JAR HEAD

Trevor Kirbabas

War moive

Jarhead is based on the experiences of one Marine named Anthony Swofford (played by Jake Gyllenhaal here), who wrote the book on which the movie is based. Surely Swofford's path of frustrated inactivity wasn't shared by all the soldiers of the Gulf War. And it's also not reflective of the current situation in Iraq. Yet, the dramatization seems justifiable in how it gives light to the possibilities of these new mutations of war. And despite its differences in outward appearance, there's still a common experience to be shared -- the veteran of a war will always witness a horror the regular civilian can never fully understand, even when the horror takes the form of sitting around, waiting, wondering, and slowly losing a grip on the stability of one's fate.

Jarhead is bookended with a pronouncement from Swofford about how a soldier will always be a soldier, even after he returns to civilian life, just as long as he's had the training and has felt the reality of a war. But there's a strange, detectable resentment here to the level of his scarring -- in that he hadn't been scarred enough to feel the residual effects of the military life that he feels. It's almost as if the horror wasn't horrible enough, and yet the events that he did go through have certainly affected him. It places him in a limbo, caught between being primed and nurtured for an experience he didn't have and the awkward, directionless, unrewarding experience he did have.

Director Sam Mendes might be accused here of not being subtle enough in presenting Jarhead's themes -- a lot of what happens here is met with how strange things are, and how nothing is turning out as a soldier would hope for (the use of voice-over, for instance, is evidence of this). Yet he makes up for it in the movie's feel of aimlessness and in how visually surreal it is. This is a movie about disillusioned fascination, and it looks the part with its stark desert scenes and with Gyllenhaal's glazed-over expressions. His face isn't saying war is hell -- it's saying war isn't everything it's cracked up to be.

4.2/5 stars