving Private Ryan war film not to feel totally beholden to that masterpiece’s visual style, largely — no doubt — because Jarhead avoids any big battle sequences.
The editing displays Walter Murch’s typically artful grace. Scenes and shots flow together with quiet precision. The rhythms of pacing are finely modulated in every mood and tone from exuberant energy to quite brooding, all with equal dexterity.
The performances are uniformly fine. Jake Gyllenhaal, as Desert Storm marine Swofford, is expressive and vital and raw (not to mention buffed up as hell). Peter Sarsgaard, quite possibly the finest actor of his generation, turns in yet another quietly brilliant performance (in yet another thankless supporting role) as Swofford’s best friend Troy. Jamie Foxx inhabits Staff Sgt. Sykes with the same commitment and verve he brought to Ray or Collateral.
If you watched any individual scene on its own, you’d be sure you were seeing a really good movie. There are lots of precisely observed details of marine life that are funny or scary or sad. And many of the scenes have a wonderful surrealistic edge to them: marines playing football in their gas masks, dueling scorpions as a spectator sport, burning oil wells scorching the sky. There are good moments a plenty, more than in most films.
So what went wrong? Well, there’s really no story here. We get a sequence of chronological events, most of them quite interesting, but nothing that happens to the characters ultimately matters very much. The movie tries to capture the frustration of not going to war, but it just winds up being frustrating for us. It’s finally a hollow film, all texture and no substance.
Director Sam Mendes seems desperate to make a powerful anti-war film, and he clearly realizes that the very excitement of battle on screen can turn even the most rigorously anti-war polemic into an exciting experience of war. There’s an early scene where the marines watch Apocalypse Now, cheering the action on as if it were a Rambo movie. To forestall this reaction, Mendes just avoids any direct depiction of war. The soldiers never get the chance to fight and so we never get the chance to cheer them on. As a story-telling strategy this is clearly self-defeating because showing people not fighting conveys no message whatsoever about the virtues or vices of warfare.
Of course Mendes is simply adapting the memoir of the real-life Gulf War veteran Tony Swofford. But that’s no excuse for making a pointless film.
Jarhead (2005)
Grade: C+
