Letters from Iwo Jima
Clint Eastwood's companion piece to Flags of Our Fathers has the unenviable job of humanizing the enemy, which is easier said than done when looking back on more than 60 years of World War II movies that tried to convince us otherwise. But sprinkled among those films which propped up our boys while subtly, if not implicitly, denigrating the Germans and Japanese were films that made a conscious effort to suggest that even if their leadership's ethics were lacking or downright despicable, most of the rank and file were people just like us.
They were mechanics, shop owners, schoolteachers, carpenters, you name it—young men with mothers and wives and families who loved them and prayed for their safety just like ours did. It's a difficult thing to put a likeable face on people whose injury or death was the objective of many of the fathers and grandfathers of your audience, and that's the charge of screenwriters Iris Yamashita and Paul Haggis, who use a bag of buried letters unearthed from a cave on Iwo Jima—as well as the prolific writing of General Tadamichi Kuribayashi—to string together a partly historical, partly fictional recreation of the Battle of Iwo Jima from the perspective of the Japanese who fought there.
General Kuribayashi knew his 20,000 men, with no air or naval support, had no chance of defeating the 100,000-strong American invasion force, so he devised a defense around a system of caves and tunnels intended to help his men hold out as long as possible while inflicting maximum damage on the enemy. That's exactly what happened: The battle stretched out for more than a month before almost every Japanese soldier was killed and the Americans suffered casualties in excess of 20,000.
But it's the human angle that's most important to any story, and the mixing of real events and people with fictitious storylines to fill in the missing pieces of what happened to the Japanese forces on Iwo Jima provides
Letters from Iwo Jima with its heart and soul. Kuribayashi actually spent two years in the late 1920s as a deputy military attaché in Washington, D.C., and traveled the U.S. extensively in his free time. His knowledge of and respect for the U.S. and its military capabilities made him an opponent of war with America, but it never impeded his sense of duty and loyalty to his homeland once it happened a decade later.
Another officer on Iwo Jima who knew America well was Lieutenant Colonel Baron Takeichi Nishi, a gold medalist equestrian at the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles. While there, Nishi befriended Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, giving him a closer connection to Hollywood movie stars than the American kids who would soon land on the beaches of Iwo and idolized them on the silver screen.
However, it's Saigo, a private in the Imperial Army, who really anchors the film's human story. Saigo is a bit of a smart-aleck who left his pregnant wife and their bakery behind when he was drafted. As he awaits death with the inevitable American invasion, Saigo reflects on the life he once had and the life he never will, wondering how it came to this, distraught at the pointlessness of it all. He is the everyman—the everyman every army has ever had throughout the course of human history—the film's conscience and our personal link to an important historical event.
Venerable Japanese actor Ken Watanabe, odd man out in the various best actor competitions this year, is superb as General Kuribayashi, and Kazunari Ninomiya is outstanding as Saigo. They are two different men from two very different backgrounds whose contrasting lives cross at a crucial moment in history with dignity and respect for each other.
Where Flags fails in its narrative structure, Letters succeeds. Its flashbacks and time shifts are far less jarring, as Saigo and Kuribayashi look back on their lives knowing full well that their fates are sealed. There are no forced jumps to the present and the action on Iwo takes place on a linear timeline, interrupted only by these occasional recollections. It better suits Eastwood's economical, every-shot-counts style of filmmaking, to the point that it feels like the battle took place over the course of a few days, rather than an entire month.
A bleak, eight-sq.-mi. chunk of volcanic rock about 650 miles south of Tokyo (it's actually part of the Tokyo prefecture, which probably gave it more strategic importance than it deserved), cinematographer Tom Stern made Iwo Jima (mostly recreated on locales in California) look like it was shot through a grey, translucent sheet. And in a nifty and obviously intentional decision, Eastwood ties
Letters to Flags by using a handful of the exact same shots during the initial battle when the U.S. Marines took the beach.
The movie business has a strange way of connecting the people who work in it. One of the films that comes to mind while watching
Letters is Wolfgang Peterson's masterpiece Das Boot. With the exception of the setting, everything about
Das Boot is fictional; but the story of its desperate, stressed-out U-boat crew is so gripping we find ourselves not just sympathizing with the Germans, but rooting for their survival.
Letters' historical outcome precludes that possibility, but these men earn our sympathy through their simple humanity and the hopeless situation that surrounds them. Peterson, by the way, directed Eastwood in 1993's
In the Line of Fire. Both men were very accomplished directors by then, but it's a coincidence worth mentioning. Not a coincidence, and no longer a surprise, is how Eastwood continues to stack one exceptional film after another onto his directorial résumé.