Week Of December 11, 2006 - Mon / Wed / Fri

December 11, 2006

What makes Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima special is that it never really offers anything like hope… but it never allows its heroes to lose their humanity.

Of course, its heroes are our Far Eastern enemies in World War II, specifically the men on Iwo Jima who were overtaken in 1945. But Eastwood has put the war into the rear view, as he explores what interests him… the lives of men who don't have the freedom to chose otherwise. It is this theme that does connect Letters From Iwo Jima to the earlier release Flags of Our Fathers. But the newer film also makes it extremely clear how Flags failed in a similar goal.

As opposite numbers, Flags seems to want to be about the desperate effort to maintain your humanity in the face of survival, while Letters seems to be about the desperate effort to maintain your humanity in the face of imminent death. But Flags never seems to be able to answer the pressing question of why survival is so hard. It got caught up in some father/son thing that never turned into magic and plays like it is from some other planet than Letters. It doesn't seem to me that the two films had to be direct reflections of one another, but Flags doesn't seem willing to go in for the kill, as it were.

In thinking of the opposite reflection of Flags in Letters, I think of the Soldier Field sequence in Flags. The gaudiness of that display was meant, I think, to express something embarrassing about our culture… our need to show off and overdo and to abandon our dignity. But the complexity of the story made that sequence more about the War Bond drive and the personal characteristics of the young men involved and not so much about us as Americans… or, in the bigger picture, us as humans who are so willing to engage in warfare.

At the center of Letters From Iwo Jima are two characters, drawn in classic Hollywood fashion. One is General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, played by Ken Watanabe, who fights his own high-ranking subordinates to build the tunnels on the island in a bid to extend the fight longer than reasonably likely if fought in the conventional way. The other is Saigo, played by Kazunari Ninomiya, a baker-turned-soldier who is touched by and then inspired by Kuribayashi, but never loses the simple humanity at his core. Both men deserve all the awards they can handle.

The General, who is wiser and more knowledgeable than all others, considers, in letters home, the nature of the fight, the beauty of animals, etc. He is a man who has spent time in America quite happily. One of the best sequences in the film is when he flashes back to a time when he was with American friends and is asked out where is loyalty would be in a time of war. He is a Gregory Peck of a man, preferring to walk the island to get a feel for it than to take a jeep. When the moments come to be forceful, you can see the General in this man. But when he is allowed his solitude, he is as calm as a long-tenured history professor.

Saigo is the guy who gets in trouble for shooting off his mouth. And when the "shit pot" needs to be emptied, you know that he will be the one called upon. But he never falls into wacky caricature. This is a man who will evolve through the three acts of the film, our eyes and heart in the middle of a dangerous slice of hell. I don't know whether he was actually named for real life "the last samurai," who bucked the feudal system in the name of samurai honor or if that's just a popular name for boys of that era. But it seems too well fitting to be a coincidence.

We're 45 minutes into the film before the first American plane strafes the island, laying down two barreled machine gun fire. Five minutes later, we see the American fleet that is so clearly going to overwhelm the island. The next hour and a half will offer some relief in relevant flashbacks, but mostly, we are on the long, hard, slog to death, in which honor is a powerful and defining issue.

In the process, Eastwood and his team craft what Flags of Our Fathers was so desperately missing… and intimate look at the process of fighting and the details of the odd moments. What do you do when the machine gun jams and enemies are rushing towards you? Well you don't just die, as though you were in a Schwarzenegger film. You find another weapon. You find another possibility.

Though you might not be able to place action within yards of where it is happening on the film's visually mapped island, Eastwood also does an excellent job here of establishing conceptual space. There is a group on the main mountain of the island, Mount Suribachi, and another across a wide open expanse of about a half mile. Crossing this area, with American machine guns and flares for better viewing seems nearly impossible. But we understand the idea of the effort as characters make the run.

Sound is also critical, as your sense of what is going on outside of the cave is so clearly defined by what the men in the caves are hearing.

Is suicide a death of honor or a coward's way out or a bit of both? Does an officer who leads his soldiers to suicide worthy of his men's respectful following? What happens to your mind as you watch the suicides of others? In classic Eastwood fashion, he answers that question without words. The moments of watching a man with a grenade in his hand, considering what action to take are horrible and beautiful and profound.

One remarkable thing about the film is that Eastwood never loses his patience with these characters, even when the audience may start to. In an interesting way, he is even more patient than Terrence Malick, who drives some people crazy with his wind through the trees and disembodied poetry. Eastwood just lets the quiet have its way with you. And as the quiet creeps into your mind, the soldiers are feeling it creep away with their own. Some order remains, but as deaths seems closer and closer, characters start considering their own true preferences for their demise. As time passes, death becomes more and more a form of expression.

And it is then, in the third act, that for meLetters From Iwo Jima truly becomes about something greater than that battle in that place at that time. It becomes low-key Shakespeare, as people expose their true selves. And the structural gimmicks that have been planted like so many landmines feel almost subtle as they explode with emotion.

When in one flashback sequence late in the film the Japanese hierarchy acts with cruelty back on the mainland, it's interesting that it no longer seems to be "the Japanese hierarchy," and not even the Military, but specific individuals who are troublingly in those positions of authority. The fear of a man who kicks another man when he is down… the horror for both the attacked and the attacker… it says so much.

Letters From Iwo Jima is not going to be everybody's cup of tea. Many will find it to be a critics darling, languid and lacking in humor. But for me, it was a powerful experience, all the more powerful on a second and third viewing. Unlike other current films that try to claim some connection to the Iraq War, this film feels connected to the men on the ground who are fighting in a futile effort.

For Eastwood, this film is another significant step, as he puts away the broken, often abusive or murderous anti-hero and really makes a film about the other men who have, in Eastwood's films, been under the control of the bigger-than-life men. If this were a version of Unforgiven, it would be about all the men who rode with William Munny and who worked for Sherriff Little Bill Daggett, much more akin to Bird than Million Dollar Baby.

Beautiful.

E Me.

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