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.
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.
An irreverent and true account of a war that was antiseptically packaged a decade ago, 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
In the summer of 1990, Anthony Swofford, a 20-year-old third-generation enlistee, got sent to the deserts of Saudi Arabia to fight in the first Gulf War.
In 2003, his memories of that time in that place became the best-selling book Jarhead. Swofford wrote with the urgency, immediacy, honesty and humor that could only come from someone who had lived through the experience itself.
Swofford’s book spent nine weeks on The New York Times list of best sellers and was hailed in that same publication as “some kind of classic...a bracing memoir of the 1991 Persian Gulf War that will go down with the best books ever written about military life. A wild passage familiar to millions of young men but rarely so well revealed.”
The Times’ Michiko Kakutani noted that 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.”
Here was the unvarnished story straight from the mouth of the then 20-year-old kid, who told of a very different war from the one delivered in print or over the air. Here was the war from the ground up with images of burning oil wells shooting flames into the night sky, like comets that had fallen to the earth; rowdy, horny, dusty recruits, exhilarated and also terrified that at any moment, over the next hill, the war might begin; young men, suddenly dropped down in an unforgiving terrain, seeking diversion in a game of gas mask football, awaiting care packages of letters and porn, betting on staged scorpion fights and getting blind drunk to celebrate a Christmas away from their families. But out of this hellish situation ultimately arose unlikely friendships, fierce loyalty and do-or-die camaraderie -- a brotherhood of jarheads sworn to be always faithful…semper fi.
Red Wagon producers, Academy Award winner DOUGLAS WICK (Gladiator) and LUCY FISHER (upcoming Memoirs of a Geisha), immediately snapped up the rights to the book and commissioned screenwriter and ex-Marine WILLIAM BROYLES, JR. (Academy Award nominee for Apollo 13) to adapt Swofford’s memoir. Wick and Fisher also sought out the only director they felt could bring 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.
Mendes and the filmmaking team now collaborate on the next generation of war movies with 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.
JAKE GYLLENHAAL (upcoming Brokeback Mountain, The Day After Tomorrow) heads a brilliant ensemble cast and tackles the central role of Tony “Swoff” Swofford, who transforms from third-generation enlistee with half-formed visions of valor into a veteran, the only one who knows the true cost of war. PETER SARSGAARD (Kinsey, Shattered Glass) portrays Troy, Swoff’s partner in their elite unit of Marine scout/snipers, whose unflappable exterior conceals a stormy and mercurial nature. Oscar winner JAMIE FOXX (Ray, Collateral) plays Staff Sergeant Sykes, a lifer who commands the Surveillance and Target Acquisition (STA) Platoon with bulldog tenacity and an unwavering sense of nationalism. And Oscar winner CHRIS COOPER (Seabiscuit, Adaptation) portrays Lieutenant Colonel Kazinski, the commander who itches to unleash his killing machine on an overmatched enemy.
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.
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.
An irreverent and true account of a war that was antiseptically packaged a decade ago, 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
In the summer of 1990, Anthony Swofford, a 20-year-old third-generation enlistee, got sent to the deserts of Saudi Arabia to fight in the first Gulf War.
In 2003, his memories of that time in that place became the best-selling book Jarhead. Swofford wrote with the urgency, immediacy, honesty and humor that could only come from someone who had lived through the experience itself.
Swofford’s book spent nine weeks on The New York Times list of best sellers and was hailed in that same publication as “some kind of classic...a bracing memoir of the 1991 Persian Gulf War that will go down with the best books ever written about military life. A wild passage familiar to millions of young men but rarely so well revealed.”
The Times’ Michiko Kakutani noted that 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.”
Here was the unvarnished story straight from the mouth of the then 20-year-old kid, who told of a very different war from the one delivered in print or over the air. Here was the war from the ground up with images of burning oil wells shooting flames into the night sky, like comets that had fallen to the earth; rowdy, horny, dusty recruits, exhilarated and also terrified that at any moment, over the next hill, the war might begin; young men, suddenly dropped down in an unforgiving terrain, seeking diversion in a game of gas mask football, awaiting care packages of letters and porn, betting on staged scorpion fights and getting blind drunk to celebrate a Christmas away from their families. But out of this hellish situation ultimately arose unlikely friendships, fierce loyalty and do-or-die camaraderie -- a brotherhood of jarheads sworn to be always faithful…semper fi.
Red Wagon producers, Academy Award winner DOUGLAS WICK (Gladiator) and LUCY FISHER (upcoming Memoirs of a Geisha), immediately snapped up the rights to the book and commissioned screenwriter and ex-Marine WILLIAM BROYLES, JR. (Academy Award nominee for Apollo 13) to adapt Swofford’s memoir. Wick and Fisher also sought out the only director they felt could bring 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.
Mendes and the filmmaking team now collaborate on the next generation of war movies with 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.
JAKE GYLLENHAAL (upcoming Brokeback Mountain, The Day After Tomorrow) heads a brilliant ensemble cast and tackles the central role of Tony “Swoff” Swofford, who transforms from third-generation enlistee with half-formed visions of valor into a veteran, the only one who knows the true cost of war. PETER SARSGAARD (Kinsey, Shattered Glass) portrays Troy, Swoff’s partner in their elite unit of Marine scout/snipers, whose unflappable exterior conceals a stormy and mercurial nature. Oscar winner JAMIE FOXX (Ray, Collateral) plays Staff Sergeant Sykes, a lifer who commands the Surveillance and Target Acquisition (STA) Platoon with bulldog tenacity and an unwavering sense of nationalism. And Oscar winner CHRIS COOPER (Seabiscuit, Adaptation) portrays Lieutenant Colonel Kazinski, the commander who itches to unleash his killing machine on an overmatched enemy.
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