Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain is making a convincing claim for “Year of” honors in
impending 2005 wrap pieces and awards season races everywhere. Gyllenhaal is
Swofford, a naïve sharpshooter who comes to the Marines from a dead-end
background. There he meets up with the taciturn Alan Troy (Peter Sarsgaard) and
many others, and they train under Staff Sergeant Sykes (Jamie Foxx) before being
summoned to the desert staging ground in a five-month-plus ramp-up to conflict.

A big part of Jarhead is about the tedium of war, as chronicled
through that wait. It’s here that the movie’s keen and glancingly heartrending
sense of detail (a “Wall of Shame” for Polaroids of cheating girlfriends and
wives back home; coerced drug liability waivers signed just prior to going into
battle) gets its hooks into you. Once the bullets start flying, however,
Jarhead ironically becomes a bit more unfocused. This was, after all, a
war won quickly through the air, and while the movie depicts honestly and
forthrightly the conflicted feelings the Marines have about this (bloodthirsty,
combat-hungry but on-edge), there’s not a clear sense of the lines of the front
for the skirmishes that do take place to feel rooted and substantial.

That’s part of the point, I realize. War is a big word — perhaps the heaviest
three-letter word in the English language — but Jarhead gets the micro
right while the macro feels out of focus a bit. The film isn’t a minor work, but
neither does it achieve masterpiece status; its meter is actually more like that
of a stageplay than a film, due in large part to the anecdotal nature of the
source material. That may be a turnoff for some folks, and certainly account for
divided/conflicted opinion, both critically at large and even within one’s own
reflections on the movie.

Jarhead reminded me in significant ways of the recent Iraq war
documentary Gunner Palace, because it assays the very personal cost of
broad, international conflicts. Mendes’ film isn’t incendiary, or even
particularly an antiwar salvo. It’s not an indictment of one political
philosophy, but rather a rebuke of the system and a psalm for the pawns of the
chessboard. One particularly effective scene finds the soldiers — pushed into a
full-gear demonstration football match — haranguing an irritated Sykes in front
of a camera crew about all the pieces of equipment that either they don’t have
(and haven’t for months) or don’t properly work.

On an end note, slightly amusing is the fashion in which the film is being
doggedly sold as a hoo-rah!, pro-military, bootstraps actioner, with
Foxx’s proud speechifying capping off bits of strung-together action mayhem. The
irony is that within the film that speech, while sincere, comes at a down
moment, when two men are sharing a frank conversation wherein the undiscussed
white elephant is the essential futility of their grunt existence but devotion
to it nonetheless. Americans who’ve never served have a complicated,
contradictory and often almost embarrassed relationship with our Armed Forces.
Jarhead grippingly flirts with peeling back the layers of truth on these
subjugated capital-I issues, but as its brawny marketing shows us, that
awkwardness will not likely change anytime soon. DVD extras include two audio commentary tracks (one with Mendes, another with Swofford and screenwriter William Broyles, Jr.), deleted scenes with an introduction by Mendes and editor Walter Murch, news interviews and more. B (Movie) B+ (Disc)