Battling boredom

In a generally disappointing year for movies the biggest disappointment for me so far was Sam Mendes' Jarhead. Unlike, say, Elizabethtown, which had bad festival buzz and a mediocre trailer as harbingers of an underwhelming final product, I saw Jarhead before the middling reviews and had only the well produced trailer, credentials of the cast and crew and Oscar-friendly release date to feed my expectations.

Sure Road to Perdition had its significant flaws but American Beauty is one of my all-time favorites, so I was eager to see what Mendes would deliver for his third film. And the cast is excellent: Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper and, before he was cut out of the final film, Sam Rockwell.

The good news is that Jarhead is hardly a crap film. It's well made, it's thoughtful, the performances are solid. There's nothing sloppy or stupid about it. No one involved has anything to be ashamed of (the one possible exception being a very embarrassing epilogue).

The bad news is that there's nothing very interesting, entertaining or enjoyable about it either.

It's more of an exercise than a movie, an existential riff on what it's like to be a soldier who undergoes dehumanizing basic training, gets shipped off to a desert in a very foreign land and is forced to wait and wait and wait for "something" to happen. The basic action of Jarhead goes something like this: you worry if your girlfriend back home is cheating, you question your sanity, you question the sanity of those around you, you wonder why you agreed to this in the first place and you wait some more. Jarhead revels in the tedium of the soldier's daily lives so much that it simply becomes tedious.

Possibly more shocking than how dull the movie is is its complete failure at getting inside these soldiers' heads. You might think by devoting so much screen time to hanging out, goofing off and getting into trouble we'd actually learn something about them. But every character remains at a distance from beginning to end.

I haven't read Anthony Swofford's memoir on which the film is based but I can't imagine that a first-person account of time spent as a sniper in desert storm would lack a personal touch that transforms the Marines from pure grunts into real people. I imagine by removing any such personal detail Mendes was aiming to turn one man's story into something more universal, but the end result is a lead character who is such a cipher that it's impossible to connect, or even care.

There's one preciously meta scene where the soldiers watch Apocalypse Now, which feeds their expectations - and possibly our own. While watching Jarhead I couldn't help but think of many other (better) war movies, not limited to Apocalypse Now: there are also scenes that recall Three Kings, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Born on the Fourth of July, etc. Eventually I even found myself longing for the simple-minded approach of Black Hawk Down (at least in Black Hawk Down's character-deficient story things happened).

Anything to squash the boredom.