Jarhead (2005)

I must confess to not having read the memoirs of Anthony "Swoff" Swofford, on which this intriguing, striking but ultimately frustrating film is based.
Swoff, played here by the effective and talented Jake Gyllenhaal, "fought" in the first Iraq war and the film tells for the most part the story of his boredom and frustration as he sat in the Kuwaiti desert with increasing numbers of US soldiers, waiting for the all clear to proceed with an invasion that in the end lasted all of four days.
We find Swoff first of all at boot camp, getting yelled at by a drill sergeant in a manner not remotely dissimilar to the first half of the superior Full Metal Jacket. So far, so predictable. Soon though, orders come through to ship out to the Middle East as part of Operation Desert Shield, the precursor to Desert Storm. Those orders arrive halfway through unabashed hollering and cheering during a troop screening of the chopper attack from Apocalypse Now. Rather than being a generation of grunts raised on the harsh realities of Platoon and The Deer Hunter, aware of the brutality and ultimate futility of much of modern warfare, we instead have a room full of jarheads, yelling along to "Ride of the Valkyries" and crying "get some", like there's no tomorrow. These are boys and men entirely consumed by their love for battle, unaware in any sense of what really awaits them.
What turns out to await them is spirit-sapping, soul-destroying boredom. They arrive, they drill, they practice shooting, the play football in their chemical warfare suits, they pretend to dry-hump each other in front of a visiting news crew, they set off a truckload of flares while frying sausages and they rib each other with merciless vulgarity and enthusiasm. On screen titles regularly update us as to how many troops have arrived from the US and how long Swoff has been there until finally, mercifully, they set off into Iraq to drive out the Iraq Republican Army and reclaim Kuwait for the Kuwaitis. The invasion winds up being over before it has even started and there is a hugely affecting and effective scene when Swoff and his target man, the excellent Peter Sarsgaard, are camped out, ready to take out an Iraqi officer by sniper rifle, when a major steps in and tells them to stop so that he can carpet bomb the building they have scouted. Sarsgaard is desperate to contribute something, anything to the war effort and begs and pleads the Major for the chance to take their shot before the bombing commences, only to be refused. Sarsgaard goes off the deep end, screaming and crying, before collapsing in the corner, destroyed by the frustration and futility of the entire situation.
It is moments like these that ultimately make the film worthwhile, but it is worthwhile rather than essential. Director Sam Mendes seems to have an uncanny grasp of the tone and style of essentially American films, despite his background in English theatre. American Beauty and Road to Perdition got under the skin of white picket fence Americana and the Prohibition-era gangster film respectively and Mendes successfully grapples with the US war film genre as well. We feel Swoff's weariness, his exasperation, his despair and the cinematography is breathtaking too. Endless shimmering deserts eventually give way to burning oil wells, the sky thick with black smoke and raining oil. "The earth is bleeding", says Swoff.
The difficulty ultimately is not with the performances or the cinematography. Fundamentally, the film seems to a lack a sense of its place in history. Set during the first Iraqi war, but released during the second, the film seems uninterested in saying anything about the current invasion and war, or modern warfare in general. The boredom of the wait in the desert is effectively presented but that leaves the overall message as "waiting in the desert is really boring and frustrating when you are keen to get on and invade", which is really no message at all. Does every film have to be loaded with meaning? Of course not, but for a film set and released in the historical and political climates of 1991 and 2005 respectively, it represents something of a missed opportunity. Worth watching, but once will be enough.