Shadow war

Do anti-war movies really exist? This was one of the more interesting questions raised by Jarhead, Anthony Swofford's memoir of the first Gulf War. To his fellow Marines, he suggested, even the "Vietnam war films are all pro-war," seducing soldiers with "the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills." On the eve of shipping off for Iraq, Swofford and his comrades-in-arms fired up the VCR and roared their un-ironic approval at Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter and Platoon, the anti-war message lost in the deadly glamour of combat.

That scene shows up midway through Sam Mendes's lovely, pointless film adaptation: Francis Ford Coppola's helicopters strafe the Vietcong while "Ride of the Valkyries" blares and the Marines, the close-cropped jarheads of the title, stand and cheer the carnage on. It's a potent moment, but the movie feels trapped by it--by the suggestion that anything Jarhead might say about war has already been said, and already incorporated into the culture, and the cult, of military combat. Movies once celebrated battle, and later they deplored it, but war itself has proven too strong for both these idealisms, too dark to glorify and too attractive to condemn. Jarhead tries to tack between these exhausted alternatives, but it's a movie that doesn't know its own mind, that fancies itself complicated because it doesn't have anything to say.

It doesn't help that Swofford's story proves thin material--it's the memoir of a week-long war, in which the waiting is the hardest part (metaphors of ejaculation and impotence abound) and the details of Marine life are more interesting than the brief spasm of combat. The book had literary flair, at least, and the novelty of an author who went from the Marine Corps to the Iowa Writer's Workshop; the movie, alas, has Jake Gyllenhaal. Playing Swofford, Gyllenhaal is handsome in the wounded fashion of a male model; he bulked up for the role, but it only makes him look absurd, a Hollywood man-child on steroids. In a movie where so little happens, the only drama is necessarily existential--and watching Jake Gyllenhaal stare into the abyss would make Kierkegaard giggle.

The supporting cast has its pleasures: The always-able Peter Sarsgaard plays Swofford's friend and mentor on the Marine sniper squad (though it would have been interesting to see what Sarsgaard could have done with the lead role), and Jamie Foxx strides through and swipes the movie with a cool, sympathetic turn as Swofford's commanding officer. And the film is beautiful--the white desert and the flaring orange of the oil wells set ablaze, and the awful beauty of a strafed-out highway, the cars gray with ash and the corpses like statues carved in charcoal.

But as in his previous efforts, Mendes shows a filmmaker's eye and little else. Jarhead is the most entertaining movie he's yet made, in a way; it lacks the rancid heart of American Beauty and the glossy emptiness of his gangster flick, Road to Perdition. But it delivers clich6s and rarely complicates them--the stock drill sergeant with his stock insults; the banter and rough-housing of the platoon; the infidelity of stateside girlfriends and the homoeroticism of military life; the pulsing soundtrack and the "let's kick some ass" thrill of armed men on the move. When it reaches for pathos and moral complexity, Jarhead comes up short; when it retreats into crowd-pleasing, it carries all the weight of a Marine Corps advertisement.

The Marines need recruits, of course, but a movie about the first Iraq War should offer more than this. Gyllenhaal's Swofford advises us, at one point, to forget about politics--but this is dishonesty masquerading as realism. In war, politics always matters, and it's worth contrasting Jarhead, in this regard, with David O. Russell's Three Kings, a movie that limned in a few broad strokes what Mendes takes two hours to arrive at--the strange virtual-war quality of the first Gulf War--and then went on to grapple with the complexity of the war's aftermath, the Shiites and the Saddam loyalists and the well-meaning Americans caught in the middle. You didn't have to agree with Russell's politics--an anguished liberalism, tom between pacifism and interventionism--to enjoy his movie, because he had something to say about our liberation of Kuwait, about what it meant and didn't mean, what it did and what it tragically failed to do.

Whereas Mendes has only the beauty of the desert, the sweat of the Marines, and the deadly sleekness of their weapons: the pornography of a war without its point.

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