Review: Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima

Apropos of the recent holiday, Fiancee and I had a 2-night film festival for ourselves in which we viewed Clint Eastwood's duology treating the battle of Iwo Jima from two directions, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima. Making a war movie in this day and age is no easy thing: we've had so many good war movies, with the genre getting a particularly intense treatment in the past decade or so. So, how does Eastwood make not one but two fresh and interesting contributions to the genre? Although it's reverse order from the way we watched them, I'll take them in the order they were released.

In Flag of Our Fathers, Eastwood rises to the challenge by in many ways avoiding a typical war movie, because at its heart Flag is less about the battle than it is about the famous flag-raising and about remembering the battle. This isn't the film that's going to show us the beginning, middle, and end of the battle, because the battle itself is hardly central. 

The film is based on the book of the same name, and more than an exploration of the battle of Iwo Jima, it is an exploration of... well, a whole lot of things. Myth-making in a time of war, the idea of heroes, and the selling of the war. Remembrance of the war from a distance of years and the struggle for the next generation to understand the past generation. And, yes, the realities of war too. A consequence of this split attention is what I found to be one of the weaknesses of the film, its often-confusing narration. It seems to have multiple narrators and the shifting frames seemed distracting at times. Perhaps a second viewing would clarify matters, but I'm not sure. It can be enough of a challenge at times just to keep faces and names together with the supporting cast, and the narrative style doesn't do us any favors.

Still, it's quite an interesting film. At its center is the famous photograph of the marines raising the flag over Iwo Jima, a photograph which, we are told, won the war. It was misrepresented back home as a sort of "mission accomplished" documentation, which in fact the battle raged for weeks after that (and this was actually the second flag raised, not the first. One aim of the film is a demystification, a truth-telling. The truth, it is suggested, is ultimately enough. To get there, though, requires a deconstruction of myth-making. In hindsight, WWII is typically seen as the noble war of the Twentieth Century, a war of liberation against brutal tyrannies, the hot forge that created and purified "the greatest generation." One thing that Eastwood's film brings out is just how contentious the war was. The American public was not nearly as unified over the war as we like to remember it. The majority of the country didn't want to get into the war in the first place, and public opinion was only dragged there by the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Nonetheless, the war continued to be questioned at home. The film shows how the iconic photo and the three surviving soldiers from that photo were used to sell the war. The film seems to distrust this unsavory salesmanship, as two of the three characters do, but grudgingly accepts it as a necessary evil. If war bonds don't get sold, the war grinds to a halt. John "Doc" Bradley (Ryan Phillippe) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach) are profoundly uncomfortable with this process, of being called heroes. They're allowed to express their true feelings to a limited extent, to acknowledge their dead comrades as "real heroes," but they're still held uncomfortably to the spotlight. As Hayes says, "I was just trying not to get shot." Heroes, it's finally suggested, are created in order to make the folks back home feel better about the war. 

Also at play in the film are the racial dynamics of the time. One reviewer I saw leveled a charge of racism against the film in two directions: first, that it failed to depict the sacrifice of around 1000 black soldiers at Iwo Jima and second that its depiction of the Native American Hayes is a caricature that vacillates between two stereotypes, the drunken Indian and the noble savage. The most obvious retort to both of these claims is that the film is based on a work of history, and a narrow slice of history at that. So, on the one hand, the story of African-American soldiers wasn't the story that this film was trying to tell, and it's not fair to ask it to be that story. On the other hand, it's presumably a point of historical fact (inasmuch as anything in history is a "fact") that Hayes had a drinking problem. The thing is, this criticism rings false not only for these reasons, but because the story is far more engaged with questions of race than that reviewer gave it credit for. We don't just see that Hayes is an alcoholic: we see strong suggestions of the reasons that he turns to the bottle. First, as already mentioned, is his profound discomfort with the label of hero which he doesn't feel he's earned, but feels coerced into accepting for the greater good. On the other hand, he's confronted with racism throughout: when we see him early in the film, he's winning at cards, and this opens him to racial disparagement from disgruntled comrades; he's constantly called "chief" (which seems to make him uncomfortable) and references are made to the "squaw" he must have "back on the reservation." Stateside, he has to endure--and even smile at--the insensitive jokes that he "killed Japs with his tomahawk," while restaurants won't serve him because of his race. We see, in short, the pressures that are deforming his character, and we see them largely as pressures from what is still in many ways a racist society. So it's not as if Eastwood's film ducks racial issues.

All in all, Flags of Our Fathers is a thoughtful and thought-provoking look at war. Imperfect though it may be, it is well worth watching.

For Letters From Iwo Jima, Eastwood takes a different approach, as he tells an American audience the story from the Japanese perspective. Unlike the other film, we get a more traditional narrative, taking us from before the battle to its bitter end. We are brought to empathize with the other side in this film. We see a brilliant general, Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) who is afflicted by hidebound officers whose defiance costs the Japanese their best chance at victory at Iwo Jima. We see a hapless young man, Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya) who just wants to get home to his wife and his simple life. We see the common soldiers and we see that they're not so different from the common soldiers from our own country.

Which is not to say that Eastwood's film portrays the Japanese as Americans with a different skin color. In many ways, they are certainly culturally different--differences which are at times respected and at times shown as fatal flaws in the national character. For instance, the extreme idea of honor causes many of the soldiers to commit suicide rather than "cowardly" retreating--as they were ordered to do--in order to live to fight another day. Still, at heart, the film seems to say, people are people. The film throughout is framed by soldiers' letters. Mostly these are letter to those at home, but at one point we read a letter written to an American soldier by his Mom. The Japanese soldiers who hear it read find a profound identification with their enemy. At root, we share a common humanity: we all want to live, to return home to our families. Wars, and our ideas about wars, sometimes get in the way of that.

The film has a more straight-forward quality to it than Flags of Our Fathers, and if it is not, finally, so analytical of broader ideas as Eastwood's other Iwo Jima film, it is certainly more directly compelling in its humanity as it offers the other side of the story. 

tags: clint eastwood  letters from iwo jima  flags of our fathers  wwii  selling a war  

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