'Jarhead' is a big gulf with no war

"Jarhead" is a minimalist epic - a grunt's eye view of the 1991 Persian Gulf War that, in more ways than one, never lifts its gaze higher. Directed by Sam Mendes and based on the autobiographical 2003 bestseller by Anthony Swofford, it follows the brief military career of the 20-year-old "Swoff," a Marine recruit and third-generation military man - played by Jake Gyllenhaal - who also narrates the film. Contrary to what we might expect, "Jarhead" doesn't have much to say about the politics of that bygone escapade. More perplexing, it doesn't draw any parallels to our current cauldron in the Middle East. The film raises the question: Why was it made?

Mendes and screenwriter William Broyles Jr. seem to be making the point that soldiers are traumatized by all wars in the same way, even if, as in the case of the Gulf War, there wasn't much of a war to fight. In the framework of the movie, basically a portrait of masculine ritual - i.e. men behaving badly - politics are irrelevant.

The recruits in Swoff's company are a more hyped-up version of the typical war movie platoon: there's the gonzo warrior, the father-to-be, the studious type, the braggart, all of them bullied into shape by the usual complement of gung-ho officers.

Staff Sgt. Sykes (Jamie Foxx) is the lifer who leads the young men into the Saudi desert. Warriors without a war, they don gas masks and play football in the 112-degree heat and obsess about infidelities back home. A soldier declares to his buddies, "I need to shoot something." Placed under a gag order by the military, they spout happy talk to the press corps. The fighting, most of it done from the air, ends almost as soon as it begins. To their great regret, Swoff, a crack sniper, and his spotter partner Troy (Peter Sarsgaard) never get to kill anybody.

Mendes tries to universalize Operation Desert Storm by getting up close and personal with the marines - as if, in the end, it made no difference whether their arena was the Persian Gulf or Danang or Normandy Beach. In Swofford's book, which is far more pointed than the movie, he writes about squandered lives "being deployed to protect oil reserves and the rights and profits of certain American companies, many of which have direct ties to the White House." Mendes pays lip service to this sentiment, but, as with so much else in the movie, he backs off just when things get interesting.

Emblematic of this problem is a moment early on when a soldier is accidentally shot during maneuvers, and virtually no weight is given to his death. Mendes isn't being savagely ironic here - he's just being blah. Time and again, he flattens out the innate absurdism of the story. War movies are often at their best and truest when they're craziest, and this movie has no craziness in its soul.

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