Jarhead
With Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Jamie Foxx, Lucas Black, Chris Cooper, and Skyler Stone
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Like most of the good things in Jarhead–a somewhat muddled adaptation by writer William Broyles Jr. (Cast Away) and director Sam Mendes (American Beauty) of Anthony Swofford’s best-selling 2003 memoir–the reference to Apocalypse Now comes from the book, which alludes to movies in its first paragraph. In the second chapter Swofford writes, “There is talk that many Vietnam films are antiwar, that the message is war is inhumane and look what happens when you train young American men to fight and kill, they turn their fighting and killing everywhere, they ignore their targets and desecrate the entire country. . . . But actually, Vietnam films are all pro-war, no matter what the supposed message, what Kubrick or Coppola or Stone intended.” He goes on to argue that civilians see these movies as moral statements–and that military men see them as pornography. “It doesn’t matter how many Mr. and Mrs. Johnsons are antiwar–the actual killers who know how to use the weapons are not.”
Mendes has been smart enough to hire some of the best sound and image people in the business for each of his features, including the late Conrad Hall as cinematographer on American Beauty and Road to Perdition and Walter Murch (sound designer and editor of Apocalypse Now) as editor on Jarhead. But he hasn’t been smart enough to transcend the ideological confusions of his scripts; instead he uses his inventiveness and the talents of others to distract us from those confusions. He persuaded a lot of people to skate past the kiddie porn and the uncritical view of the hero’s midlife crisis in American Beauty, and he persuaded many viewers to ignore the infantile aspects of the revenge plot in Road to Perdition–in both cases by tacking on the equivalent of a moral disclaimer at the end. It appears he’s trying to do something comparable in Jarhead by appealing to the antithetical preferences of both pacifists and warmongers. I suspect the warmongers lured in by the trailer will walk out disappointed and the pacifists will come away confused.
