Jarhead (2005 - Sam Mendes)
In March of 2003, just days before George W. Bush would take us into war in Iraq, Tony Swofford's memoir,
Jarhead, hit the shelves. Chiefly it recounts his experiences as a Marine sniper in the first armed conflict with Iraq under George Herbert Walker Bush, 1991's Desert Shield/Desert Storm. As it looked like our country would soon have more soldiers in similar circumstances, it made the timing of the publication a "lucky" coincidence. Far from a gung-ho adventure story,
Jarhead is introspective, darkly critical, self-deprecating, and Swofford's writing voice can be profanely poetic. The book is an unflinching portrait of that particular battlefield, but it is also something larger: a soldier's narrative that is so unique and literary that it should take it's place with Tim O'Brien's
The Things They Carried and maybe even Heller's
Catch-22. Yeah, it's that good.
Jarhead the movie is, sadly, not something larger.
The main, glaring problem with the film is it fails to capture Swofford's voice or even much of his unique perspective. What remains is an episodic war movie that, while visually stunning at times, has no real focus and nothing much to say. It's a shame, because the book speaks loudly. Sam Mendes and company get details correct, but miss the all important tone. Not that their movie is a rah-rah piece. Not at all. But the movie offers nothing new for an audience to think about...other than those beautifully horrible images. The screenwriter who adapted the book, Willam Broyles (
Apollo 13, Cast Away), was a Marine himself in Vietnam and had a successful career as a journalist after the war before turning to Hollywood in the '90s. Theoretically he should have been a perfect choice to take on this project. But somehow he and Mendes have missed the larger points Swofford was illuminating. Too bad.
Jarhead does have its moments, and again I have to praise the visuals. In his first two movies, Mendes worked with the late, great Conrad Hall, and both
American Beauty and
The Road to Perdition are amazing to look at. This time Sam turned to Roger Deakins as his cinematographer. Deakins has lensed all eight of Joel & Ethan Coen's movies from
Barton Fink onward, as well as Rafelson's
Mountains of the Moon (1990), John Sayles
Passion Fish (1992), Darabont's
The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Scorsese's
Kundun (1997), Vadim Perelman's
House of Sand and Fog (2003), M. Night's
The Village (2004) and many others. He is definitely one of the best in the business, and
Jarhead stands as one of his best efforts. There's only so much one can do with the bright white sand of the desert during the daytime, but where Deakins excells are the battlescarred ground and most obviously the scenes at night, often lit seemingly only by the ubiquitous burning oil wells the Iraqi's left in their wake as they retreated. One of these shots in particular toward the end of the film, as Swofford (Gyllenhaal) and his spotter Troy (Peter Sarsgaard) return alone from their mission, with the sand blowing over the hills as they run through the flame-lit desert, is the equal in jaw-dropping beauty to anything Freddie Young shot in Lean's
Lawrence of Arabia. Really magnificent stuff.
BUT, these astounding visuals that abound mostly in the second half of the movie take precedence over Tony's voice and thoughts and fears and insanities. For example, there's a scene where Swofford breaks from his platoon at the burnt-out wreakage of a bombed convoy and sits in the circle of a few charred human remains. Visually, it's an arresting moment, especially as this is the first time we see the footprints in the blackened sand leaving pure white from the sand underneath: a memorable and fascinating image. Then Gyllenhaal sits in the circle of dead men, says "Hell of a day, ain't it?", and vomits. This is how the same scene reads in the book...
We stop for chow. I eat the powdered cocoa and dehydrated pears from my MRE and give the main meal, spaghetti, to Dettmann. I put my crackers in my cargo pocket, saving them for later when I will need salt. We are in a slight draw, and I walk up the rise in order to ***** in private.
On the other side of the rise, bodies and vehicles are everywhere. The wind blows. I assume this is what remains of an Iraqi convoy that had stopped for the night. Twelve vehicles – eight troop carriers and four supply trucks – are in a circle. Men are gathered dead around what must have been their morning or evening fire. This is disturbing, not knowing what meal they were eating. I am looking at an exhibit in a war museum. But there are no curators, no docents, no benefactors with their names chiseled into marble. The benefactors wish to remain anonymous.
Two large bomb depressions on either side of the circle of vehicles look like the mark a fist would make in a block of clay. A few men are dead in the cabs of the trucks, and the hatch of one troop carrier is open, bodies on bodies inside of it. The men around the fire are bent forward at the waist, sitting dead on large steel ammunition boxes. The corpses are badly burned and decaying, and when the wind shifts up the rise, I smell and taste their death, like a moist rotten sponge shoved into my mouth. I vomit into my mouth. I swish the vomit around before expelling it, as though it will cover the stink and taste of the dead men. I walk toward the fire circle. There is one vacant ammunition box, the dead man felled to the side. I pull my crackers from my pocket. I spit into the fire hole and join the circle of the dead. I open my crackers. So close to it, on top of it, I barely notice the hollow smell of death. The fire looks to be many days old, sand and windswept. Six tin coffee cups sit among the remains of the fire. The men’s boots are cooked to their feet. The man to my right has no head. To my left, the man’s head is between his legs, his arms hang at his sides like the burnt flags of defeated countries. The insects of the dead are swarming. Though I can make out no insignia, I imagine that the man across from me commanded the unit, and when the bombs landed, he was in the middle of issuing a patrol order, Tomorrow we will kick some American ass.
It would be silly to speak, but I’d like to. I want to ask the dead men their names and identification numbers and tell them this will soon end. They must have questions for me. But the distance between the living and the dead is too immense to breach. I could bend at the waist, close my eyes, and try to join these men in their tight dead circle, but I am not yet one of them. I must not close my eyes.
The sand surrounding me is smoky and charred. I feel as though I’ve entered the mirage. The dead Iraqis are poor company, but the presence of so much death reminds me that I’m alive, whatever awaits me to the north. I realize I may never again be so alive. I can see everything and nothing – this moment with the dead men has made my past worth living and my future, always uncertain, now has value.
Over the rise I hear the call to get on the road. I hear my name, two syllables. Troy is calling, and now Johnny, and Troy again. I throw my crackers into the gray fire pit. I try, but I cannot speak. I taste my cocoa-and-pears vomit.
It's one of the more memorable passages in the book, but in the movie it isn't much more than an interesting visual.
Of course it's always difficult to translate interior monologue to the movie screen, which is why so very many books suffer in the adaptation. The most obvious and easiest way to correct this problem is the use of voice over.
Jarhead uses some, especially in the first part of the movie, but I found during the most crucial moments and for the deepest ideas, as in the above example, they elected not to use any voice over at all. Odd. Deakins' pictures do tell a story, but they don’t really tell Swofford's particular story. And that's the problem over and over again with
Jarhead.
I think there was a way to bring the brilliance of the book much more to the screen, but it didn't happen here. What's left is visually gripping, but feels like it has no center. No soul. The book is largely about warfare by necessity or tradition or bad luck draining one's soul, but the movie eliminates the middle man - namely Anthony Swofford. Instead of the examination of this one man's decent and wrestling with the horrors around him and intellectually trying to process it all, what we have is an episodic military travelogue that is often interesting to look at but doesn't have the courage to do much of the plumbing of the depths that Swofford did as a soldier and an author.
Overall, this is a disappointment, and a lost opportunity.
GRADE: C+
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