Dir. Sam Mendes, 2005, US, 122 mins
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Jamie Foxx
Q: When is an anti-war film not an anti-war film?
A: When it’s just a war film.
The problem facing Sam Mendes’ Jarhead is the one that has bugged almost all films of its type from the birth of cinema: that the representation of conflict can be as exciting as it is harrowing. The American critic Jonathan Rosenbaum recalled once how legendary director Sam Fuller walked out of a screening of Full Metal Jacket, calling it “another recruitment movie”, the implication being that its scenes of bombs and bullets were not off-putting but alluring. Ironic, then, that the first 15 minutes of this movie should so closely resemble the training segment of that film with its eloquent drill instructors and boot camp milieu. Particularly so, since throughout his film, Mendes alludes to the war movies of yore and exposes their essential failings as moral tales – in one disturbing scene, marines are shown cheering on the Ride Of The Valkyries sequence from Apocalypse Now, at least until their commanders snip the moment when a Vietcong woman disables a helicopter with one grenade…
It’s fitting that the films Mendes most clearly attacks are those of the Vietnam war because, as a conflict, it still overshadows any that has succeeded it. At one point in Jarhead, the central protagonist hears ‘70s rock blaring out from a helicopter and asks why this war can’t have its own soundtrack – a complaint that underpins the whole movie. Based on the memoirs of a marine, Anthony Swofford, serving in the first Gulf War, it follows the fortunes of a platoon who ultimately fail to engage with the enemy. In short, it’s a war film without any combat. And that seems to be Mendes’ point – that this was a non-war, a war without any of its own essential character, a waste of manpower, resources and, most emphatically, time. The tension – if there is any – derives solely from whether the guys will ever get to fire their rifles, not what skirmishes they get into. It’s significant that they are not soldiers, but snipers, men on the periphery of the action. This is the essential nature of modern warfare – not hand-to-hand engagement but take-outs from afar, not the macho nobility of the fight but precision targeting.
So, what are we being sold here? A moral tirade against a wasteful war or an exercise in cynicism? After all, the viewer can’t help asking themselves what would have happened if Swofford had managed to get a shot in – would he have written his book? If he’d been allowed to go trigger happy, would this film have become anything more than a gleam in an ex-English-theatre director’s eye? Mendes takes a thoroughly objective approach to the conflict in that he merely follows the soldiers’ lives without any flourishes of anti-war rhetoric – just to observe what happens to these men should be enough.
But is it enough? The average grunt is not intellectually stimulating company – there’s little by way of enlightening comment in this film. Instead, we are left to ponder the eerily beautiful site of oil wells burning on the desert horizon, the surreal sequence of a horse appearing from nowhere covered in oil, the clever cut from confused shouting to silence and the pitter-patter of sand in a bomb attack. In short, those wonderful, bizarre, exciting sequences that are part and parcel of the war film… As Jamie Foxx’s sergeant points out, “Who gets the chance to see this?”
So Jarhead is another recruitment film. It’s worth comparing it with Anthony Mann’s forgotten but extraordinary Men In War (1957). This, too, is content to concentrate on the nuts and bolts of warfare – a platoon’s attempt to escape from behind enemy lines – but is a film of continuous combat. However, despite all the bangs and flashes, what you remember is the fatigue on the actor’s faces, the terrible sense of waste, and the worrying implication that the resort to extreme violence at the end is necessary. It’s a war film that is also an anti-war film – Mendes’, curiously, is neither.
Mike Bartlett
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