Scenes like that create a nice, safe distance between characters and audience: We can cluck cluck over the U.S. war machine, professing to feel the pain of the poor innocents forced to participate in such cruelty, without ever acknowledging that the guys who join that "war machine" often get something more from it than just a cruel induction into real manhood. As Swofford points out in his book, the military offers a kind of secure domesticity, and there's certainly a sense of community. One thing Mendes at least hints at, late in the film, is the way these guys, living in close quarters and under such extreme conditions, learn thousands of intimate details about each other -- and yet, because of the "high and tight" regulation haircut, they may not know what their best buddies look like with actual hair.

The one heartening thing about "Jarhead" is the way the actors -- subconsciously, I'm sure -- refuse to yield to Mendes' brand of puppetry. Gyllenhaal is asked to play a naif here (albeit a smart-alecky one), but his face always suggests intelligence and depth: He has the huge, dark, skeptical eyes of a Max Beckmann charcoal drawing. Peter Sarsgaard, as the sincere, sensible Marine Troy -- a guy who, unlike Swofford, really wants to be in the Marines -- gives off an aura of sincerity that doesn't seem to be written into the script. And Foxx, even in the thankless role of the hard-ass sergeant, is a pleasure to watch: We see glimmers of good humor behind the character's bullying cartooniness.

But as hard as the actors work, "Jarhead" feels false right down to its seductive visuals. There are places where cinematographer Roger Deakins' work strives to give us the human touch so foreign to Mendes: Early in the movie, when we meet the young, newly shaven recruits, they have the look of child cancer-ward patients, perhaps a little sickly but definitely spirited -- a subtle way of contrasting their youth with the horrifying experiences they're preparing to face. Deakins is a great cinematographer, and you may find yourself marveling at the way he captures the shimmery, cold brightness of the desert -- until you realize how blatantly the look of "Jarhead" is borrowed from David O. Russell's far superior "Three Kings" (shot by Newton Thomas Sigel).

It's impossible to make a movie set during the first Gulf War without delivering at least an implicit political statement about the current one. Late in "Jarhead," Gyllenhaal's Swofford reflects on his own experience -- fighting a war that, unlike this current one, lasted only four days -- and intones, "We're still in the desert." Mendes means to suggest, I think, that the flawed, reckless Marines we've gotten to know in his movie are exactly the people we've sent out to fight our current war: They may be brave kids, doing their duty, but they're really not very smart, and it's our government's fault for sending them out that way.

There are grains of truth in that view: We have sent kids out to fight with far less training than they need, and with faulty equipment (and too little of it). But now that, once again, we're stuck in a war we never should have fought, doesn't it seem conveniently facile to be damning the mind-set of soldiers?

That's assuming, and we probably shouldn't, that all soldiers have an easily defined single mind-set to begin with. Swofford's book suggests the fallacy of that kind of thinking. Here's how he describes the scene in which he's invited to try out to be a bugler, and in which, rather than humiliating him in front of his platoon, his staff sergeant actually saves him from potential future embarrassment:

"You still want that bugle job? There isn't a bugle job, you fucking monkey! I could've humiliated you in front of the battalion, called you out there to make bugle noises with your mouth. But I didn't because for some reason I like you. Swofford, you are a goddamn Marine Corps grunt. You are the most savage, the meanest, the crudest, the most unforgiving creature in God's cruel kingdom. You are a killer, not a goddamn bugle player. That bugle shit is from the movies."

Tell it to the Marines. But first, tell it to Mendes.

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