New Head On The Block
Last updated: 04/10/2006 - 14:42
Jarhead
Jake Gyllenhaal (The Day After Tomorrow, Moonlight Mile), Jamie Foxx (Ray, Any Given Sunday, Collateral - to be seen next year in Miami Vice) and Peter Sarsgaard (Kinsey, Boys Don’t Cry, The Skeleton Key, The Dying Gaul) star in Universal Pictures’ Jarhead, the adaptation of Marine Anthony Swofford’s bracing memoir that took readers into his disorienting firsthand experience in the Gulf War.
Here's what the critics have been saying about Jarhead:
"Superb...a powerful film with stunning performances." - Dave Aldridge, BBC Radio Five Live.
"Fantastic...Gripping, intelligent...not to be missed." - Dabvid Edwards, The Daily Mirror.
"Unflinchingly honest, moving and powerfully vivid." - Boyd Hilton, Heat magazine.
***** - "Film of the month." - Maxim.
"Extraordinary, riveting and strikingly original." - Henry Fitzherbet, Sunday Express.
"Mendes' best film...gleamingly accomplished." - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian.
Jarhead - the term refers to a self-imposed moniker of the US Marines - follows ‘Swoff’ (Gyllenhaal), a third-generation enlistee, from his sobering stint in a Marine Corps boot camp and onto active duty in the war zone. Sporting a sniper’s rifle and a hundred-pound rucksack on his back through seemingly endless, seemingly identical sections of desert in the Middle East - with no cover from the intolerable heat or from enemy soldiers, who are always – potentially - just over the next horizon. Swoff and his fellow Marines sustain themselves with sardonic humour and wicked (occasionally gallows!) comedy on blazing fields in a country they don’t understand against an enemy they can’t see for a cause they can’t fully fathom...
Southern California
Foxx portrays Sergeant Sykes, a Marine lifer who heads up Swofford’s scout/sniper platoon, while Sarsgaard is Swoff’s friend and mentor, Troy, a die-hard member of STA – their elite Marine unit.
Filmed on location in the Imperial Valley region of Southern California - an area that was apparently used for some preparedness training for US troops before heading out to the real conflict - this is an irreverent, personal account of a war that was arguably somewhat antiseptically packaged at the time. Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles the book is laced with dark wit, honest inquisition and episodes that are at once surreal and poignant, tragic and absurd.
Comparable to Joe Haldeman’s account of active service in the Vietnam War: 1968, the film version has been directed by Academy Award winner Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition) and the producers are Oscar winner Douglas Wick (Gladiator) and Lucy Fisher (the upcoming Memoirs of a Geisha), partners in Red Wagon Entertainment. The screenplay – based on the novel of the same name - is by William Broyles Jr. (Cast Away, Apollo 13).
Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles by Anthony Swofford is published by Scribner - and in the shops now. Publishers Weekly called the book: "A witty, profane, down-in-the-sand account of the war many only know from CNN, this former sniper's debut is a worthy addition to the battlefield memoir genre. There isn't a bit of heroic posturing as Swofford describes the sheer terror of being fired upon..."
Jarhead is in cinemas now.