Sam Mendes, Jarhead (2005)

Sam Mendes won the Academy Award for Best Director for American Beauty (1999), a film he made when he was only 33 years old. While this seems amazing, there are numerous examples of a director's first film being one of his/her best: John Singleton's Boyz in the Hood (1991) and Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum (1987) come to mind.


Mendes, however, is no "one hit wonder". His Road to Perdition (2002) , which followed Beauty, was a stylish noir and Jarhead is perhaps the best film about the life of the modern warrior to date. It combines the depth and sarcastic wit of American Beauty but takes on a much more serious topic, putting the viewer in the shoes of the US Marines during Operation Desert Storm.



Mendes' take on modern warfare acknowledges its predecessor Vietnam-era films (clips of Apocalypse Now (1979) and The Dearhunter (1978) are part of Jarhead), while also highlighting the modern Marine's dilemma: trauma comes not from the killing but the non-killing. High-tech military equipment have dimished the modern warfighter from one of a killing machine to one of a front-line scout whose primary role is to prep the battlefield or clean-up after the battle is done.



In one scene, the Marines in Jarhead watch Coppola's Apocalypse Now not as an anti-war statement on the fog of war but with youthful enthusiasm, cheering the scenes of US soldiers attacking the Vietnamese. Later these same soldiers find themselves in a position which mirrors the "Who's your commanding officer" scene in Apocalyspe. Jake Gyllenhaal's character Swafford hears a helicopter descending on the "battlefield" of flaming oil fields and playing a Doors song. While the scene in Apocalypse attempts to compare the fog of war to a drug-induced hallucination, Mendes' Marines are living in a completely different world. Swafford very lucidly quips "Can't we even have our own music?"; his character does not see any glory in battle and resents this feeling of inability to affect the war's outcome.


Still, these Marines do share at least one trait with the Marines of yesterday. Both remain faithful to the Corp, even after returning to the U.S., the experience of war has left an indelible mark on the rest of their lives. The difference is that the boredom that they experience back at home is juxtaposed to the boredom they experienced on the battlefield. Finally, speaking of boredom, check out this clip where some guy spliced together every time one of the characters in Jarhead drops the f-bomb... not sure but this may just rival Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) for some sort of "Most F-bombs in a Film" record here.