Jarhead Synopsis
Jake Gyllenhaal (The Day After Tomorrow, Moonlight Mile), Jamie Foxx (Ray, Collateral) and Peter Sarsgaard (Kinsey, Boys Don't Cry) 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. Jarhead is directed by Academy Award® winner Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition) and the producers are Oscar® winner Doug Wick (Gladiator) and Lucy Fisher (upcoming Memoirs of a Geisha), partners in Red Wagon Entertainment. The screenplay is by William Broyles, Jr. (Cast Away, Apollo 13). Jarhead (the self-imposed moniker of the Marines) follows "Swoff" (Gyllenhaal), a third-generation enlistee, from a sobering stint in boot camp to active duty, sporting a sniper's rifle and a hundred-pound ruck on his back through Middle East deserts with no cover from intolerable heat or from Iraqi soldiers, always potentially just over the next horizon. Swoff and his fellow Marines sustain themselves with sardonic humanity and wicked comedy on blazing desert fields in a country they don't understand against an enemy they can't see for a cause they don't fully fathom. Jarhead is laced with dark wit, honest inquisition and episodes that are at once surreal and poignant, tragic and absurd.“Like most good and great Marines, I hated the Corps. I hated being a Marine because more than all of the things in the world I wanted to be -- smart, famous, sexy, oversexed, drunk, f***ed, high, alone, famous, smart, known, understood, loved, forgiven, oversexed, drunk, high, smart, sexy -- more than all of these, I was a Marine. A jarhead.” -- Anthony Swofford, Jarhead Jarhead . Swofford wrote with the urgency, immediacy, honesty and humor that could only come from someone who had lived through the experience itself. Jarhead was “an irreverent but meditative voice that captures both the juiced-up machismo of jarhead culture and the existential loneliness of combat. He makes us understand the exacting and deadly art practiced by a sniper...the rhythm of boredom and terror of preparing for an enemy attack and the terrible physical and psychological costs of combat and the emotional bonds shared by the soldiers.” Jarhead to the motion picture screen -- Academy Award-winning director SAM MENDES, who had previously probed beneath the surface calm of suburbia in American Beauty and examined the intersection of family ties and criminal violence in Road to Perdition. Jarhead , an unforgettable view of war as seen through the eyes of one Marine -- as if J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield had been deployed to the Gulf.
