REVIEW 'Jarhead' depicts inaction of war

The soldiers are just waiting to get into the action in the first Gulf War.
By BETSY PICKLE
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
Most war movies find a home somewhere within the action-film genre. "Jarhead" is a war movie that's primarily about inaction, but that doesn't necessarily make it an anti-war movie.
This film set against the backdrop of the first Gulf War is neither for nor against the military. It's blatantly, even somewhat conspicuously, nonpolitical. It has no ideology beyond "Semper Fi" and love for one's rifle.
Sam Mendes ("American Beauty," "Road to Perdition") directed "Jarhead," a visually rich, narratively frugal meditation on being and nothingness. William Broyles Jr. adapted the screenplay from the best-selling memoir by Anthony Swofford.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Swofford's screen alter ego, a young man with a sense of pride about serving as a third-generation Marine but also with a constant bemusement about how he ended up where he is. At Camp Pendleton in 1989, Camus-reading Swoff gets a crude introduction to his disparagingly described unit, but he's not allowed to coast.
Comrades
Staff Sgt. Sykes (Jamie Foxx) insists that Swoff train to become a scout/sniper, which he does. Paired with the watchful, more mature Troy (Peter Sarsgaard), Swoff hones his rifle skills and dreams of the day he'll have a live target.
Swoff and Troy think they're close to that dream when they arrive in the desert with 5,000 troops itching to engage Saddam Hussein and his forces. But as the days turn into weeks and weeks turn into months, the only conflict the Marines see is what arises among themselves. The war is being fought by air, and the ever-swelling ground troops sit by eating dust, finding raunchy forms of entertainment and struggling to get by with little or no emotional sustenance from home.
The hardest part for them is being separated from their wives and girlfriends. They're simultaneously sympathetic and sadistic toward one another in their misery. There are virtually no women around, period, because females have yet to be allowed combat roles.
Comparisons with Vietnam
"Jarhead" juxtaposes this new kind of war with the previous one by showing the Marines' excitement over getting to see "Apocalypse Now" (they know every word) and "The Deer Hunter." It may not have been the best idea to provoke comparisons between "Jarhead" and those films; even at its deepest, the new film is a puddle compared to those oceans. It's more like a "Twilight Zone" war story scripted by Edgar Allan Poe, with dread and frustration building as hearts beat.
"Jarhead" is all about mood, which grows out of the surreal lighting and landscape. It benefits from the excellent performances of Gyllenhaal, Foxx and Sarsgaard, who embody three arms of a sacrificial cross. Chris Cooper and Dennis Haysbert breeze through to add a whiff of eau de brass, but the story is what goes on below.
Mendes frames "Jarhead" with a kind of detachment -- as befits a film about a war plied from great distances. It's an intellectual gamble that robs "Jarhead" of some vitality but keeps its integrity intact.