Jarhead (Sam Mendes)

[Chris Knipp]

Sam Mendes: Jarhead (2005)

Meaninglessness

Review by Chris Knipp

Sam Mendes' work as a director hasn't lived up to the temporarily high expectations aroused by his first movie, the 1999 American Beauty. With Kevin Spacey in one of his easiest but most successful roles, American Beauty seemed some kind of classic fin de siècle statement of middleclass white rebellion. But like a lot of expressions of a moment, it went stale quickly and over the past six years the rose completely lost its bloom. Mendes movie number two, 2002's Road to Perdition, another filmed graphic novel, was full of visual pizzazz but flabby in the storytelling department. It makes sense that when Mendes adapted Anthony Swofford's eponymous novel into the 2005 Jarhead, people had lowered expectations and didn't see much there. Reviews haven't been very favorable.

And indeed Jarhead isn't the movie of the year. But it's gotten a bum rap from reviewers who have repeatedly said that it starts out in a derivative and conventional manner and winds up disintegrating into formlessness. It’s true the Full Metal Jacket drill scene and the barracks sequences early on are sub-Kubrick and even sub-Black Hawk Down. The latter was a horrifically uncritical recreation of a terrible modern battle sequence but it at least has the virtue of precision. In its early sequences establishing Swofford's training and his unit and their mission, Jarhead wavers between the generic and the specific. Again, Mendes isn't outstanding in the conventional storytelling department. There isn't exceptionally good development of a cast of military characters -- you don't get much beyond Gyllenhaal (the narrator), Sarsgaard (his main sidekick and the boil on the bum of the unit) and Jamie Foxx (the platoon commander, an invincible staff sergeant). Chris Cooper looks too sickly and neurotic to be a brigade leader and cheerleader for the whole endlessly delayed war.

There they sit: Operation Desert Shield. The boys at the top have to make some decisions. A hundred thousand and then five hundred thousand men are set down in the sand to sit and hydrate and pee and hydrate and sit some more. They stage combats of desert spiders and they find out their girls have left them for somebody else back home.

This passage is not an outstanding performance despite the steely competence of Foxx and Gyllenhaal's seering musclebound youthful intensity -- which are all good to watch, anyway. It really is just waiting, and waiting is somthing Beckett was good at, but this ain't Godot.

But the war finally does come. And what matters is that Jarhead is both a very specific description of a new kind of American warfare, seen at the very lowest level of the grunts on the ground -- high tech war, fought with "precision" from above, in air strikes so skillful against an enemy so unequal that troops are almost irrelevant -- and something universal but hardly ever so truthfully represented on film: the utter meaninglessness, the sheer insignificance and emptiness of the individual soldier's role in combat.

The latter is something often alluded to, but writers and actors and directors always ruin the point by creating heroes or noble sufferers. In Jarhead nobody's a hero. Nobody even gets to fire a shot or kill anybody. After months and months of waiting, their "war" is four days long. They are sent out into a hellish landscape of sooty burning oil wells, a horizon of endless fire and blackness dotted with frozen cinder corpses out of the Dresden of Vonnegot's Mother Night, torsos and limbs of Arabs the marines lay claim to with selfish madness as "my Arab," because their only sense of triumph is the insane one of laying claim to a dead zombie object scattered on a plain. The end of this? Sniper team Sarsgaard and Gyllenhaal get one Arab officer in a tower in their sights and are ready to squeeze the trigger -- and an American officer intervenes to call in an air strike. The boys don't get one single kill -- not even a trigger-squeeze. Dazed and mad and Sarsgaard whining like a baby, they wander over a ridge to find their unit celebrating the end. "The war's over and you didn't get killed," Foxx's staff sergeant declares to them.

There has never been a better or more hallucinatory depiction of the meaninglessness of war than this. And it's also an accurate view of one angle of Operation Desert Storm. Critics have questioned why the movie isn't more comic or more ironic. What can they be thinking of? How could anything be more hideously comic or more deeply ironic than this? I was never in a war but I was in the US Army, and of all war movies I feel this is supremely my war movie. It must be a lot of other guys' war movie besides mine. The war where the grunts are sent out to kill and find only incinerated corpses is the war of the future. Movies need to show us more black bodies frozen like zombies in the sand, because there are going to be a lot more of them.

There's nothing about Gulf War Syndrome. There's nothing about the overall strategies of the war, or the hilarious chaos so brilliantly depicted in David O. Russell's Three Kings -- admittedly a much better, as well as more entertaining, movie than Jarhead. But Three Kings is ironic without really making any profound statement. Jarhead has something universal to say about the powerlessness and insignificance of 95% of all combat soldiers. And it has a very fresh flavor in its final voiceover: we will always be Gulf Warriors. They did nothing; they were geared up and trained for macho hell-raising and mayhem, and they didn't get a single kill. That's because, as Thoreau wrote, lo! men have become the tools of their tools. And when you're the tools of your tools, it's hard to be men any more.

[cinemabon]

Knipp: "There has never been a better or more hallucinatory depiction of the meaninglessness of war than this."

While I found your review (as all your reviews) insightful, I got stuck on this statement. Surly war has been depicted as hallucinatory and meaningless in countless films (especially, Apocalypse Now or The Big Red One to name but a few).

Additionally, how did the phrase 'fin de siecle' (concepts of art and society at the end of the 19th Century) pertain to American Beauty? You lost me there. Since you are more familiar with French expression than I am (I only took two years); you'd draw the correlation.

P.S. Oscar tells me you are out of Paris. Hope you are doing well.

[tabuno]

Chris Knipp posted:

There has never been a better or more hallucinatory depiction of the meaninglessness of war than this. And it's also an accurate view of one angle of Operation Desert Storm. Critics have questioned why the movie isn't more comic or more ironic. What can they be thinking of? How could anything be more hideously comic or more deeply ironic than this? I was never in a war but I was in the US Army, and of all war movies I feel this is supremely my war movie.

Like Apocalypse Now (1979) with the strange surrealistic weirdness or like the television series M.A.S.H. without the comedy, Jarhead (2005) represents the new modern war and its craziness. This Lost in Translation (2003) meets Iraq creates a compelling, mesmerizing wartime experience that emotional envelopes the viewer into the emotional, underbelly of war (interestingly signficantly preferred more by females than males in the IMDb ratings). One of my favorite movies of the year.

[Chris Knipp]

Like Apocalypse Now (1979) with the strange surrealistic weirdness or like the television series M.A.S.H. without the comedy, Jarhead (2005) represents the new modern war and its craziness. This Lost in Translation (2003) meets Iraq creates a compelling, mesmerizing wartime experience that emotional envelopes the viewer into the emotional, underbelly of war (interestingly signficantly preferred more by females than males in the IMDb ratings). One of my favorite movies of the year.I don't know if I'm going to go quite that far -- "one of my favorite movies of the year" -- I have reservations about it, I've seen a lot of movies this year and I'm pretty picky; but I like your descriptions of Jarhead -- "surrealistic weirdness...M.A.S.H. without the comedy...emotional underbelly" --and your connection with Lost in Translation is real interesting: that's another way the movie is universal in reference to US troops abroad -- it highlights the way US soldiers, not to mention often US travelers and US workers abroad, are very often hermetically sealed off in an ethnocentric jarhead chamber, as these boys are in the Saudi desert waiting for their meaningless four-day combat that never really happens.

[tabuno]

Jarhead is a movie that is not so much about action and adventure as are almost all war movies, but about the visceral experience of war, the more substantive, emotional feelings and personal meanings of war from the perspective of being there. Like Lost in Translation , this movie brings the unusual sights and sounds of a foreign country, foriegn experience into full view and even more so than Lost in Translation it adds a more meaty "substantive content" of the reality of war on a personal level.

Much in the same way The Blair Witch Project was able to bring the audience into the movie, Jarhead gets into the mind of the viewer at times as if you were there, especially during scene where the Marines search the fire bombed Iraqi caravan in the desert. This movie so much more than almost any other movie this year provides vivid images and sounds, realistic foul language and suffering of the craziness of a major aspect of American life for thousands of military personnel in the past decade and today. This movie has I believe successfully brought the contemporary war experience home to those audience members who are viewing war from the safety of their moviehouses. It is difficult to believe that any other movie out this year has so successfully brought to life a major event in American society.

[mouton]

JARHEAD
Written by William Broyles Jr.
Directed by Sam Mendes


Something I like to do before writing a review is avoid writing it. Before sitting down to write this particular piece about Sam Mendes’ war epic, “Jarhead”, I made a quick stop at a local sandwich shop for a large club. Whilst waiting in line, I paused Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks” on my ipod to listen in on the conversation taking place between the young, male sandwich maker and his customer counterpart. The sandwich maker had just seen “Jarhead” the night before and he was very vexed by the experience. You see, he had spent his hard earned sandwich making money on this war flick after not having seen anything on the big screen for a very long time. Imagine his disappointment when he sat through an entire film about the gulf war, the first one, and didn’t get to see any war. I’m paraphrasing here, as I don’t make it a habit to write down everything I hear other people say but his complaint went something like, “You just watch these guys drift around in the dessert forever and nothing happens. Finally it seems like something’s going to happen, they’re gonna get to fight and then nothing. No one fires a single shot.” I snickered silently to myself. Hmmm, I wondered if the sandwich maker would eventually connect his frustration to the infinitely more frustrating experience it must have been to actually be a marine in the Gulf War marching aimlessly through the dessert and never getting to take the shot you’ve trained so thoroughly for or if he’d figure out that his frustration may very well have been the desired effect of the film to begin with. Then | got distracted and wondered if I wanted mayo or Dijon.

In many ways, “Jarhead” is not that different from other war films. There is a loud, foul drill sergeant at boot camp; there are strapping, young men horsing around for no reason in particular other than having pent up sexual energy; there are familiar character types like the unbalanced loose cannon and the quiet, uncomfortable farm boy. What does differentiate “Jarhead” from films it is quite clearly influenced by, like Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket”, is that these soldiers’ war never comes. There are no ultra-violent, intensely choreographed battle sequences in Sam Mendes’ take on the war movie. Instead the soldiers simulate warfare, play football, have drunken parties (thank you whoever you are who decided Jake Gyllenhaal should wear only a Santa Claus hat in this particular scene) and make themselves look useful and sound like appreciative, dedicated soldiers for the media cameras. By the time they’re told the war is on, you may find yourself also excited and anxious for their piece of the action. What they get is more walking through the dessert. What they came across made me nauseous enough to not want a large-scale attack scene anyway. I guess the sandwich maker has a larger bloodlust than I.

Not having the bloodbath to distract us or shatter our naïve impression of how violent war genuinely is leaves us with very little other than the characters themselves to focus on. Whereas Mendes suggestion that these expectations may in fact be what is actually naïve, none of his characters are developed further than boys who think they’re men and want to kill and get back to their girlfriends and wives. Even the central character, Anthony Swofford (played by Gyllenhaal and based on the author who wrote the book the screenplay is based upon) is only given about two minutes of quick flashbacks, giving us some incite into his family history and sex life but not enough to give him any clear storyline to carry the film forward and home. And though cinematographer Richard Deakins frames and lights everything in a beautiful yellow-orange haze and editor Walter Murch keeps the pacing steady as a marine’s march, the characters come off as a bunch of apes in a cage. That may have been what Mendes intended but it isn’t always compelling or engaging. We are detached but so are they.

By testing our patience, Mendes leaves us frustrated and wanting some much-needed release. In addition, he points out that the very disturbing need to kill these men exhibit is inherent in you, me and sandwich makers everywhere. Did you know that was there?

[Johann]

OK- finally I'll add my two cents.

Brilliant review Chris.


Meaninglessness is right.

The old days of an enemy in a trench 10k away and you in your own foxhole is long gone.

My own personal training as a grunt basically consisted of "You'll learn trench warfare, you'll dig those damn trenches (and I dug 'em in the frozen tundra of CFB Wainwright Alberta, where you use a pick-axe to dig down about one-inch in 6 hours of swingin!) but you'll never use this training in actual theatre".

Infantry soldiers today are "clean up crews", they "spray the terrain" after the artillery and air strikes have done their worst.

Today grunts just walk behind tanks, doing field sweeps.

Jarhead is accurate in that regard. It's bang-on with all of it's depictions.

I just don't care. Mendes is just stating the obvious.

If it's "your war movie", I can accept that.
The feelings of the troops are exactly what they are.
Nowadays "combat" is all digital, all technical.

The need for actual stormtroops is not there.

I can see the future like James Cameron did with those cyber-skeleton, metal skull-crushing, automatic weapon-wielding Terminators in T-2.

Soldiers are obsolete now, and because there's no "cause" to fight for anymore, I think the army should just release all soldiers to society and take the salaries that would be going to troops and build the combat-bots (battle droids?) that could easily do the work of a living man, without concern for death.

I mean, technology is so fucking advanced now.

If they can build a machine to replace a worker on an assembly line, they can replace soldiers for robots.

And we wouldn't now have 2110 dead and 16,000 wounded.
And losing "the war"....

They spend BILLIONS AND BILLIONS on defence and the military.

Yet social security is going bankrupt?
Health Care is an abomination?

Take those billions (used for WARS OF FEAR OF LOSS) and use it to build a peaceful society.

Sorry.... you caught me dreaming there.


Jarhead's message is unmistakable.
I just don't care.

My viewpoint on soldiers is very finely honed, because I was one.

Soldiers are not supposed to think.
And like Kubrick pointed out: they are supposed to kill.

Mendes says with no one to kill, what do they exist for?
And I agree.

That's why I thank God every day for July 3, 1996.
My release day from the Canadian Armed Forces.

[Chris Knipp]

Johann --

Lots of good comments, from one who was one. It looks different from inside, doesn't it? You had to be there. Having been in the army, though not as long as you, I know how crazy and meaningless it all is from the grunt standpoint.

If they can build a machine to replace a worker on an assembly line, they can replace soldiers for robots.

This I don't agree with. I mean, you're right of course; technically they can. But the robots won't replace human cannon fodder. There are many reasons for that, but the first one that comes to mind is: suicide bombers, insurgents, et al. There are always going to be real humans willing to put their own bodies on the line for their people and their way of life. They're not going to be willing to fight against robots, and there are always lots of people on the ground, more and more in fact. So you have to have soldiers to deal with it. Even though 95% of the time they deal with it inadequately. Another thing is that the Army and the government just love wasting people, in every sense.

I don't know why I said the Jarhead war was my war. It just came out. I think what I mean is that I was in the army and didn't get to fight in a war but came close to it, though not nearly as close as Jarhead did. And the other reason I said that is because I think this is -- as you say, johann -- the way war is now and is going to be in future: charred bodies with infantrymen stumbling around cleaning up, and getting various forms of PTSS to take back to VA hospitals unwilling and unable to handle them.

[Johann]

Good point about the suicide bombers.

Kinda hard to blow up the enemy or get your point across if the enemy is IG-88 (an assassin droid).

The sad part is the leadership. You know it, I know it.

When U.S. congressman Murtha (a decorated Vietnam Vet) called out Cheney, saying "I love guys who've never been to war telling me to shut up. I love those guys- guys who've had 5 deferrments and won't hear a word from those who've been to war and are suggesting how to help- I love guys like that" was the greatest thing I've ever heard a U.S. congressman say.

The BushWarHeads get all indignant when someone with real clout points out the lies and the bullshit.

E.L. Doctorow? CLOUT.
Gore Vidal? CLOUT.
Congressman Murtha? Clout.
Michael Moore? Clout.
CINDY SHEEHAN- MOTHER OF A DEAD SOLDIER
CLOUT.

Did you hear that, Busheviks?

No- you see no evil and hear no evil.

I can hear 'em now:

This war is about terrorism! Saddam Saddam Saddam!
You hate America Johann! You are an insurgent!

Honk on Bobo, all you Bushbot Clowns.

I don't jump on bandwagons unless I believe in the band.

And I believe in Michael Moore.
He's looking like a goddamn Saviour.
A fucking Prince.

And it's actually quite sad that this is the case.

It's so fucking pathetic that this guy is the one who is sounding the fucking air raid siren of America's demise.

No other man or woman in America has the fucking wherewithal and conviction to say enough is enough? (apologies to Noam and all the others- you know what I mean here)

That's what's really sad: there's no trustbusters anymore in the States.

Everybody's a bitch or a coward or a limp-dicked reationary, barking from the comfort & security of wherever they plunk their sorry asses down.

And movies like jarhead only confirm the obvious.

Again I ask why was this film made?

To confirm the United States government is supremely out to lunch? That wars ain't what they used to be?

We knew that already!

I guess everyone else in the States didn't.

It's safe to assume that a lot of Americans don't know shit about shit.

How can I say that?

They re-elected Bush

[Fan of Kubrick]

Johann you certainly are passionate about the uselessness of this film. I can see why you think that this movie states the obvious. And it does. It shows people like me, who have never been in an army (and never hope to be) that soldiers are becoming obselete. Soldiers were meant to kill, not think. But with nothing to do, how can they do anything but think?

Yes, the film does state the obvious. But that is not for people like you or Chris. That is for people like me, people who have never seen a war, or the military from the inside.

[Johann]

That's the only conclusion I can come to.

That this film was made to educate the masses on what modern soldiers have to put up with.

And yes, when a soldier starts to think, his career is OVER.

You don't belong in the Army if you ask "why are we here? why are you telling me to open fire on women and children?"

When they say jump, you say HOW HIGH? while jumping up and down like Star Jones at a chinese buffet.

The soldiers' motto:
Ours is not to ask why, Ours is to do or die



I love this one: Marines never cut and run.

Marines don't, but the U.S. will.

You'll be cuttin' and runnin', mark my fuckin' words.

Nixon was impeached in the 2nd year of his second term while Vietnam raged.
Bush is approaching that exact moment.

Exciting, huh? History just might repeat itself.



I can hear all the voices of those who disagree with me.
Soldiers, Reich-wingers, Bill O'Liely.

But I have way too much SANITY to even entertain arguments on what I've been saying here.

We don't have too many Bush supporters on this site and for that I'm glad.

Dealing with frustrating debaters like anduril and steveseitz is a total waste of time.

I guess Jarhead has value, but not much for me.

[Fan of Kubrick]

It would be nice for history to repeat itself... And although I liked Jarhead, I still agree with you.

[oscar jubis]

I'm finding it hard to say anything interesting about this adaptation of Anthony Swofford's memoir of his experience during the first gulf war. I'm also finding it hard to find anything truly wrong with a film I enjoyed only marginally. Perhaps most of this material feels overfamiliar. Jarhead seems constructed to convey one single irony_that Mr. Sworfordd and many others were trained to kill and transported to the other side of the globe, then not required to do much there. I've thought about the film for days and find nothing else that resonates with me. That is, nothing else already present in other, significantly better, war movies.

[Chris Knipp]

You're not alone. I tried to say above what is there that's not in the other "significantly better, war movies." See my concluding paragraphs at the start of this thread.