Japanese soldiers realise one world war too late that Dulce et decorum est means nothingClint Eastwood spent slightly more than 2 years to research, produce, and then shoot 2 war films, back to back. It's a little like running 2 marathons back to back, and then we remember that Eastwood is about 76 years old. So it's an achievement that the director has not only turned out two gorgeous-looking war movies, but also two war movies that manage to say something entirely new about war in the history of the genre. It's also an achievement that the films, while taking an unflinching look at the same battle from both sides, manage to avoid preaching the same message
Flags of Our Fathers has a unique perspective on war, that it is sometimes nothing more than a propaganda campaign with stage-managed photo ops and endless victory parades to sell war bonds. Superficially, one might accuse Wag The Dog of saying the same things, except with Eastwood's visual and realistic camera style, one is less likely to laugh and more likely to gag at the fact that this was a real war, with more than real battles and soldiers dying, getting maimed, or damaged spiritually. With Letters from Iwo Jima, the director repeats the feat: it's not just an account of a war from the side of the losers, but an account of a war that not just reverses decades of portraying the enemies soldiers as depraved monsters, but merely young men that could very well be our own. Where the American war movie tends to paint its soldiers as badly equipped by honest sons who won the war with their individual honesty and innate goodness, Letters from Iwo Jima is the war movie that has its protagonist soldiers lose the battle because they were worse equipped than the other side, and who lost the war despite their individual honesty and innate goodness.
In other words, expect Letters from Iwo Jima to completely overturn expectations of how war films have been made for decades as propaganda, feel-good victory movies, expect a very depressing time in the cinema, and yes, expect to be wowed off your feet because Letters manages to be better than its companion piece. Clint Eastwood has a better eye for the artistic and dramatic potential when telling the Battle of Iwo Jiima through Japanese eyes, because here there is only one story to tell: how men prepare for their inevitable deaths, and fight a war they know they will never survive. Relentlessly, over the course of over a very fatalistic 2 hours, Eastwood begs his audience to ponder with him: how do soldiers doomed to die behave? What do they tell themselves to justify why they're stuck in a no-win situation? And what do they do once they start losing a battle they know they mustn't allow themselves to lose, yet know that there is no other outcome for them?
With such concerns, Letters could very well end up a mawkish film, but Eastwood finds a good answer that acts as a magnifying glass and fulcrum for his many questions. The doomed men of Iwo Jima write letters that will never reach their receipients, not least because of the depletion of most military resources. Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) illustrates his letters to his young son about how he spent a decade in America before the beginnings of escalations between the two countries. Saigo, a baker press-ganged into the defense of Japan by a desperate Japanese army, writes home to his wife on the war preparations on the island. Former Olympic winner Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara, the Japanese pugilist from Jet Li's Fearless) brings embargoed news to the General about the true state of the Japanese war machine: expect no reinforcements or armaments as the Japanese combined fleet was sunk a month earlier. Even the American soldier they capture has a letter from home, a motherly reply that stands in for what every soldier had wanted to hear from their own families when they wrote their letters.
And all this happens during the course of the film, while the Japanese change defense strategies, get bombed by American fighters, ambush the American soldiers, painfully lose inch by inch of the island while crawling or hiding in their huge subterranean complex, argue amongst themselves about whether it's nobler to regroup after a losing battle or just to die in a blaze of self-administered glory - and go mad or attain enlightenment in the process. For a film about losers and "historical villains", Clint Eastwood is smart enough not to turn this movie into an apologist reel or a revisionist drama extolling the nobility of the fallen Japanese hero-soldiers in place of the fallen American hero-soldiers. in this movie, the men who act with the noblest of intentions and the most honourable passions are the ones whom I suspect the audience will have the least sympathy for. Instead of a trite "everyone's human" or "there are no good sides in a war because everyone suffers and dies", the message of Eastwood and his film is perhaps to show that because everyone is human, no country, military or political establishment should be allowed to provoke, enter or engage in a war without strong justifications - and also that patriotism, defense of the motherland (or fatherland), protecting the future generations - all good-sounding soundbites, are no excuse to wage a war.
I am told that the movie is mostly historically accurate, with some WW2-era weapons actually featured. As there weren't many Japanese survivors from the Battle of Iwo Jima, some events accounted in the movie are a result of well-informed and scholarly conjecture, but conjecture nonetheless. Even so, I'm actually impressed that Clint Eastwood has managed to bring out the subtlety of the state of the Empire of Japan, with the notorious jockeying, rivalry, and mutual sabotage between the Army and Navy making it to screen for the first time, I believe, in western cinema. There is no doubt that this is an important film - the All Quiet on the Western Front for the Pacific Theatre in WW2, and so far the only WW2 film by non-Japanese that doesn't make the Japanese army out as monsters or pure evil wearing a human form.
In Letters from Iwo Jima, Eastwood's remarkable eye for cinematic detail merges well with his single-minded and focussed storytelling, and I find the film a more superior product than Flags of Our Fathers. There are no extraneous scenes, no strained jumping in between locations separated by vast distances, mood, theme, and time. Aside from a few flashbacks that I felt were too "obvious", Letters is a well-made and compact war film that I hope will inspire filmmakers to tell more different types of war stories.
First published at incinemas on 22 February 2007
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