Tales From the Other Side

Clint Eastwood flips the script on Iwo Jima.

by Michael Atkinson

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Published: Jan 10, 2007

However you come at it, the second half of Clint Eastwood's Iwo Jima diptych is more than a war movie. With its brother film, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters From Iwo Jima comprises a statement about war movies, and war, and propaganda, and the military, and the modern state's uses for war. How substantial and affecting this blitz of big ideas may seem — the movie itself is an earnest, rampaging, state-of-the-art carnage-fest — depends to some degree on how you consume them. Individually, the films are ambitious but troubled with cliches and melodramatic irony; together, they can leave a serious bruise. I dare anyone to watch them back-to-back, all four-and-a-half hours, and not be scalded by the experience and by the unwhitewashed history they scrupulously evoke.

The Rashomon effect of the combined diptych does not address issues of, as the Wiki-commissars like to say, disambiguation. There's little or nothing historically puzzling or disputable about the battle of Iwo Jima, for us or for the Japanese. Instead, Eastwood's intentions are simple and fundamental: Depoliticize the conflict, make it Allies/Axis-neutral, so that even World War II, that least ambiguous of U.S. involvements, becomes a pointless, insane, widow-making nightmare for all concerned. Men become immoral beasts (even Americans, the Greatest Generation!), dreams of imperial honor and glory wither absurdly on the battlefield, death is death is death.

In Letters, of course, we experience the battle from the Japanese point of view, from the first encampments on the volcanic beach, to the extraordinary labor of tunnel-building, to the Americans' first air raid, the Marines' landing and the days of tortured battle. The sense of it is convincingly Japanese, aided by subtitles; even the acting is typically emphatic, post-Kabuki and prone to brooding explosions, in the way Toshirô Mifune made familiar in the postwar years. The narrative burden, amid a throng of reluctant conscripts and sadistic officers, is carried by two lowly grunts (Kazunari Ninomiya and Ryo Kase), who hope to survive in a war they don't understand, and despite the emperor's mandate of honorable death. Contrasting them in the underground tangle of confusion and bloodshed are a humane, Americanized aristocrat-Olympian lieutenant (Tsuyoshi Ihara), and the very real General Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), under whose cultured, wizened leadership the Japanese troops hunkered down against overwhelming forces and awaited their deaths.

Shot wholly in sepia, Eastwood's film is an expert re-creation of hardcore combat that carefully alternates hand-held, flesh-shredding chaos with awesome, distanced visions of explosive ruin — just enough to give us a taste of the fire and pain, but never presuming to duplicate the experience. In fact, Eastwood strives toward realism without rubbing our noses in gore. The movie's most remarkable scene, in which the hopeless soldiers begin performing hara-kiri with hand grenades in a dank bunker, is appalling and tactful in equal measure, unceremoniously affording us only a glimpse, without cutting away, of the human hamburger as it hits the cave floor over and over again. (In Flags of Our Fathers, this grisly moment was sensed by the Americans as only a series of muffled ka-booms.)

Eastwood's great tastefulness also serves to make the film feel more prosaic and safer than it should, and forces it to rely on the full battery of war movie stock items: photos of loved ones, letters home, expository flashbacks, overscripted camaraderie, nostalgia about decent food, forced confrontations between ranks, etc. The mode becomes almost anachronistic, a hearkening back to the Korean War-era anti-war epics of Samuel Fuller, Robert Aldrich and Anthony Mann, full of ironic salvations and pointless sacrifice, before the truly demoralizing dark age of Vietnam took hold.

It may seem odd for Eastwood to have made this film, given the ghost of Heartbreak Ridge still haunting his resume, but for years now he has been Hollywood's most mature and reasonable advocate for ambivalence, particularly in terms of the impact and costs of violence. That Japanese filmmakers have already covered this sickening territory very well, with hundreds of ghastly, self-excoriating war sagas beginning, more or less, with 1956's The Burmese Harp, may be beside the point at hand. That's because it's probably best to see Letters From Iwo Jima as a contemporary political act, a courageous affront to a blithely warmongering populace — the vast majority of which still support illegal Third World carnage as long as it's handled well and we are sure to win. The blood of the Iraq war runs through the movie's veins. Only by expressing an Axis perspective in a WWII scenario could Eastwood empathize with dumbfounded infantrymen sent to their graves by a homicidal imperialist government embattling an extravagantly demonized enemy. The enemy is, finally, us.

(m_atkinson@citypaper.net)

Letters from Iwo Jima

Directed by Clint EastwoodA Warner Bros. releaseOpens Friday at Ritz Five

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