LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA (Clint Eastwood, 2006)

A soporific mess, Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers (2006) does not prepare one for the high quality of its purported companion-piece, Letters from Iwo Jima, Eastwood’s more incisive study, this time of the Japanese side of World War II, as a group of combatants, armored in national pride and fueled by their lost cause, face certain oblivion. Victors pay a price for war, media attention, government manipulation and so forth in Flags, while the narrower focus of the horrible nature of war in Letters allows Eastwood to make a much more trenchant and gripping film. He is also, with Letters, working from a far more intelligent, disciplined and probing script, and the film, in its intricately edited form juggling present tense and flashbacks, is as nimble as Flags is coarse and lumbering as it goes about juxtaposing its own different time frames and various locations. The screenplay for Letters is by Iris Yamashita, from a story by the scenarist and Eastwood stalwart Paul Haggis that is drawn from the nonfictional Picture Letters from Commander in Chief by Tadamichi Kuribayashi, and edited by Tsuyoko Yoshido. Beautifully played by Ken Watanabe, Lt. General Kuribayashi is one of the main characters in the film.
     The other main character is Saigo, a conscripted soldier, who occupies the center of the film’s concern for ordinary people whose lives are tragically discombobulated by war.
     This isn’t a perfect film. Its repetitious length, while not an end in itself (Eastwood hopes to convey the monotonous grind of war and of the anxieties of those facing extinction at enemy hands in their own land, which the enemy has invaded), nonetheless wears the viewer down. While indebted to the source material, the formal narrative device of the Japanese men’s letters often seems corny and trite, and Eastwood’s attitude is alarmingly sentimental at times. Eastwood’s film, although his very best, is vastly inferior to a number of Japanese films about the war, such as Kon Ichikawa’s The Burmese Harp (1956) and Fires on the Plain (1959).
     A yardstick of its merit, however, is how vastly superior the film is to Saving Private Ryan (1998), whose director, Steven Spielberg, is one of the executive producers of Eastwood’s film. Undoubtedly, this professional alliance between liberal Spielberg and right-winger Eastwood reflects how the U.S.’s current involvement in Iraq has brought together in heartfelt protest Americans of various political stripes.
     There are two aspects of the film that make it extraordinarily valuable. One is the rare attempt by a U.S. filmmaker (or a U.S. anything-else) to imagine war in which the U.S. participated from the vantage of those the U.S. warred against. This represents an imaginative leap of sympathy. (The film is almost entirely in English-subtitled Japanese.) The film’s other outstanding aspect is its visual form, for which Tom Stern, Eastwood’s cinematographer, is the chief architect. Whether in one of the voluminous caves at Iwo Jima that the Japanese had constructed or on the battlefield, the film’s color so approaches black and white—really, especially charcoal—that this metaphoric drainage of life and hope becomes the film’s most expressive feature.
     Whatever one thinks of Eastwood or of Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima is not to be missed.