The Battles of Iwo Jima (directed by Clint Eastwood)

Written at the time of each film's release...

Photo Opportunism

Every year, like clockwork, Clint Eastwood makes a new film, and they become instant Oscar-bait. His last one was Million Dollar Baby (Hilary Swank won Best Actress-her second award, and Morgan Freeman won Best Supporting Actor) The year before that, Mystic River (winning Oscars for both Sean Penn and Tim Robbins). Eastwood shoots movies fast in a calm environment and leaves actors alone to do their job. And while most directors are making movies that jump and whirl just to prove they're doing their jobs, Eastwood sets up the shot, does a take or two and moves on. He's efficient, fast, and doesn't do any fancy cutting or post-production. 

In this way, he's very much like his mentor, Don Siegel. Siegel, too, wasn't afraid to throw a little controversy into the mix. Eastwood, a moderate Republican, has made movies recently that have condemned vigilante violence and lack of process (Mystic River), and turned a sympathetic eye to euthanasia (Million Dollar Baby). His recent work is not for the complacent, and Flags of Our Fathers is just as impatient with easy myths and lazy thinking. 

Saving Private Ryan can look at "The Greatest Generation" and sentimentalize them while acknowledging their sacrifice. Eastwood's film has the audacity to question blind patriotism and that sentimentality for the purposes of hucksterism. I'm sure when some neo-con blowhard actually sees this movie there's going to be as much controversy as there was around Million Dollar Baby among panicky right-to-lifers. As it is, I've already heard some CBS radio reporter in Iraq talking about the stationed soldiers "fighting for each other, rather than the cause," a line right out of the movie. How quickly this stuff travels...

Performances are top-notch from a bunch of actors never given their due--here, they shine. Guys like Robert Patrick and Neal McDonough, good actors (whom you know from other things) with odd faces that will never be leading men are revelations here. Gordon Clapp from "NYPD Blue" has one scene of such comic ferocity that you'll never see him the same way again. Ryan Phillipe, thought of as the less-talented of a Hollywood marriage (and ironically they split up right after this film came out), belies that here. Barry Pepper, from Ryan plays an "old vet" of 25, with the slightest veneer of gravitas and bravado. And Adam Beach, of Smoke Signals and the Tony Hillerman adaptations on PBS, has never displayed the potential of his performance here. He has one devastating scene that will get him nominated him for an Oscar and probably win it for him. The day I saw it, there wasn't a dry eye or a nose unsniffled after it. The story of Ira Hayes has been told before on screen and in song, but never so effectively as here.

Eastwood's next movie will be coming out quickly, as he shot it simultaneously with Flags.... It's also about Iwo Jima...from the Japanese perspective-Letters from Iwo Jima.

Eastwood is so good, he's scary.

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"See you on the other side!"

Somewhere in the planning stages of Flags of our Fathers, Clint Eastwood had a thought—What was on the minds of the Japanese soldiers who also fought at Iwo Jima? What of the commander who took such a different approach that the badly out-numbered troops could hold off the Americans as long as they did? So with the same crew, and a completely different cast he made another movie on the heels of the previous one that showed the situations and motivations of the defenders of Iwo Jima, based on writings contained in the book "Picture Letters from the Commander in Chief," written and illustrated by the Iwo Jima forces' commander Tadamichi Kurabayashi.

The results, Letters from Iwo Jima won the National Board of Review's "Best Picture." It's nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, and it incongrouosly won the Golden Globe for "Best Foreign Language Film" ("I guess I have to learn a foreign language now," said Eastwood laconically).

The film is 98% in Japanese with subtitles. Played by a terrific cast (assembled with Eastwood's knack for picking interesting faces) led by Ken Watanabe who after stealing The Last Samurai from Tom Cruise and going to waste in Batman Begins shows how thoroughly he can carry a film. He suggests no one less than Gregory Peck in his portrayal of the American-schooled Japanese tactician who knows the impossible task of defending the last stop to Japan and does so to the best of his ability.

Like that defense strategy Letters is an excavation. In a present day prologue the letters are unearthed by Japanese archaeologists. Flash back to war-time Iwo Jima and the soldiers are digging trenches for the initial beach attack strategy, then digging the elaborate system of tunnels that would prove to be the core of their final strategy. Letters follows several soldiers of various ranks in the days between Kurabayashi's arrival and the fall of the last man. The film wheels between the scenes of the island (filmed in a bleached monochrome broken only by the reds of the Japanese flag, the orange flame of explosions or blood), and of the men's past lives filmed in vivid technicolor. Technically, the film is a wonder. The effects by Digital Domain are photo-realistic, even amidst battles that are shot hand-held and face-close. The explosions singe.

Given the structure, the film is very much in lock-step with such traditonal war-films as, say, The Sands of Iwo Jima, where the personal lives of the individuals in the troop manifest themselves on the battle-field. But the war film it most resembles is the B-movie WWII drama Hell is for Heroes directed by Eastwood's mentor, Don Siegel. Like Letters, Hell... is a view from the trenches, where the conceits of heroism and honor--a constant hook in the dialog of the Eastwood film, everyone talks of honor...or mocks it ("Kashiwara died from honorable dysentery," says a grunt about the whereabouts of a comrade) have no place in the grime and destruction of war. The picking-apart of the hero myth has been the most frequent Eastwood subject. But not even Eastwood has gone as far as Siegel's film to suggest that the maladjusted make the best heroes.

It's interesting that Eastwood has made these two films now: Flags of Our Fathers with its focus on propaganda and the selling of a long war in the face of a populace's flagging enthusiasm, and Letters with its hollow talk of honor and pride in the worst of circumstances. At one point Kurabayashi bitterly reacts to a wire from his superiors, "The Imperial Headquarters is not only deceiving the people, but us as well." The similarities cut across time as well as the disputed borders of the combatants.

And there is a constant reminder of what unites the combatants rather than divides, managing to make the standard war-film trope of "we're more alike than different" that goes all the way back to All Quiet on the Western Front fresh and surprising (that lesson is never hammered home more than in films about the Civil War). The American-trained commanders drink Johnny Walker while grousing about the food, the conditions and their superiors. At times in the dim light the features of the participants blur--it could be any army. Eastwood and his screenwriters--the ubiquitous Paul Haggis and first-time scripter Iris Yamashita work overtime on the ironies, but one stands out. Watch the ivory-handled revolver that Karabayashi wears on his hip. "He must have taken it from an American," says one of the admiring soldiers. He did. But like so many of the twists in Letters from Iwo Jima, it's not in the way you'd think.

Letters from Iwo Jima is an extraordinary film, however, it feels 20 minutes too long (though I've struggled where one can cut it).
Of the two Eastwood Iwo Jima films, I prefer Flags of Our Fathers for being less traditional in its story-telling, and for taking up two subjects--propaganda and the selling of war and patriotism, and survivor's guilt, the practical and mysterious faces of war, that are rarely touched on despite the reels and reels of film that have been dedicated to the subject of battle.