Imagine a war movie devoid of any actual warfare and you have Sam Mendes's latest and most fibrous effort, Jarhead. Deliberate and dramatically tapered, Mendes' dreamscape of U.S. Marines and the maddeningly elusive battlefront of Operation Desert Storm is both sobering and intoxicating. Rightfully absolving itself of the need to politicize its subject matter, Jarhead makes it a duty to immerse the viewers in the life of the soldier instead. As a war film predicated on the absence of killing and about the men who consider murder an integral component of their identity as Marines, this beautifully simple movie is an exercise in emptiness that still manages to saturate.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Anthony "Swoff" Swofford, a boyish but determined teen on his way to the Marine forces. With a youthful absorbency and a mischievous smile, Swoff, along with each and every other recruit, seems to embrace the life of a soldier as the life of a true man. Tidbits of personal history soon rise to the surface, though, and it becomes clear that for most, joining up was a foregone conclusion, not a measured choice. To the young men of Jarhead, the Marines tempt not only as a right of passage, but as a supplier of whatever may be missing from their lives as well.
It is that amorphous thirst of the Y-chromosome that really pours through the screen for the first third of the film. Jamie Foxx cuts a nasty turn as the frothing Staff Sergeant Sykes, and to witness the incessant punishment and ridicule of boot camp is to weather it alongside the men onscreen. Amidst the morbid testosterone, Mendes achieves an odd flavor of fantasy. No matter how appalling you find the torturous environment, the soldier's experience is, as always, an enchanting burden. The viewer responds to the pressure as the jarheads do: with outward excitement and hidden fear. With Swoff as their guide, the audience gears up for war.
Only there is no war to be fought. Upon arrival in Iraq, Sergeant Sykes and his men find an empty and cruel desert, the potential for combat an increasingly dim specter of haze and sand. To pass the time, the soldiers run the gamut of manly leisure as they doze off, pleasure themselves, and fight scorpions in shoeboxes. Such minor diversions, however, cannot begin to ease their frightening yearning to fight and kill. Boredom quickly turns to madness as Swoff and the others break under the pressures of an illusory purpose with no outlet.
Mendes's keen eye for visual splendor compliments the frayed psyche of the men on screen. In films like Apocalypse Now and Platoon, the ragged jungles of Vietnam whispered the primal regression that marked the warfare of both movies so vividly. Here, Mendes utilizes the creamy landscape of the Iraqi desert (actually shot in California) to hint at the chaos and confusion of soldiers without a war to fight. As Swoff and company wander through increasingly ghostly conditions, as their pores are caked with oil and their trigger fingers constantly tricked, disillusionment sucks them in like quicksand, and Jarhead transforms into a nightmare of a never ending wasteland.
To watch Jarhead is to be exposed to the striking realities of a soldier's life. More importantly, the film exposes the transparency of the desire to fight. As an audience we sympathize with Swoff because we have seen the devices that so thoroughly conjured his most diabolical characteristics. As the Marines wander aimlessly through the desert oilfields, their survival seems to revolve less around enemy encounters than dealing with the contemplation of their own navels. It is an oddly captivating experience to watch young men attempt to live through the wartime mechanization of their own minds. As an audience, we are invited to partake in the desire to fight, as well as the heartbreaking lack of fulfillment when the opportunity to do so is never realized.
When the credits roll, we question not if we would want to experience war for ourselves, but if we could indeed bear to return from war alive, to a home that is now somehow foreign.