If Kevin Spacey's Lester Burnham from 1999's "American Beauty" had been born later, bypassed college and enlisted in the Marines, he could have been a stand-in for Jake Gyllenhaal's Anthony Swofford in "Jarhead."
Sam Mendes's latest follows the memoir of real-life Anthony "Swoff" Swofford, a 20-year-old Marine who spent several months in Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War. The film is good at lots of things: starkly beautiful imagery, a dynamite soundtrack (featuring Kanye West, Public Enemy, T-Rex and an original score by Thomas Newman), and casting three gifted young actors with double letters in their last names. But "Jarhead" is mostly an ideal platform for Mendes' signature examination of pensive outsiders who find themselves in life-draining situations, wondering how they got there and how to get out.
Without much to do after high school, Swoff becomes a "jarhead" (what the Marines like to call themselves). Despite regretting it almost immediately, tongue-in-cheek vignettes of life back home keep him in check ("Making muffins with Mom," Swoff deadpans over a haggard woman crying while cooking). By the time Sgt. Sykes, a passionate Marine lifer played by Jamie Foxx, catches him faking stomach flu and reading Camus in a boot camp bathroom stall, America's headed to war. Swoff's only ticket to glory is to be good at something, namely sharp-shooting, even if he's not sure what he's fighting for.
Swoff's spotter, Troy (Peter Sarsgaard), is a complex loose cannon beneath a collected fa?ade. He's quick to play mediator between his fellow Marines, but later explodes into one of cinema's most teeth-baring, vein-popping fits of rage and desperation when a superior officer steals from him and Swoff the only kill they've ever been asked to make.
Going from sanity to silently cradling himself in the corner in minutes, Sarsgaard's performance jars the audience into Troy's frustration and loneliness. Gyllenhaal certainly shines, but if "Jarhead" doesn't garner Sarsgaard a long-overdue Oscar, Hollywood is indeed going to Hell in a designer handbasket.
Swofford's book molds nicely to Mendes's knack for breaking down the fears, hopes and desires of his protagonists. After enduring taunts about his girlfriend's infidelities while he's away, Swoff stumbles through a nightmare in which he begins uncontrollably vomiting sand after seeing her when he looks in the mirror.
Mendes is the master of cinematic contrast. In nighttime scenes, Swoff and Co. tread through the desert as burning oil wells shoot ghostly orange glows and showers of oil onto the filmscape. Even Pompeii-esque remains of twisted car metal and Marines hit by Iraqi carpet bombs seem almost beautiful.
Brilliantly cast, "Jarhead" brims with sharp editing and honest humor without taking political sides. The na?ve, jovial Kruger (Lucas Black) is the only Marine who verbalizes his misgivings about the war's purpose and the military's seizure of his rights, at one point refusing to take unproven pills to protect against nerve gas exposure.
A particularly ironic scene at the war's end includes a Marine yelling, "We'll never come back here again!" Others show Lieutenant Colonel Kazinski (Chris Cooper) rallying the troops into a fever pitch and Sgt. sykes preparing the boys for interviews with embedded reporters. It's at times downright funny, while never straying from the candid reality of life at war.
Although it's hard not to compare "Jarhead" to "American Beauty," Mendes's tale of learning and loneliness on the battlefield is about soldiers, not war. In that sense, it stands alone.
