Movie Review: Jarhead

Stars (Out of 10): 9

One Word Summary: Captivating

Movie Details: MPAA RATING: R for pervasive language, some violent images and strong sexual content Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Jamie Foxx, Peter Sarsgaard, Skyler Stone, Wade Williams, Katherine Randolph, Chris Cooper, and Lucas Black GENRE(S): Action  |  Comedy  |  Drama  |  War   WRITTEN BY: William Broyles Jr. Anthony Swofford (book)   DIRECTED BY: Sam Mendes   RELEASE DATE: Theatrical: November 4, 2005  RUNNING TIME: 115 minutes   Relevant Sites: IMDB Official Movie Website Watch The Movie Trailers Shopping: Shop Amazon for items related to this movie. Shop for movie posters at AllPosters

"Jarhead" Review:

          Jarhead—the self imposed moniker of the Marines—follows Anthony Swoffard (Jake Gyllenhaal) in his journey from boot camp to duty in Iraq. 'Swoff” never really wanted to be a Marine; he was kind of born into it having been a third generation enlistee. Only shortly after getting to know his drill sergeant, Swoffard realizes that enlisting in the Marines might not have been such a great idea. 'I'm 20 years old, and I was dumb enough to sign a contract,” he says. Jarhead follows Swoffard from basic training to scout/sniper training, and finally to Iraq. There we witness Swoff and his fellow soldiers go mad with boredom.

'This is our labor: We wait,” notes Swoff. All a soldier can do in the desert is clean their rifle, reread letters from home, masturbate, fight scorpions, hydrate, walk around in the sand, and hydrate some more. Jarhead is unique as a war movie because it doesn't contain very much war at all. "Four days, four hours, one minute. That was my war," says Swoff, "I never shot my rifle."

Though not a war movie in the same sense as Saving Private Ryan, Jarhead is an absolutely incredible film in that it completely transports its audience into the 'action.” Roger Ebert said it best when he wrote, 'It is not often that a movie catches exactly what it was like to be this person in this place at this time, but Jarhead does.”

But Jarhead is a war movie. While most war movies deal with what it's like to be in active combat, this one describes what it's like for a 'killing machine” to be inactive. Jarhead is great because it introduces us to many types of soldiers. Swofford notes that all his buddy Troy (who is going to be kicked out of the Marines two weeks after they return from Iraq and who is played by Peter Sarsgaard) wants is to be in the Corp while all he himself wants is to be out. Jamie Foxx's Staff Sergeant Sykes is a lifer in the Marines. 'I thank God for every day he gives me in the Corps,” he says, to which he follows with a spirited, 'Oorah!”

In only his third feature film, wonder kid director Sam Mendes has solidified his spot as one of the best directors working today. It is hard to rank the three films because they are each so different from each other, but Jarhead is perhaps the most universally appealing of the three. In American Beauty he captured the drama in a seemingly normal suburban setting long before Desperate Housewives came along. In Road to Perdition he created, in my mind, one of the greatest gangster movies of all time. And now with Jarhead he's truly brought the audience into the mind of a soldier during the first Gulf War.

Mendes' cinematography is beautiful. While William Broyles Jr.'s tremendous script (adapted from Anthony Swoffard's book) brings us into Swoff's head, it is really Mendes' camera work that brings us into his heart. A character that we first see as a misguided youth quickly becomes lovable through Mendes' eye, even as we see him doing the most horrific things. And though Jarhead isn't loaded with special effects, the war scenes and the scenes filmed in the burning oil fields look absolutely terrific.

The biggest surprise of Jarhead, however, is Jake Gyllenhaal. There's always been something inherently childish about his performances, even in his most recent movies, but Jarhead is as much a maturing role in the context of his career as the experience in Iraq was a maturing one for his character. In one decisively powerful scene in which Swoff pulls a gun on his own friend, Gyllenhaal at once made a strong case for the Best Actor Oscar and forever garnered my respect as a critic.

The Bottom Line is that Jarhead is incredible. Broyles' screenplay provides for a terrific story seen through first person narrative, and Sam Mendes has turned Swofford's own vision into a beautiful looking movie. Led off by a strong performance by Jake Gyllenhaal, Jarhead has a tremendous cast that includes Peter Sarsgaard, Jamie Foxx, and Chris Cooper. The dialogue is terrific, and the narrative is almost poetic, and though this depicts the first Gulf War, we should not forget Swofford's words that 'every war is different, every war is the same.”