"Jarhead": New Movie Rattles Complacent America
"Jarhead" (123 mins, 15) Directed by Sam Mendes; starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Jamie Foxx.Sam Mendes's latest indictment of America is set during the first Gulf War, but resonates powerfully with Iraq today.
In the late 1970s, in the wake of the fall of Saigon, there was a flurry of movies about the Vietnam War and then a period of silence until the appearance of Platoon and Full Metal Jacket.
Subsequent movies about the military experience in the post-Vietnam years have been few and circumspect.
Rules of Engagement, focusing on the response to an attack on the US embassy in the Yemen, Courage Under Fire, about moral issues in the field during the 1991 Gulf War, and Black Hawk Down, an account of the US army's horrendous 1993 intervention in Somalia, take a morally neutral attitude to war and a benign view of the Americans involved in it.
Only Three Kings, a black comedy set on the Iraqi border in the final stages of Operation Desert Storm, took a sceptical look at the war and those fighting it.
Jarhead, directed by Sam Mendes, based on Anthony Swofford's memoir of his life as a private in the US Marines, takes us back to the Gulf War.
That brief affair is now further away from us than was All Quiet on the Western Front from the Great War when it first appeared or The Bridge on the River Kwai was from the Second World War.
All Quiet was an out-and-out pacifist movie bent on rubbing our noses in the horror and inhumanity of trench warfare. River Kwai recognised the madness of war but couldn't throw off the shackles of popular entertainment.
Jarhead (a somewhat derogatory nickname for a marine that originated in the 18th century), while set in the first Gulf War, clearly invites us to see it as a movie about more recent events in the Middle East, just as M.A.S.H, which takes place during the Korean War, was about the war then raging in Vietnam.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Swofford, a second-generation marine conceived in 1969 when his father was on leave from Vietnam, who enlisted in 1988 at the age of 19 to escape his messy circumstances at home and find a role in life.
Reading Camus and acquiring a working knowledge of Arabic sets him aside from his crude, foul-mouthed, sex-obsessed comrades, but his goofy smile suggests he's proud of being a marine and enjoys the daily routine.
Like Full Metal Jacket the picture presents basic training and daily life in the corps in all its humiliating horror, and inevitably raises the question as to whether the attempt to turn people into dehumanised killing machines produces the right kind of soldier for modern warfare.
Swofford is chosen to join an elite sniper unit and takes pride in mastering 'the JFK shot' - the bullet into the brain of a distant victim. When the prospect of the Gulf War comes up, he's immediately in gung-ho mode.
In a particularly chilling scene, he and his fellow soldiers watch the helicopter sequence in Apocalypse Now, wholly unaware of its irony. They sing along to 'Ride of the Valkyries', and cheer as innocent civilians are blown away.
This is the spirit that made possible the My Lai massacre. Military training, the film shows us, suppresses civility, moral intelligence, human decency.
We never see an officer until the troops arrive in Saudi Arabia, and he's a jingoistic, xenophobic colonel (Chris Cooper), a cheerleader for war, as aggressive and obscene as the NCOs.
The only other officer we meet is an African-American major who uses the foul latrines that Swofford is charged with cleaning and incinerating out in the desert, and deliberately humiliates him. One senses an appalling failure of leadership at every level.
The last touch of civilisation for the war-bound troops comes when, rather bizarrely, they travel in camouflage uniform on a commercial flight, waited upon by smiling stewardesses. Thereafter the 175 days in the desert before war begins is a surreal nightmare.
The realistic events (such as a football game staged for TV cameras wearing full gas protection outfits in stifling heat) are indistinguishable from Swofford's personal nightmares (vomiting sand while on R and R).
The Marines put up a 'wall of shame' to exhibit photographs of the wives and girlfriends who've deserted them. When at last they prepare for action they have to sign waivers agreeing not to take legal action against the pharmaceutical firms that supply the inadequately tested pills they take as protection against Saddam's nerve gas.
However, they never see the action for which they've been trained, and come to realise they're not merely expendable but redundant.
There's a tense encounter with a small group of Bedouins on camels, where Swofford's courage and knowledge of Arabic prevent a massacre.
By the time the marines get on to the battlefield, all that is left are blazing oil-wells and an endless trail of charred bodies and burnt-out buses, lorries and cars, the remains of a vast convoy of civilians making their escape.
Swofford and his sniper colleague are given the mission of killing two Iraqi officers commanding a unit of imperial guards at a desert outpost, and at last have the chance to fulfil their roles as killing machines. But before they can fire, they're replaced by planes dropping high explosives.
What we know, of course, is that men like Swofford and his colleagues are now serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, and acting as guards in Guantanamo Bay. They are charged with winning hearts and minds and bringing peace and democracy to the downtrodden, tasks for which they are wholly unequipped.
Jarhead, following American Beauty and Road to Perdition, is Sam Mendes's third movie in which a complacent American turns against the system in which he has been reared. In the first two the protagonists are destroyed.
Here he survives but feels permanently maimed by the experience. It's a dispiriting picture, as no doubt it is intended to be, though extremely well made and performed.
An interesting irony is that much of the effectiveness of the sequence from Apocalypse Now that so thrills the Marines was essentially the work of sound editor Walter Murch.
He is the editor on Jarhead and has contributed to a movie that future troops are unlikely to embrace before going into battle.