The Earth is Bleeding (Jarhead (DVD))

Member Name: Fairydustbitch

Product:	Jarhead (DVD)
Date:	14/02/06 (394 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Top notch acting, interesting issues raised, visually stunning

Disadvantages: Probably wont appeal to a wide range of people

Jarhead is based on the book of the same name. Written by Anthony Swofford, an ex-marine, about his pre-Desert Storm experience...although according to some the book is a highly coloured and exaggerated version of events. A production taken on by Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition), it has a touch of “Full Metal Jacket” and for some reason also reminds me of “Blair Witch” (with the psychological torment and the intangible enemy) but manages to retain a real sense of originality.

An impressively bulked up Jake Gyllenhaal takes on the role of Swofford; or Swoff as he comes to be known, and manages to recover some man points after his role in “Brokeback Mountain”. Shortly after experiencing a “Full Metal Jacket” style boot camp, he makes the dryly sardonic observation “at this point I realised joining the marines may have been a mistake”. Following this Swoff and co are shipped off the desert, where they fall into a hellish routine of training in the desert, waiting for their involvement in a war with an invisible enemy, making derogatory remarks about each others girlfriends and…well, masturbating. As the young men with nothing to fight deal with their pent-up aggression and desires, more than one or two of them begin hallucinating and acting in extremely bizarre ways. This includes a particularly memorable moment where Swoff decides to shoot one of his buddies Fergus in the face after a Christmas Eve party goes awry, then hands Fergus the gun and asks him to shoot him. After more than a few months of this insanity, they finally find themselves with a war to fight, and they head off into the deserts and oil fields, where even more craziness ensues.

Jarhead is a bit of a strange film, both to watch and review. The hard, brutal reality of military life in the desert is interlaced with occasional moments of trippiness with some dry and bizarre humour thrown in along the way. If your expecting a rousing war film full of action, blood and explosions you are looking in the wrong place. Like the war on which it was based, the film is pretty slow, mostly portraying every day events happening in the life of a bunch of terminally bored and scared men, punctuated by occasional moments of gut wrenching terror and the odd scene that looks like it belongs in a David Lynch movie (a dream that involves vomiting a cascade of sand, an oil drenched Arab horse found on its own in the desert, one of the marines losing the plot entirely and making friends with a burnt and blackened corpse). The movie is by turns funny, exciting, weird and scary with a brilliantly well-chosen soundtrack that enhances it all the more, but when you come away from it ultimately feels like very little has happened at all. To use a direct quote, the book on which this film was based on was “Based on former Marine Anthony Swofford's best-selling 2003 book about his pre-Desert Storm experiences in Saudi Arabia and about his experiences fighting in Kuwait”, but to be honest the only thing any of these guys fight is their own psychological demons creeping up on them in the weirdest of ways. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, as this movie looks unflinchingly on the military and the war without necessarily taking any political stance on the issues it involves.

Gyllenhaal is pretty surprising in his role, if only in the sense that the character of Swoff goes firmly against the usual types of character that he plays. His performance is riveting and there are more than a couple of scenes where his performance explodes off the screen, yet he handles the quieter moments of the film brilliantly as well. His character doesn’t always inspire sympathy, nor does it seem as though he wants it. His role seems like one of a confused boy who has had a fair amount of his individuality beaten out of him and as a result is itching to use his trigger finger…yet on the other hand he is scarred by his life in the military (“Whatever else he may do with his life-build a house, love a woman, change his son's diaper-he will always be a jarhead. And all the jarheads killing and dying, they will always be me”) and is looking for a way out…to the point where he considers shooting another man, and then considers having another man shoot himself…one of the most powerful scenes in the film, and also one of the most painful to watch. His voice over laces the film with irony, melancholy and a dry, biting wit…and occasional some beautifully poetic statements (saying robotically “the earth is bleeding” after being told to stop sticking his tongue out to catch the oil which is raining down upon them after Saddam “insane“; as the marines refer to him, has set the oil fields on fire). His portrayal of Swoff is honest to the point of brutal, never over the top yet explosive.

Jamie Foxx’s Sgt. Sykes is equally brilliant in a superb supporting role. His character cleverly provides a contrast to Gyllenhaal’s viewpoints of the war, rounding out the film and preventing it from taking a one-sided look at the issues involved. Sykes loves his job, he is profound and hilarious, and occasionally he comes across as a little mad, often using religion and humour to make his point, which is always worth making. Foxx provides a great deal of depth and layering to a character that could so easily just be the over-used “tough sergeant” stereotype done to death in war and military movies. His performance as motivator and role model never falls into pigeonhole territory and he is a cleverly conceived multi-layered character, who seems almost capable of reading minds. His stand-out moment in the film has to be when Sykes and Swoff are staring out into a desert scarred by explosions and Sykes says how he loves his job and lives for the military. “Where else do you get to see s**t like this?” he says, staring out over the burning destruction, while Swoff looks at him although he’s lost his mind. Peter Sarsgaard also provides an outstanding performance in the film, although much more quietly so, than Foxx and Gyllenhaal.

For me the most affecting scene of the movie for me is when Swoff, wandering alone, comes across an oil-drenched abandoned horse…a very prized animal in the Middle East. For me that moment in the film brought home the reality of war for humans and everything else, with Swoff’s quiet distress about the animal’s condition yet complete inability to do anything for it except allow it to wander off into the desert to die, or possibly wander too close to a flame and catch fire. it’s a very sensitively handled scene, not as in-yer-face as some of the others, but subtle and providing a neat little simile of how the horse, like Swoff, got lost and has now ended up in the wrong place, alone…”I got lost on the way to college, sir!” (the latter being Swoff obviously, not the horse). It adds to the weirdness of the film, plonking something down when it shouldn’t be there and it half makes you wonder if the horse is a mirage or not.

Another scene in the film that really caught my attention was one of the marines being found digging a sleeping pit far off from the others, talking to a burned corpse. It really brings out just how isolated these guys were, as they stare aghast as their friend introduces them to the “A-rab”, they all look like terrified little boys instead of hard-as-nails grown men, lending a tremendous sense of humanity to the scene.

The cinematography in the movie is absolutely spectacular…the bizarre beauty of the burning oil fields and the shimmering heat of the desert sand in the midday sun provide the perfect disorienting setting for the movie, and one scene in particular where Swoff and Troy (Sarsgaard) are lost in the desert as night draws in, and the sand is lit by the far off and nearby explosions and fires…it looks beautiful and incredibly eerie, and adds ad incredible feeling of suspense to the scene…with you half expecting a bomb to go off any minute as you watch the two men walking like ants over a sea of sand. You feel yourself getting drawn in by the strange setting and understanding the midday hallucinations and insanities the environment, combined with the lifestyle, is causing the characters in the film. The use of colour throughout the film is extraordinary.

The whole movie is strange and unsettling, its definitely one of those films that gets under your skin…despite its total lack of graphic violence and limited amount of explosions. I left the cinema with a feeling of real ambiguity about the film, which I suspect is part of the point of the movie, its only when I began to think about it later that I formed an opinion on it…when I left the cinema I couldn’t tell if I liked it or not. It definitely seems like one of those films that gets better and makes more sense with a second viewing, unfortunately I’ll need to wait for the DVD to come out for that. The film could essentially be described as virtually plot-less, the story is so basic it can be summed up in a couple of lines, but to define the film by its plot is to totally miss the point. There are no Rambo style heroics and little in the way of brave deeds, instead just an honest portrayal of war and its consequences, which despite the horrors in the film manages to sit on the fence, politically speaking. By turns the film is hilarious, psychotic and melancholic but always unfolds with great intensity. All in all it probably wont appeal to a wide range of people, but its great if you like your movies unusual and presenting more questions than answers.

Summary: Full Metal Witch Project