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| Modern Anti-War Movies
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War...what is it good for? Well if nothing else, it supplies endless plots for filmmakers and writers. From gung-ho efforts, like The Dirty Dozen or The Eagle has Landed, to the more thought provoking, like Das Boot or Bridge over the River Kwai, there are unlimited stories attached to every war.
In recent years, however, particularly since the fiasco that was the US campaign in Vietnam , there has been a trend toward the strong anti-war message. Not that anti-war films haven't been around for a long time, it's just that modern filmmakers tend to take it one step further. Sam Mendes's Jarhead takes this sub-genre and injects it with some freshness, to mixed success. Jarhead is definitely not a typical anti-war movie; it creeps up on you rather than delivering an in-your-face diatribe.
The film, based on US former marine Anthony Swofford's book of the same name, joins a long line of films highly critical of war, but manages to give a contemporary audience enough new angles to consider.
Most of the anti-war films that came before it can roughly be put into a few categories. There are those films, like Oliver Stone's Platoon, that show heroes caught up in a war which may not be of their making, but who still have purpose to their combat. They are following orders, even if those orders are flawed, or, in this particular case, find themselves at the mercy of a deranged officer sent over the edge by war itself.
The heroic soldiers in Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan have a more historically legitimate reason for fighting. Their enemy is in no doubt. However, even they are full of uncertainty over the purpose of this particular mission and raise the question of why one man's life might be worth more than another's.
Then there are movies that show the aftermath of war. How the physical or mental disabilities it inflicts affect those who return home.
The Deer Hunter is the one of the best examples here. Michael Cimino takes an anti-war stance by showing the terrible impact combat in Vietnam had on the men when they tried to return to their lives. Not only were they mentally and physically scarred by the enemy, but they also had to endure hatred and resentment from the country they believed they had been fighting for. Stone did the same thing to more gruesome effect in Born on the Fourth of July, still one of Tom Cruise's finest performances, with his story of a broken hero completely failed by the system.
Then there is the surreal. Apocalypse Now put forward the premise that the lunatics really can take over the asylum and it certainly doesn't make things any better. It seems that Kurtz's attempts to escape what he sees as 'the horror' only brings new horror on his 'tribe' or those who do not agree with his demented vision.
Mendes claims that surrealism is what he is aiming for with Jarhead, but compared to the blueprint film in that category, Catch 22, his efforts fall far short. Nor has he pulled off the cynical hyperrealism of Three Kings, David O. Russell's intelligent look at Operation Desert Storm. Three Kings has more prescience and may well be a better film for it.
Where he does triumph though is in depicting the sheer mind-numbing monotony of basic training - think Full Metal Jacket lite - and the ennui suffered by the ground forces in modern warfare. They are stuck in camps in the desert waiting to fight, or even just to fire their guns, at an enemy who is so far away he is not even on the horizon. Only the jets and missiles screaming overhead give them any impression of where the enemy actually is.
For the first time in a war film, the enemy is not some madman screaming in a foreign tongue or a cruel, twisted torturer, but in fact, he seems, in both threat and physicality, to be non-existent. In fact, the marines' only close encounter with any Iraqis is when they are well and truly dead and a threat to no-one. Only movies about the cold war managed a more distant enemy.
Another strength of Mendes's film is that it isn't full of heroes. It shows how wars are actually fought by a cross section of normal men, who bitch and moan about everything from their situation to their unfaithful girlfriends and develop a warped, but deep, comradeship.
One criticism could be that some of the humour in the conversations and the set pieces falls quite flat. It may be that it is Mendes's intention to show the 'you had to be there' aspect of what these men went through and the fact that even the most stupid or unfunny jokes stirred their laughter.
Mendes has also been criticised for the similarities in his film to that of Kubrick's Metal Jacket, particularly in the scenes in basic training. He has answered those criticisms by saying there really is no other way to show it. The very consistency of basic training, and the accuracy with which both films portray it, means parallels are inevitable.
Recent events in Iraq underline the futility of the ground war Swofford and his contemporaries fought, but since the book was written before the start of this Iraqi war, there is no concrete reference in the film to that futility. However, as a film about how a sensitive boy becomes macho man it succeeds admirably, due to creditable performances from Jake Gyllenhaal as Swofford, Peter Sarsgaard as his friend Troy and Jamie Foxx as Staff Sgt. Sykes.
Mendes may not claim he has made an anti-war movie in Jarhead, but it does work as one.
Joyce Dundas |
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