A Dry War Film

JARHEAD

Directed by Sam Mendes

BROOKLYN LOBSTER

Directed by Kevin Jordan

AFTER INNOCENCE

Directed by Jessica Sanders

The Gulf War movie Jarhead is fundamentally unsatisfying, but it's hard to imagine how it could be anything else, because its subject is disappointment. Specifically disappointing is the contemporary soldier (likeable but dull Jake Gyllenhaal), who joined the Marines because he wanted to experience the horrendous spectacle of real war but ended up ghost walking through virtual war instead. Adapted from Anthony Swofford's memoir, and directed by Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition), the movie earns points for being true to its source. But that fidelity is not likely to satisfy anyone, because Jarhead isn't a pro-war or anti-war movie, or even a flat-out war movie from the perspective of a kid who knows war is hell but still wants to feel it. This is an epic meta-war movie, in which the contemporary infantry soldier's experience is viewed through the prism of (and then judged against) all the war movies he has seen. These warriors want the orgasmic release of mechanized carnage, but they don't get it because Gulf War I turns out to be an air war, a TV war. Anthony "Swoff" Swofford (Gyllenhaal) trains to be a sniper, hoping he'll get a chance to actually go into battle and cap a few people. ("I wanted the pink mist," he muses in voiceover, hitting bull's-eye after bull's-eye on a firing range.) But he and his best friend and forward observer (Peter Sarsgaard) can't catch a break; their skill set is of very little use in a war driven by air power. (If they'd held on for another 12 years, it would have been a different story.)

The movie's voiceover narration fuses with its images to confirm war's unabashed sexualization of violence, its canny, timeless capacity to tap young (mostly male) energy that wants to fight and fuck and will trade one for the other in a pinch. (These guys hate queers and bond over that hatred, yet they love to be naked and pile on each other, and when they get excited, they mock-hump each other like crazy monkeys.) Mendes accurately captures the romantic, often near-erotic intensity of male organizations geared toward competition, combat and dominance, and he lets the Marines sentimentalize their own intense male bonding without condescension. (At one point, they get together to watch The Deer Hunter, and their solemn expressions suggest it is a near-religious reverence.) But this intense emotion finds no release. These swinging-dick Marines go home with blue balls, unable to process or appreciate all the spectacular, unique sights they witnessed (oil fields on fire, Iraqi caravans seared like briquettes) because their own trigger fingers initiated none of those sights.

Mendes and screenwriter William Broyles, Jr. define their characters in precise strokes (Jamie Foxx's drill sergeant, in particular, grows more complex with each new scene). But for the most part, the filmmakers seem to be under no illusions that war is anything but a collective, dehumanizing enterprise or that modern (or is it postmodern?) war can satisfy media-saturated imaginations. Accordingly, the movie begins with a bleached-out boot-camp sequence that's deliberately reminiscent of Full Metal Jacket (complete with numb, first-person narration, barking drill sergeant and super-wide-angle, rectilinear master shots), weaves knowing war-movie references into its imagery and narration (a chopper zooming over our grunt heroes blasts The Doors on its PA system, prompting the gripe, "That's Vietnam, music, man-can't we get our own fucking music?") and reaches a giddy referential peak in a sequence where the Marines' viewing of the chopper-attack sequence from Apocalypse Now (they love it) is interrupted by the news that Saddam Hussein has rolled into Kuwait. (That film and Jarhead share an editor, Walter Murch.)

This is a dry, schematic film, more interesting to think about and talk about than to watch, but it's intelligent and original, worth seeing and having an opinion on. The movie's sardonic take on how pop culture gets appropriated and personalized in ways that artists never intended reminded me of a Marine friend's disclosure that she and her unit used to unwind and bond by watching any ultra-violent film with Marines in it, from Full Metal Jacket to Starship Troopers. They didn't give a damn if the message was antiwar as long as the film depicted combat as a phantasmagoric, hyper-masculine spectacle that portrayed Marines as the craziest, baddest hombres in the known universe. I always suspected there was truth in Francois Truffaut's over-quoted line about there being no such thing as an antiwar film, but I didn't know it was being illustrated daily in boot camp.

yes, giorgio: Danny Aiello deserves to be called a treasure. At 71, he's been around for decades, working steadily in films that run the gamut from trash to classic, always managing to slip a bit of humanity into scenes that either lacked it or could use a bit more. As Frank Giorgio, the patriarch of a family of struggling seafood-restaurant owners in Kevin Jordan's Brooklyn Lobster, Aiello gives his richest performance since 1990's Once Around. He's charming, tenderhearted, rude, hot-tempered and pigheaded, sometimes all at once. Refusing to accept that the restaurant's bank has gone under and defaulted on an expansion loan, Frank contrives multiple schemes to save the 65-year-old Sheepshead Bay landmark from extinction. But he's too prideful to just throw himself on the mercy of others and look for a coldly pragmatic escape route. He resists overtures to turn the place into a bed and breakfast or to permit a McDonald's franchise to take the place over because he just has to do things his way. He's one of those tough old businessmen who fancies himself a kind of visionary hero; he's so proud of his resilience that he'd rather suffer than entertain another person's solution.

Lobster isn't a work of towering cinematic ambition. While it's richer and more mature than Jordan's debut, the slight but sweet Smiling Fish & Goat on Fire, it's still poky, life-sized to a fault, and sometimes too kind to its family of tight-knit, eccentric characters. But there are compensations: a rare insight into the anxious world of the small businessman (Jordan based the story on his own family's experience in the restaurant business; warm, at times elegiac images (by David Tumblety) that showcase the neighborhood's salt-abraded beauty; and a raft of fine performances. (Jane Curtin shines as Frank's amiable but alienated wife, Maureen, whose executive-decision mentality suggests her husband might have improved their marriage by soliciting her counsel.) Even at their quirkiest, Jordan's characters feel real because they see through each other's delusions while trying to protect their own.

Nothing left to lose When wrongly convicted people are released from prison, columnists are likely to describe that person as having gotten his life back. Jessica Sanders' documentary After Innocence, about seven men sprung from prison after serving long sentences for crimes they didn't commit, refutes that cliché by pointing out that exonerated prisoners don't get back their old life, but a sorry facsimile of a new one. The ex-cons (who were sent up for rape, murder or some combination) were freed by the Innocence Project, a human-rights group founded by lawyers Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck to overturn false convictions through DNA testing. But the state stymies their attempts at exoneration, then refuses to amend or expunge their records. (One of Sanders' subjects, Vincent Moto, was wrongly convicted of rape and served more than years, and he remains unemployed because his record hasn't been expunged.) The employee-application question, "Have you ever been convicted of a felony?" doesn't allow for the answer, "Yes, but."