"Jarhead"

Sam Mendes' specious adaptation of Anthony Swofford's Gulf War memoir is both antiwar and anti-soldier.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Nov 4, 2005 | Early in Sam Mendes' adaptation of Anthony Swofford's memoir of the 1991 Gulf War, "Jarhead," a monstrous boot-camp drill instructor smashes the head of a young Marine recruit -- the protagonist and narrator of the story, played by Jake Gyllenhaal -- into a chalkboard for no good reason. Mendes presents this as a typical instance of Marine brutality, just one insignificant miniature in the mass-meathead M.O. of the U.S. military. He lays it on us and then quickly moves on to some other instance of degradation and humiliation, as if he fancied himself Lars von Trier remaking "Gomer Pyle."

What's odd about the scene is that in Swofford's book, the instructor uses Swofford's head to break the chalkboard (in the movie, it remains intact), so that his skull hits the cinder-block wall behind it. Later, a command lieutenant witnesses another instance of the drill instructor's explosiveness and tells the recruits that if any of them have been physically assaulted by the instructor, they should report it. (Swofford and others did.)

Nothing much changed -- the instructor was transferred to another platoon, so at least Swofford didn't have to deal with him. Even so, none of that appears in Mendes' movie, because it would negate his "Military: Bad!" thesis. And while every filmmaker has the right to shape (and sometimes reshape) the text he's adapting, the difference between Swofford's account of the assault and Mendes' dramatization of it encapsulates everything that's specious about the movie "Jarhead." Swofford's book is both funnier and more horrifying than the movie Mendes has made from it, and he makes no bones about how messed up (by civilian standards, at least), the U.S. Marine Corps is. But his book also addresses a world of greater complexities, and at the very least, it's ultimately about soldiers -- in other words, people. Mendes doesn't care about people -- he's too busy making his art. And with "Jarhead" he pulls off, effortlessly, what so many pro- and antiwar individuals since Vietnam have tried so conscientiously to avoid: His movie is antiwar and anti-soldier.

I suppose that shouldn't come as a shock. Mendes is about as far as you can get from a humanist filmmaker; he's more of a floatist filmmaker -- he's so above it all, this wretched mess we know as human life, that the best he can do is file pinched, jaundiced reports from his lofty cloud. In pictures like "American Beauty" and "Road to Perdition," Mendes doesn't love his characters; he can barely contain his contempt for them. But in order to make movies, he needs characters, so he reluctantly works with what he's got.

Swofford's character here is like a piece of raw meat Mendes feels he needs to punch into shape. We see Gyllenhaal both reading Camus and, with his fellow Marines, just as they're all about to be deployed to the Gulf, whooping and cheering with bloodthirsty glee during a showing of "Apocalypse Now." Much of what's in Mendes' movie actually appears, in some sense, in Swofford's book (the screenplay here is by William Broyles Jr.): Swofford makes the point that, even though Francis Ford Coppola and Oliver Stone sincerely believe their films are antiwar, to men who have been trained to kill, "the magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills." Swofford may not be making a pretty observation there, but it's a considerably more delicate one than Mendes even tries to make.

All of that suggests that Mendes is more interested in scoring his own points than in capturing the subtler, more interesting ideas in Swofford's book, which is his choice to make. But even within the discrete universe of the movie itself, Mendes is sneakily halfhearted in his desire to present Swofford -- the Camus reader and the trained killer, an STA (Surveillance and Target Acquisition) scout/sniper -- as a human being and not just the military's clueless chump. Mendes can't see Swofford as both a good soldier and a good man, because in his view the two are mutually exclusive. So he spends the majority of the movie showing the ways in which Swofford and his fellow Marines are sadistically degraded by their superiors, as when Swofford is invited to try out for the position of bugler, only to be told by his staff sergeant, Siek (Jamie Foxx), in front of the whole platoon, that no such position exists -- and then ordered to play reveille with nothing but his lips.

Next Page: A film set during the first Gulf War makes an implicit political statement about the current one

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