Late last year we saw Flags of Our Fathers, Clint Eastwood’s film about the World War II battle of Iwo Jima and its aftermath — particularly the American propaganda effort that centred on, and in doing so traduced, the young soldiers who erected a flag on the island after the battle. Flags of Our Fathers was a thoughtful investigation of the ambiguous nature of heroism.
It was while making Flags of Our Fathers that Eastwood reportedly began to wonder about the other side of the battle, and to ask what the Japanese defenders of the island went through. After all, about 20Â 000 of them defended Iwo Jima from the numerically and militarily superior American assault, and fewer than 1Â 000 survived. Eastwood’s impulse was sound, because Flags of Our Fathers, like so many war movies, reduces the enemy to empty ciphers; any filmmaker worth his salt was going to have questions about filling that gap.
And so we have Letters from Iwo Jima, Eastwood’s companion piece to Flags of Our Fathers. Together they make up more than four hours’ worth of movie time — an extraordinarily thorough cinematic examination of a single battle. The earlier movie took the battle as a starting point and then, homing in on a handful of characters, moved forward in time, through the often laughable propaganda effort, and then jumped years ahead to see what happened to those real-life characters. Letters from Iwo Jima focuses more closely on the battle itself, which is appropriate enough in that almost all its protagonists died there.
As the title indicates, the movie makes use of the letters written home by the Japanese soldiers stationed on Iwo Jima, letters discovered decades later and filled with poignance. Two characters emerge as central, and they are at opposite ends of the chain of command: a lowly private first seen digging a trench and grumbling about the war, and the general sent to conduct the defence against pretty impossible odds.
The first is the disgruntled Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a baker in civilian life, whose conscription is shown in a flashback that contains multiple ironies: he is congratulated for being given the honour of dying for his country; his young, pregnant wife, obviously, feels otherwise. The second is Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), who is up against the traditionalist Japanese military ethos, in which, for instance, it is more honourable to kill yourself after a defeat than it is even to carry on fighting.
Eastwood and scriptwriter Iris Yashamita make much of this, working up to a sort of tragic irony. They highlight the way the Japanese soldiers had it drummed into them that their enemy was utterly barbaric — just as the Americans had been led to believe their enemy was subhuman. In this, Letters from Iwo Jima is a mirror of Flags of Our Fathers, and both demonstrate a key concern with the way war propaganda deliberately dehumanises the enemy even as war itself threatens to dehumanise the fighter.
At the same time (various commentators have noted), Eastwood and Yamashita rather soft-pedal other Japanese dirty tricks, such as the booby-trapping of corpses. Not to say the Japanese were any more savage than the Americans, but if Eastwood’s point is that war is hell and there aren’t really any non-dirty tricks, why should he shy away from such things? Then again, one movie can’t cover everything, and he does show how Japanese commanders ordered their soldiers to target American medics.
Also, it seems a drawback that Eastwood does not really give a sense of how many Japanese were on the island. From what we see in the film, you could be forgiven for imagining there were only about 30 defenders there. Perhaps he couldn’t afford the computer-generated imagery.
Both Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima are shot (by Tom Stern) in the almost-black-and-white style that Steven Spielberg pioneered in Saving Private Ryan, though they are, if anything, even more leached of colour. The technique suggests the historical nature of the story, adds to its sombreness, and means that the explosions become a kind of visual shock.
In the light of these two films, it looks as though Eastwood’s career as a director has been a long tussle with the notion of heroism, from the avenging-gunman motif he translated from Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns into those he directed himself, up to the revisionism of his Oscar-winning Unforgiven and this pair of movies. If, in between, he has resorted to conventional right-wing boilerplate (Heartbreak Ridge, The Rookie, and so on), he is at least an interestingly ambivalent and self-questioning filmmaker, and the Iwo Jima diptych offers his deepest meditation yet on the contradictions of heroism.