Foxx miscast as roughneck Marine in Gulf War drama
By K. Curtis Lyle
For the St. Louis American
Director Sam Mendes made his Hollywood bones and garnered five Oscars with his 1999 blockbuster film American Beauty. It told the story of an everyman grappling with the failure of his personal dream. A mid-life crisis and a spiritual death wish, focused in the silk panties of his 17-year-old daughter’s best friend, add up to a special kind of disorder at the border of the American dream.
Amidst stereotyped casting and pedestrian storytelling, Mendes made a film that was penetrating, because we – the audience – bought into it; we actually cared about this group of goofy suburban losers. The film was also funny, like some of that taken-out-of-circulation money that you can pick up on the outskirts of Fort Knox on a really lost weekend.
Mendes came back at us in 2002 with another memorable piece of filmmaking. Road to Perdition, starring Tom Hanks, Paul Newman and Jude Law, told the story of a hit man who is forced to choose between the crime family that has rescued him from an orphanage and the blood family he has created. Hanks plays the taciturn hit man with depth, solitude and a riveting loneliness that seems outside his original range of characterization.
Obviously, Mendes’ direction is the added dimension that allows Hanks to flex his new acting muscle. Mendes creates an atmospheric film that draws one in slowly and lets us grow toward the complexity of Hanks’ character. We feel for the killer, because his victims are an unpleasant lot, and their deaths almost seem justified.
Now comes Jarhead, which opens tomorrow. Based on the memoir by Anthony Swofford, it sets itself up in the Kuwaiti desert on the eve of the first Gulf War. In a platoon of Marines, six men are chosen, after months of rigorous training, to become snipers. Their personal stories are interwoven with the excitement and boredom that lay the groundwork for the run up to the war.
Jake Gyllenhall plays Swofford. He’s a bit of a virgin (not literally), but has an intact will that creates an aura of respect about him and a sense of high expectation from others.
The others represent a diverse crew that is almost interesting. The real problem with diversity in this kind of film is that you have to work hard to make it mean more than slotting space for each ethnic or racial or gender group. The obligatory white, black, Latin mix is true; so true, in fact, that it has become a cliché. Yes, we all now know that the military is the most diverse institution in the society. So what?
The film is riddled with testosterone-driven energy that goes absolutely nowhere. Yes, young men going off to war are filled with profanity and a totally exaggerated sense of themselves and what they conceive of as their personal power. They are trained to be aggressive beyond a reasonable or unreasonable doubt.
But all these are known quantities. The film is filled with the predictable, the expected, the quantifiable.
Example: every soldier on his or her way to war is set up to fear and even expect death. All relationships change in this environment and become tenuous, uncertain, even hostile. Love, stable connections and personal commitments lurk on the runway, waiting to take flight.
The deepest emotional fear is the arrival of the dreaded “Dear John” letter. Of course, the soldier who spews the most verbal abuse, the guy who taunts everyone else, gets his drawers set on fire when his wife sends him a video, disguised as a present, of herself making love to his next-door neighbor. This is not a new or interesting idea.
Jamie Foxx has a featured role here, as the sergeant major who trains the elite sniper team that is preparing to go into Iraq and kick Saddam’s ass. This line is initially presented as the core element of the story.
Foxx, however, really doesn’t come across as a convincing sniper or a hardcore Marine. His voice isn’t strong enough to be intimidating and his manner is more collegial than deadly. Some of the attempted high-octane verbal exchanges between him and the jarheads seem more like fraternity-boy banter than true Marine profanity.
Dennis Haysbert, late of Fox’s 24 and now a very visible pitchman for Allstate, has a minor role as a misguided officer. In fact, most of the officers in the film are presented as Apocalypse Now wannabees and just a little bit addled. If you know what I mean.
The eventual loss of life and limb is visited upon the jarheads. The tragedies of war descend on the platoon leader. We see Swofford, the memoirist, standing over the coffin of his platoon leader, the implication being that he has taken his own life. This finale rings more true than anything else in the film. It’s always the best and the brightest who fall the furthest and the fastest. This is the film’s real theme.
It would have been nice to get there quicker and without all the corny distractions.
