gulf phwoar
Jarhead
Jarhead dir. Sam Mendes; starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper
Alas, the director of this film, Sam Mendes, is on record saying the most banal and unoriginal anti-war nonsense about the first and second Iraq wars. Fine if you like that sort of thing. But inauspicious if you want to see a film and not a sermon.
Thankfully Jarhead, a very thorough journey through the time of young US marine Anthony Swofford (Gyllenhaal) in the first Iraq war, avoids any tedious, trendy posturing. The biggest message to take from this film is in fact probably the vindication of Churchill’s observation that, “War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid. In fact it has been completely spoilt. It is all the fault of Democracy and Science.
We move through scene after scene of grotty, crude, locker-room sadism: no honour among friends, but plenty of swearing, fighting and sex. (Gyllenhaal’s character shouts early on that he definitely isn’t gay, but in a few scenes we move peculiarly into Brokeback Desert territory…). The marines have no desire for glory; only for ‘kills’. They celebrate by downing liquor, dancing naked to rap-music, and firing guns into the air. They are not a band of brothers.
They’re a bunch of barbarians. They are, however, very proficiently (if a little straightforwardly) acted barbarians. At first it seems the direction is also rather like this: proficient but very straightforward. There is none of the finely stylized visual choreography of Mendes’ previous films. It is shot deliberately prosaically: with a handheld camera never positioned above the eyeline of a marine, nor in a place where a marine couldn’t be.
But from this plainness moments of brilliance subtly erupt, when suddenly the camera as if by accident frames something spectacular. Moments such as the marines walking across burning oil fields, when vast columns of glowing orange flame spurt up against the dark night sky. Or when Gyllenhaal walks across charred black sand and his footprints leave a bright white trail behind him. These are incidental moments of refreshing visual originality.
The film goes where CNN never went, and these instances are rather like watching the most artful photojournalism come to life. Mendes says he hated the way the media showed the war only from a distance; abstracting towns into “toy villages”. In this way, Jarhead is redress. It brings the reality. And in the film’s very personal focus on and through Swofford, it brings the humanity. Go see it.
12th Jan 2005