Swofford endured all the brutal privations and initiations - including having his head shaved into the “jarhead” cut - and was then shipped out to the burning Saudi desert, where he and his comrades experienced an unending Beckettian nightmare of doing nothing in the 100-degree-plus heat. Swofford is a 20-year-old soldier in the United States Marine Corps during the 1991 Gulf War, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, an actor who here bulks up in maturity and presence Swofford’s future literary sensibilities are signalled with a battered copy of Camus’s The Stranger which, to his embarrassment, he is discovered reading on the lavatory by his drill sergeant, and through his deadpan voiceover, introducing us to each of the bizarre episodes. With cinematographer Roger Deakins and editor Walter Murch, Mendes heads up a triple-A-team of film-making and Jarhead is something which is stunning to look at and to listen to, with elegantly chosen pop songs unspooling on the soundtrack under each fresh new horror. “T hank God,” says an exultant marine at the end of this story of the first Iraq war, “we’ll never have to come back to this shithole ever again!” Sam Mendes’s gleamingly accomplished and controlled screen version of Anthony Swofford’s military memoir allows its historical ironies to float some way up to the surface, before sinking enigmatically back down again.
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