It's understandable why a looser and more casual film would appeal to Sam Mendes at this point in his career. His previous two films, American Beauty and Road to Perdition are two of the most carefully photographed films in recent memory made with the help of the best cinematographer who ever lived (Conrad Hall). But since Road to Perdition, Hall has passed away and left some people, me among them, wondering just how many of those perfectly composed shots were the work of Mendes and how many were the work of Hall. Additionally, such rigorously well-composed films take a lot of creative willpower to make. With these two factors in mind, is it any surprise that Mendes would make a looser and less careful film than his previous two?
And indeed he has. Jarhead is loose and fast with a constantly bobbing and weaving camera (courtesy new DP Roger Deakins, not a bad substitute). The problem with that, however, is that handheld camerawork and loose staging go a long way towards defeating analysis of a film. You can't look to any one shot in this film and say that it sums up the movie (or even the scene) because you can't say for sure whether everything in that frame was put there on purpose. You can't say for certain whether the sun glinting off the water bottle was done on purpose or if it was just a happy accident created by the fact that Deakins has the camera on his shoulder and can swoop down for that perfect shot whenever and wherever he sees it.
So Mendes has done an end run around the question of whether or not he can make another terrifically composed film without Conrad Hall. And on first viewing, that frustrated me to the point of nearly disliking the film. On second viewing, however, I began to look at the other areas in which Mendes creates subtextual and extratextual meaning in this film. There's not nearly as much of it in Jarhead as there is in American Beauty or Road to Perdition but it's there and it's worth discussing.
Foremost among these is the soldiers' use of (anti-) war films as violence porn. The marines in the film learn of their deployment to the Middle East during a screening of Apocalypse Now, a legendarily anti-war film that they're treating like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, complete with cheering and pantomiming of the on-screen action. It's a clever subversion of the idea that a film about war can ever truly be anti-war. And it's also a lot like how you'd imagine these men would respond to a viewing of a pornographic film. Indeed, with women largely absent from their lives and pornography (obviously) not allowed in the barracks, these men more or less substitute blood lust for sexual lust. And later, when the troops gather to watch The Deer Hunter only to find that it has been taped over with real porn, Mendes makes this point abundantly clear. It's the best, most resonant moment in the film and it says the most about the situation these men are in.
The main problem with the film, however, is, to carry the violence as porn metaphor one step further, that this particular war is all foreplay and no climax. Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal), the only member of his elite scout sniper unit to even see an enemy combatant, never fires his rifle. And while this only deepens the meaning and value of that particular metaphor (and indeed makes it the point of the whole piece) it isn't terribly compelling filmmaking. The audience, like the soldiers, have been craving the pink mist, the bloodletting, the violence of war. And denying us (and them) that violence aborts any sort of catharsis.
Certainly not all films have to be cathartic but this particular case of cinematic blue balls leaves the audience craving some sort of release. And if they can't have it through bloodshed, they need to get it in some other way. I think Mendes realized this and thus he tries to imbue the film with some sort of catharsis in the few short scenes after the soldiers return home from the desert. In these scenes, the characters, now quite different than we've seen them before, attend the funeral of one of their own. But this desperate grab for an emotional payoff is so far removed for the rah-rah marine life and feels so tacked on that the only real emotion engendered in the audience is apathy. It's too little, too late.
I can't help but think that if this film weren't based on a book some studio executive would have mandated that we see some bloodshed. And, although the filmmakers might have resisted, had that bloodshed made the final cut I think the film would have been the better for it.
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