JARHEAD (2005)

In a typical ‘war is hell’ film, it’s a great tragedy when its characters, dehumanised after being trained to become killing machines, lose a little something of their souls as they go out into combat and take a person’s life. In Sam Mendes’ Jarhead, its soldiers are driven to sorrow and torment over being unable to secure their first kill. These soldiers, or ‘jarheads’ as they are not-so-affectionately referred to, must stomach seemingly endless days of standing around in a dusty, stiflingly hot Saudi Arabian climate, waiting for their opportunity to strike. Even if the film doesn’t quite reverberate with the kind of righteous fury and soul-deadening chills that such a premise implies, Jarhead is remarkable for taking the path less travelled in war films.

Set over the course of the Gulf War, the movie follows unlikely Marine Anthony Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal), who at first seems totally out of place amongst his cohort. He does not possess any bloodlust nor the inclination to engage in combat, lacking the animalistic impulses of some of the meatheads surrounding him. It’s clear that Anthony, like many young combatants, is lost in life and in need of direction, which he finds amidst the brutality and dependability of his training regimen. There’s no doubting the hellish qualities of his military tutelage, but there’s also something to be said of the camaraderie between him and the other men, and even the tough direction of Staff Sergeant Sykes (Jamie Foxx).

Jarhead gradually takes itself more seriously after opening sequences which so smugly lay on thick layers of irony that they become more difficult to stomach by the minute. If Swofford is going through hell, you can be rest assured that a smarmy line of voice-over from Gyllenhaal will say something to the opposite effect, with Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” playing out in the background. Mendes and screenwriter William Broyles Jr. don’t trust the viewer to pick up on the playfully incorporated horror around each corner, employing it with the nimbleness and subtlety of a sledgehammer being swung over viewers’ heads. In doing so, the film becomes less of a commentary on the absurd spectacle of war than an irony-laden and soulless spectacle in its own right.

Each of these men come from disparate backgrounds, but as soldiers they are united by a desire to kill and a set of skills that hone this inflamed instinct. One element that Jarhead continually nails is just how worthless each man’s life is in the grand scheme of things. They are disposable units of war, nothing more, yet happily go along with this. They fail to see that the small modicum of power their guns and free reign to kill give them is nothing compared to the powerlessness of their presence in wartime conflict. They could be blown to pieces before they even have time to reckon with their demise, but that means little so long as they get to clutch their precious rifle and march into battle.

If only it were so. Instead, Swofford and his fellow Marines, like close compatriot Alan Troy (Peter Sarsgaard), must spend day after day rehydrating and questioning their life choices in the sweltering heat. Deprived of entertainment, company from the opposite sex, and the environment to act on their bloodlust, they slowly begin to lose their minds. It’s here that the movie’s cold, cruel heart emerges out of the wackier antics and tone of their training regimen. The uniformity of the desert’s seemingly endless terrain is terrifying. It’s a place with no oasis or sense of calm, where warfare could occur at any moment and waiting for it’s the cruellest fate possible.

Jarhead conspicuously eschews many of the most important facets of its protagonist’s life, all with the end goal of elevating the art of the war film into something more focused and human. Though admirable, its aims are often misguided, especially when Swofford’s life before joining the army, particularly his dynamic with his veteran father, is almost completely absent. So too is any development of his relationship with his beloved girlfriend Kristina (Brianne Davis), who might as well be on another planet. The goal, clearly, is to emphasise the here and now during Swofford’s service. Unfortunately, its main outcome is an absence of feeling for the impossible distance between this protagonist and his other life. All we know of him lives and dies with his time spent in training and service, so there are no comparisons to make between this tumultuous period and his past, and thus no inherent tragedy to this angry anti-epic.

Jarhead is an interesting beast in its visual presentation, with some gorgeous cinematography in rare scenes that are offset by a bland, oversaturated portrait of its desert setting. Once more, admirable aims lead this film astray, with these stark differences in colour grading and cinematography having the unfortunate effect of making scenes shot in similar locations look as though they’re part of different movies. Jarhead can’t access anything resonant to say about this divide, not unlike in the irritatingly harsh contrasts between brutal training scenes and the sunny music playing over them.

The film is caught between being a contrasting blend of crude concepts and a realistically harrowing look at how the machine that is the military industrial complex takes optimistic young men, chews them up, and then spits them back out into the real world to fend for themselves. The effect of this might appear to render those fruitless, hopeless months spent in the desert as something akin to a dream, but in the end it will come to feel more real than anything experienced back home. That’s why Jarhead’s visuals are so bland during desert scenes, where there can be no meaningful contrast between the sand right in front of these characters and the sand far out on the horizon. They’re trapped forever, Mendes lets viewers know, but bland visuals are a poor method for conveying the horror of this prison.

Jarhead, though largely effective, always falls shy of being truly illuminating about the war effort and the effect it has on these Marines. The film’s side characters, outside of some obvious stereotypes (the country boy, the quiet, sensitive one, the tough but fair leader, etc.) remain indistinct throughout the film. This is a core tenet of the experience, where amongst one another the soldiers form a chorus of desperation and urgency amidst an agonisingly idle backdrop. Alone, they’re nothing, a mess of contradictions without anything holding their sense of identity together. They’ve been groomed to become little devils, but languishing in hell provides no comfort. There are no people to execute, no souls to torment. There’s no liberation or empathy, just a single-minded desire to kill that can’t be acted upon. There isn’t even room for distinct characterisation, since they are all experiencing the same frustrations and anxieties.

The least anchored of all these characters is Swofford, which doesn’t bode well when he’s the audience’s POV through which they witness this hellish environment; he’s the narrator and protagonist, after all. Not long after he arrives in Saudi Arabia, he becomes unmoored from the others and himself, forming a new, crazed personality out of the blazing fire with which he sets alight to old experiences, relationships, and identity markers. If we had any meaningful insights into any of these facets of his character before he signed up for military duty, this development might feel tragic; it would certainly appear understandable given how different his circumstances have become. But Swofford’s unpredictability and the ways that this defies clear-cut characterisation only hamper the experience. The film’s crudeness counteracts its attempts at nuance or complexity.

Jarhead is often critiquing that crudeness, especially from the men themselves and their gung-ho attitude, even if it comes across as crudely constructed in its own right. The screenplay has a few clunky, heavy-handed lines to that effect, with one character yelling: ‘I came here to fight. I just can’t get out of this fucking oil!’ In this scene, he’s literally surrounded by oil; the obvious subtext rings hollow. The oil blowout scene is one of the strangest in the entire film, oddly dreamlike even when nothing supernatural occurs. Like many sequences and plot beats in Jarhead, it comes across as one strand of a disparate whole, a film patched together without much care as to how to stack these scenes on top of one another and deepen these characters, or at least deepen our understanding of them.

The film is never dull for a second, it sells its anti-war message well, provided something new for the genre while maintaining some of its core tenets, and features powerful performances from Gyllenhaal and Sarsgaard. Yet there’s something too hastily arranged about the experience to love it. It has been celebrated for its score, but outside of an excellent use of Nirvana’s “Something In The Way” (long before Matt Reeves’ The Batman received acclaim for doing so), the soundtrack is a giant compilation of hit songs ironically deployed in an insultingly crude way. War is bad, the military turns men to monsters, the war machine is telling you lies… it’s all beaten over viewers’ heads through the ironic use of the film’s licensed tracks.

Once these men enter the desert, it’s like they’ve never been anywhere else. It almost feels like the film does the same thing, since this is where its message shines. But with so little focus on who these men were before their time served, an afterthought of an epilogue, and few attempts to flesh out these characters in dire circumstances, Jarhead is always coming up just shy of delivering a chilling message or illuminating these days of boredom, bloodlust, and madness.

UK • GERMANY • USA | 2005 | 125 MINUTES | 2.35:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • SPANISH • ARABIC • LATIN

Cast & Crew

director: Sam Mendes.
writer: William Broyles Jr. (based on the memoire by Anthony Swofford)
starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Jamie Foxx, Scott MacDonald, Lucas Black, Brian Geraghty, Laz Alonso, Jacob Vargas, Brianne Davis, Jocko Sims & Chris Cooper.