Letters from Iwo Jima
Screenplay by Iris Yamashita; story by Iris Yamashita & Paul Haggis
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Warner Bros./Paramount
2006
Rating:


The cinematic bookends of "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters from Iwo Jima" should have been the towering accomplishments of 2006 and film's defining monuments to World War II. Instead the films are the year's biggest disappointments.

"Flags" failed because it employed a convoluted structure and didactic rhetoric to convey themes of the realities of war and heroism, the abuse of that heroism in the service of government-sponsored propaganda and the way soldiers are tossed aside by that government when they're no longer needed. The more narratively straightforward "Letters," told from the Japanese perspective, disappoints because it sentimentalizes an enemy that's meant to be humanized.

"Letters" reflects the Battle of Iwo Jima from the perspective of Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) and baker-turned-soldier Saigo (Japanese pop star Kazunari Ninomiya). Kuribayashi is a kindly leader who disapproves of officers beating the soldiers — on three occasions he prevents Saigo from being hit or killed by his superiors — and, having spent five years in the United States, has a fondness for American culture. Kuribayashi's character is supposed to convey the soldier's conundrum when doing what one is commanded to do goes against what one personally believes. Saigo's conflict is even more basic: a conscripted soldier, Saigo would rather turnover the worthless island to the Americans so he can go home to the wife he was forced to leave and the child he has never met. The audience is complexly asked to empathize with these two sympathetic characters, members of an opposing force heretofore reduced to the "term" enemy, even though hoping for their survival means rooting against the Americans and ignoring history.

Then again, "Letters" is quite adept at historical ignorance itself. In picking two soldiers who don't really want to fight, the film chooses to ignore the merciless nature of the Japanese combatant. The Japanese were turned into caricatures in cartoons, comics and the early war films, and so the instinct to bring humanity to these brave men is understandable. Yet it flies in the face of history and, especially to director Clint Eastwood's discredit, it contradicts "Flags": the searing memory John Bradley (Ryan Phillippe) takes away from the island is discovering the body of his friend Iggy (Jamie Bell). "Flags" undermined the power of the moment by refusing to show what happened to Iggy, but in the book the film was based on Bradley says, "The Japanese had pulled him underground and tortured him. His fingernails... his tongue... It was terrible. I've tried hard to forget all this...." Another solider says Iggy's arms were broken and they "just hung there like arms on a broken doll. He had been bayoneted repeatedly. The back of his head had been smashed in." "Letters" barely mentions the warning in "Flags" that the Japanese targeted the medic soldiers and that bodies might be booby-trapped.

To its shame "Flags" is equally incapable of displaying American atrocities. In "Flags" Eastwood backs away from showing the savagery of using flamethrowers, the weapon that some say decided the battle for the Americans. But even Bradley was allowed to be shown viciously stabbing a Japanese soldier to death where here Saigo is too timid to fight.

Eastwood undercuts the soldier's moral dilemma by refusing to portray characters who actually contain that conflict. In a typically condescending representation of the Japanese, the characters are stoic and noble. They even treat a captured American soldier with morphine while the Americans kill two Japanese prisoners of war merely because they're bored. The best Vietnam War films are able to convey how good men can turn into monsters during times of war. "Letters" doesn't do that.

"Letters" is more skillfully made from a filmmaking stance than "Flags", but the actual storytelling remains problematic. Like "Flags", "Letters" is also framed with a present-set investigation into the history of the battle and the narrative is broken up by facile flashbacks of Kuribayashi at an American dinner party. The lazy structure of "Letters" is also what has long been the cinematic shorthand for humanizing the enemy: letters. Eastwood and screenwriter Iris Yamashita (Paul Haggis helped come up with the story) may be trying to subvert that clichι, but just as Eastwood never quite succeeded in challenging the Norman Rockwell vision of World War II in "Flags", the letters home format just comes across as uninspired.

Most of the acclaim visited upon "Letters" is in Eastwood's supposedly radical decision to take the enemy perspective of an American war, especially during a time of war. Such acclaim willfully ignores the existence of, among others, 1930 Oscar winner "All Quiet on the Western Front" (a film about German soldiers fighting in World War I that was banned during World War II), "Tora! Tora! Tora!" (which related Pearl Harbor through the eyes of the Americans and Japanese in a single film and was co-directed by a Japanese filmmaker) and "Beach Red" (the story of Americans invading a Pacific island, told from American and Japanese perspectives and released during the Vietnam War). "Letters" considerably pales in comparison to these films, breaking no new ground just as it fails to properly express the Japanese experience.

Posted Friday, January 19, 2007

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/letters.from.iwo.jima