By Bryan Hartzheim
Clint Eastwood and Paul Haggis's Letters from Iwo Jima is less the "Japanese perspective" as it is a bit of the same old American posturing.
When the coming attractions finally end and the first shots of a single bright orb blasting light down on a gray-speckled island appear, you might be thinking, good God, I can't believe I actually paid good yen ($18) (!) to watch another two and a half hour war movie in December. With the same exact battle, no less. Made by the same staff! At least Peter Jackson gave us a year before dropping another load of hobbits and trees on us. Clint Eastwood and Paul Haggis just HAD to get this one out before Christmas and Oscar season so as not to deprive us of their "vision." I really don't know why Eastwood felt the inclination to make this movie at all, other than to satisfy his own ego, because there was a VERY similar, if technically inferior, Japanese film that came out last year about young boys recruited to the hells of war and then subjected to the deprivations of their commanding officers. In Otoko tachi no Yamato ("The Men's Yamato"), the gallant Yamato Japs also literally go down with the ship.
As a standalone film, Letters from Iwo Jima is good enough technically, like its counterpart Flags of our Fathers. It is finely acted, with a fiery and intelligent performance by Ken Watanabe, and a forceful counterpart in Kazunari Ninomiya; its charred and claustrophobic locales are beautifully, if darkly, photographed; the narrative is expertly and efficiently directed by Eastwood. Its battle-scenes, though sporadic, are jolting both in their violence and intensity, with a mix of cinematic suspense, such as a brief moment where the young soldier Saigo must pick up a piss bucket he drops between rocks while Allied ships launch mortar shells around him.
The plot, likely well-reported by now, concentrates entirely on the Iwo Jima campaign from the eyes of those Japanese defeated on the island. At its best points, the film glimmers with what is effective in the best biopic war movies -- Frank Schaffner and George C. Scott's Patton for example -- that remind us how significantly individuals come to shape the outcomes of wars. Regardless of what dramatic licenses the film takes, Gen. Kuribayashi was the driving force behind the decision to make a series of tunnels and fortification out of Mt. Suribachi, and thus drag out the planned five-day siege into a 40-day grind and involving what historians today believe would have been thousands less American lives dead. The filmmakers get this point, showing various vigorous scenes of him arguing and forcing his strategy down the throats of his generals.
Of course, this is not a biopic war movie, so much as a continuation of Eastwood's thesis of debunking the old myths of Hollywood, as well as screenwriter Paul Haggis's newfound niche in finding the commonality between opposing cultures, whether they be social or racial. The theme of the movie hinges on a marriage of these two donnees, essentially arguing that the heroes and martyrs -- individuals fighting small battles for their families and freedom -- can be found in any war on any side, but every war will always bring out more losers. War is hell, and this donnee, while obvious, can be exemplary if handled with proper restraint and psychological insight.
Eastwood seems insistent on telling his own angle, and the film, though gory, is not an anti-war creed. The director is intent on giving us these stoic men forced into situations beyond their control, and to follow unequivocally their patriotic duty. The film is framed on a series of letters written by the deceased to their loved ones at home. Some may find the letters poetic and humanizing; I found them boring and hammy Hallmark commercial timeouts from the big game.
This is mere pigeon shit, though, on an elephant's back, for the script is the real letdown. The conceit is intriguing: the black din erupts outside at night, but in the even darker, blacker depths of the tunneled caves of Suribachi, there are luminous psychological deaths. However, the execution is no less bloated and overly-long as its Iwo Jima companion, though here there is little else besides the slow attrition of the Japanese defense while the soldiers talk of war and themselves. For those who thought the action was infrequent in Eastwood's first, it's even more sporadic here.
There is also no contrast to this flaw in pacing through nuanced or subtle thematic weight. The displays of humanism, when aptly demonstrated, become hammered home to indicate the obvious. To take one example, during the waning moments of the American siege, Kuribayashi fondly recollects a lavish military banquet during his sojourn in the States. Such a scene, which interrupts the mounting of carcasses, is a chilling and deeply sad one instantly identifiable to anyone remotely in tune with history and its constant, unceasing flow. We know that Kuribayashi has fought and killed Americans, and could notionally have killed even some of those in that banquet hall, and yet we also know Kuribayashi will die and those eating with him in that scene will be responsible for that, too. And yet we must listen to a banal conversation between a wife of an American officer -- Alabama accent drawn out for maximum annoying effect -- and Kuribayashi detailing what the generals would do if they met each other in war. The formal meal between Captains de Boeldieu and von Rauffenstein in La Grand Illusion this is not.
Principally, the taint of Haggis cannot be excised from the story. The desire to equate the actions of the Japanese and Allied soldiers in a stroke of universality is thematically undeveloped at best and intellectually rebarbative at worst. The story does indeed include both cowardly acts of Japanese officers alongside improvised heroism from grunts in the face of stolid authoritarianism, but in a weaker attempt at balance, the film also contrasts cases of Japanese charity and American brutality. POWs, when captured by one sympathetic Japanese general, are treated benignly, nursed, and ameliorated with pictures of equestrian jumping. On the other side of the spectrum, two Japanese soldiers who surrender are shot in cold blood by their captors, one while clutching a white piece of cloth meant to be a makeshift flag of submission.
Such scenes are left hanging, not followed by other context, and thus imply that no hands in wars are totally clean. Therefore, we are led to one conclusion: we are all the same human. The theme of why (or how?) we are alike, our "universality" so to speak, is interesting in an undergraduate Shakespeare class, but so what? Are we to be shocked at, say, Aaron the Moor's display of love for his son? It's precisely the fact that we are capable of love that it is so monstrous when we choose murderous hate. We certainly don't excuse Iago because he has wife, and we shouldn't be expected through a few slipshod scenes to conflate Japanese and American treatment -- and mistreatment -- of POWs despite the documented atrocities of the former.
It is more than a matter of the winners writing the histories. If an evil act is chosen from many choices, it should be the choice we are most concerned with. The Japanese were unparalleled in their cruelty to the captured for purposes not restricted to mere circumstances. That some of them wrote sensitive rhapsodies directed to their loved ones back home does not change that fact, and such showmanship asks us in fact to ignore it, or at the very least to place such horrific acts beyond the area of human culpability.
It takes a supremely diverted mind to focus so narrowly on abstract human similarities when the less perceptible differences are bluntly the cause of so very much human misery. As Tolstoy looks dispassionately at the variety of marriage -- every happy family is happy in the same way, every unhappy family, etc. etc. -- so too could Mr. Crash stop pleading for connection and understanding as ideals unfettered from us, real people, and the incomprehensible ways in which we treat and mistreat each other.
This all leads me to the conclusion that Letters from Iwo Jima is a passable if unrelentingly bleak war movie, and if viewed by a martian, would be a decent example of the inscrutability of human behavior in the face of certain death. But the film is largely too concerned with portraying the "other" as human, too interested in cheap, sympathetic devices like killing animals or humble-pie flashbacks, and finally, too self-important. Eastwood and Haggis will likely receive accolades from PC-friendly critics who will praise the "tolerance" of the filmmakers and declare that the Japanese have finally been "humanized." Does a country whose film history includes Kurosawa, Ichikawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse, Kinoshita, Kobayashi, Teshigahara, Imamura, Oshima, Itami, Miyazaki, Kitano, and Kore-eda look like it needs a Hollywood hand?
On a final note, we've all seen about two dozen World War II movies now, not to mention all the books, TV specials, first-person shooters, haikus. Flags of our Fathers was a superior and fresh war film in that it understood how little hasn't already been said about this war, while also not denying the sad inevitability of it. Instead, how about a relevant, genuinely modern conflict of civilizations such as the one we're now engaged in? An intelligent examination of our current war beyond the anti-American bromides of the Clooney Crowd is in due order. These films simply wear their liberalism on their jackets like a badge of honor, but the unquestioned and dogmatic adherence to tolerance and multiculturalism is just an easy exercise in societal self-congratulation.
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Published: Wednesday, December 20, 2006
