This is a war movie that goes above the war and tells a soldier’s point of view. It shows the urgency and emptiness that every man’s stories have, because if something happened to us, then it is important to us regardless of how apathetic the world is.
“Four days, four hours, one minute. That was my war,” the Marine sniper Tony Swofford says. “I never shot my rifle.”
The movie is weird in its effect. It has no heroism, little action, no easy laughs. It is about men who are tired, bored, isolated, trained to the point of insanity and not given a chance to use their training. Roger Ebert said in his review, “The most dramatic scene in the movie comes when Swofford has an enemy officer in the crosshairs of his gunsight and is forbidden to fire because his shot may give advance warning of an air strike.”
His spotter, Troy, goes crazy: “Let him take the shot!” Let him, actually, kill one enemy as his revenge for the torture of basic training, the midpoint of the desert, the sand and heat, the pain of months of waiting, the look of a highway traffic jam made of burned vehicles and fresh burnt corpses. Ebert mentioned, “Let him take the shot to erase for a second the cloud of oil droplets he lives in, the absence of the sun, the horizon lined with the plumes of burning oil wells.” Let him take the gosh darn shot.
The movie is based on the best-selling 2003 memoir Jarhead by Anthony Swofford, who served in the first Gulf War. It is not like most war movies where it mainly tells the personal experience of a young man in the middle of the military process. At one point, Swofford, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, is being interviewed by a network newswoman who asks him why he serves. He has already given two or three usual answers. She continues, and finally he looks in the camera and says: “I’m 20 years old, and I was dumb enough to sign a contract.”
His best friend is his spotter, Troy, played by Peter Sarsgaard. Their small unit of scout-snipers has gone through training by Staff Sgt. Sykes, played by Jamie Foxx, who knows why he serves: He loves his job. Ebert said, “Others in the group include borderline psychos and screw-ups but mostly just average young Americans who have decided the only thing worse than fighting a war is waiting to fight one -- in the desert, when the temperature is 112 and it would be great for the TV cameras if they played a football game while wearing their anti-gas suits.”
Ebert said, “"Jarhead" is a story like Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That, in the way it sees the big picture entirely in terms of the small details.” Sykes informs them about Saddam Hussein’s invasion of the Kuwait oil fields, but says their main duty is to guard the oil of “our friends, the Sauds.” They do this by killing time. The narration has this one verse that sounds like it came straight from the book, where Swofford lists everything they do through their time: They train, they sleep, they watch TV and videos, they get in pointless fights, they read letters from home and write letters to home, and mostly they satisfy themselves.
Ebert noted, “These are not the colorful dogfaces of World War II movies with their poker games, or the druggies in "Apocalypse Now."” They have no smart remarks, we don’t see drugs, they get drunk when they can, and there is a Wall of Shame covered with the photos of the girls back home that broke up with them. They go on patrols in the desert, looking for nothing which doesn’t look like any place, and their greatest tension comes when they encounter eight Arabs with five camels. They think it’s a trap and their fingers are on their triggers. They are in formation to attack. Swofford and one of the Arabs meet on neutral place. He comes back with his report: “Somebody shot three of their camels.”
Ebert noted, “In a war like this, the ground soldier has been made obsolete by air power. Territory that took three months to occupy in World War I and three weeks in Vietnam now takes 10 minutes.” Sykes warns them to expect 70,000 casualties in the beginning of the war, but as anyone remembers, the Iraqis surrendered and the war was over. Now we are involved in a war that requires soldiers on the ground, against an enemy that no longer wears uniforms. Ebert says, “Yet many of its frustrations are the same, and I am reminded of the documentary "Gunner Palace," about an Army field artillery division that is headquartered in the ruins of a palace once occupied by Saddam's son, Uday.” They are brave, they are skilled, and dying comes suddenly from unseen enemies in the middle of routine.
“Jarhead” was directed by Sam Mendes, and it is the other side of the story of David O. Russell’s “Three Kings,” also about the Gulf War. Ebert noted, “If Russell had Catch-22 as his guide, it is instructive that the book Swofford is reading is The Stranger by Camus. The movie captures the tone of Camus' narrator, who knows what has happened but not why, nor what it means to him, nor why it happens to him. Against this existential void, the men of the sniper unit shore up friendships and rituals. Their sergeant is hard, not because he is pathological but because he wants to prepare them to save their lives. They are ready. They have been trained into a frenzy of readiness, and all they find on every side, beautifully visualized by the film, is a vastness -- first sand, then sand covered with a black rain, then skies red with unchanging flames 24 hours a day.”
It is not often that a movie does exactly what it was like to be this person in this place at this time, but “Jarhead” does. They say a story can be shown by how its characters change. For the rest of his life, Swofford informs, whether he holds it or not, his rifle will always be a part of him. It wasn’t like that when everything began.
This is one of those movies that is a must to see. If you haven’t seen it, then you should. You will love this movie because it really shows the realism of being a soldier in the army. For those who are or have been a soldier, you will relate to these characters.
However, the rest of the franchise just got worse, like the “Jaws” franchise. Look out next week to find out in “Jarhead Month.”
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