Letters from Iwo Jima
Clint Eastwood’s companion piece to the overwrought, undercooked “Flags of Our Fathers” is unquestionably better: an austere, brutal but somehow paradoxically gentle retelling of the battle for Iwo Jima from the perspective of the Japanese. Their mission was simple: to die for their country and, in doing so, stave off, however briefly, an American attack on the mainland. Say what you will (and I will) about Eastwood’s shortcomings as a director, but “Letters from Iwo Jima” makes an eloquent antiwar statement without giving voice to a single antiwar sentiment. It simply shows the awfulness of combat and, in a beautifully uninflected final shot, shows Iwo Jima as it appears today: the same stark landscape, empty and quiet, the horrors of what took place there muted by time.
The hero, Saigo (a wonderfully expressive Kazunari Ninomiya) would rather be home with his pregnant wife than fighting for a desolate scrap of volcanic rock, but who wouldn’t? Saigo doesn’t reject war, just the way his countrymen choose to fight it: They value “honorable death” over sound tactics; in other words, they’d rather storm a heavily fortified American position or blow themselves up than show weakness by retreating, even if, by doing so, they’d ultimately be able to kill more Americans and help hold the island longer. Saigo is allergic to this poisonous groupthink, as is the commanding general, Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), who nonetheless can’t undo centuries of military culture in the few weeks he spends preparing for and fighting the battle. His strategies are viewed as radical, and insubordination is common. The sad irony is that it matters little whether they follow Kuribayashi’s orders: The battle cannot be won, and everybody’s going to die, whether they take any Americans with them or not. In the movie’s most powerful, excruciating scene, Saibo watches a half-dozen of his comrades commit suicide by holding hand grenades to their chests. It doesn’t take a revolutionary to find no honor in the sudden transformation of vibrant young men into piles of limbs and entrails. “Letters from Iwo Jima” is stark and honest about the ways men respond to violence, the way it happens in an instant but reverberates forever. This is the resounding subject of Eastwood’s ouevre and the reason he sometimes touches greatness.
I don’t think he’s a great filmmaker, though. In fact, I’m mystified by the way so many critics — writers I respect — swoon over his work. The weird thing, particularly with “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters from Iwo Jima,” is that these reviewers level praise for the movies’ content, not their execution. “It is hard to think of another war movie that has gone so deeply, so sensitively, into the mind-set of the opposing side,” writes A.O. Scott in The New York Times. True, but novelty does not a great movie make.
There’s a vocal minority of Eastwood skeptics — my pal Michael Sragow of The Baltimore Sun is one of the loudest — and I’m much more comfortable in their camp, even when I find moments of grace in movies like “Letters” or “Mystic River” or even “Space Cowboys.” Cumulatively, “Letters from Iwo Jima” is not particularly powerful, in part because of Eastwood’s plodding, unimaginative style, in part because he’s so insistent about the most obvious points. The Americans soldiers and the Japanese soldiers were the same! To get this across, Eastwood has a gallant former Olympic equestrian, Lt. Col. Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), spare the life of a wounded soldier from Oklahoma and chat with him in English. Wouldn’t you know, after the boy dies, his adversaries find a letter he wrote to his mother, and Nishi reads it, and, gosh, it’s just like the letters their own mothers wrote to them! Compare this leaden sequence with the amount Terrence Malick was able to communicate in “The Thin Red Line” by showing the haunted faces of the Japanese soldiers and giving us tiny fragments of untranslated speech. We know the combatants on Guadalcanal share something that mere words could never express. Malick’s movie has the haunting quality Eastwood’s lacks because of its quirks and idiosyncracies and its adventurous use of film grammar. He can visualize unspeakable trauma while still exhilarating you with his artistry; this is beyond Eastwood. At best, “Letters from Iwo Jima” is an earnest piece of narrative journalism, not a poem of image and sound.
Speaking of sound, a note about the score: Eastwood composes the music for many of his movies, but for “Letters from Iwo Jima” he cedes that task to his son, Kyle, and Michael Stevens. Still, the strategy is the same: Bang out seven notes on a piano and repeat them ad nauseam. You know exactly when the musical cues will come in and exactly what they will sound like. It’s amateurish and maddening.