Midway through “Flags of Our Fathers” — the first of Clint Eastwood’s two extraordinary 2006 movies about the Battle of Iwo Jima — Eastwood re-creates the event at the center of that film: the flag-raising on Mt. Suribachi on the fifth day of hostilities, as recorded by news photographer Joe Rosenthal.
We see the flag on the mountain again, glimpsed by a Japanese general in the second of Eastwood’s films, “Letters From Iwo Jima.” But now the story is being told from the Japanese side, and, as with many moments in these pictures, that second sight resonates more because of our knowledge of the other film.
These two movies — the generally admired “Letters” and the sometimes underrated “Flags”–mark, along with Eastwood’s classic western “Unforgiven” and his 2004 Oscar-winner, “Million Dollar Baby,” the summit of his career to date. But they gain far more meaning and intensity when they’re juxtaposed with each other — when we see them not as two different films by the same director on the same general subject, but as two sides of the same story, a unified vision of the reality, terror and grief of war. And Eastwood’s timing — when America is sending more soldiers into battle — makes the movies more than historic set pieces, they are vital insights on what is happening to thousands of fighters, some from next door, some from our own families, some from a world away.
He embarked on both films after becoming curious about the Japanese side while preparing “Flags of Our Fathers” — sometimes catching scenes for the second film while shooting the first. When we realize how strongly one movie grew out of the other — how much Eastwood needed to explore the point of view of both the American attackers, trying to end the war faster, and the Japanese defenders, holding out almost to the last man — the entire project becomes more moving.
Then we can see why, taken together, they make up one of the screen’s great war movies — in two chapters.
Stylistically and emotionally, they mirror each other. Both are shot by Eastwood’s regular cinematographer, Tom Stern, in muted color and near-black-and-white images, occasionally streaked with bursts of bomb fire. In “Flags,” that flag-raising sequence is surprisingly simple and underplayed. The flag has already been raised earlier that day, but when a visiting dignitary, the secretary of the Navy, becomes enamored of the sight and requests the first flag for a souvenir, five Marines and a Navy medical corpsman are ordered to take it down and replace it. Photographers snap the action, including Rosenthal (played by Ned Eisenberg).
Somehow, instinctively, these six men assume, for a fleeting second, the tense, elegant pose — the man in front bending arduously forward, the others pushing the flagpole toward the sky — that made Rosenthal’s photo one of the most famous and copied of all 20th Century images of war.
In the “Flags” companion piece “Letters,” when we see the American flag on the mountain again, we can recall the moment of glory and routine on the American side. “Letters” is told from a different point of view — not of the victors but of the Japanese soldiers fighting desperately, guerrilla-style, from caves and tunnels that honeycomb the ground. The general, Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), glimpses it fleetingly — a distant tiny object waving over Mt. Suribachi — after rescuing two young soldiers about to be executed.
Both movies are low-key in their re-creation of highly charged moments, and tremendously sympathetic to common soldiers on both sides. The first film strips away our illusions about the flag-raising, turns it into a mundane chore that photographed well. The second shows the flag from the view of an enemy who has little notion of its eventual symbolism.
Realities of war
In other words, Eastwood shows war more as it really happens in life rather than the way we usually see it in movies. In 1949’s “Sands of Iwo Jima,” for example, that terrifically entertaining but often laughably false picture, John Wayne as Sgt. Stryker (one of the few Wayne characters killed in action) hands over the stars and bars in mid-battle to a squad that includes the three real-life survivors of the feat (and the protagonists of “Flags”): Rene Gagnon, Ira Hayes and John “Doc” Bradley.
“Flags of Our Fathers” re-creates more scrupulously the war experiences of those three: the dedicated medic Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), the good-looking runner Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and the tragic alcoholic Pima Indian Marine Ira Hayes (Adam Beach). Then it shows what happened after they were recruited for a $14 billion bond drive back in the States. We see that none of them thought he was a hero — their choice of a real hero was Barry Pepper’s Mike Strank, already dead in action — and how their accidental celebrity blighted their later lives, especially Ira’s.
“Letters From Iwo Jima” focuses on the doomed Japanese on the island — of whom about 20,000 died — through the historical figure of Kuribayashi and the fictitious character of Saigo (played by pop star Kazunari Ninomiya), a sweet-tempered baker. It was the basically humane Kuribayashi — a man who had lived in America, liked Americans and treasured the Colt .45 he had been given as a parting gift — who devised the cave-fighting strategy that raised American losses (about 7,000 dead). Meanwhile, the hapless Saigo wants only to return to his wife and baby.
Eastwood isn’t oversoftening the Japanese. One of the enemy soldiers, Lt. Ito (Shidou Nakamura), is a suicidal fanatic; others are thugs. But he treats both sides with the same even, sympathetic hand. The sources of the two films are the book “Flags of Our Fathers,” written by Bradley’s son James and Ron Powers, and “Picture Letters From Commander in Chief,” assembled from Kuribayashi’s letters by Tsuyuko Yoshida. William Broyles Jr. (“Apollo”), an ex-Marine and Vietnam fighter pilot, is one of “Flag’s” co-scenarists, and the Japanese-American Iris Yamashita, a first-timer, wrote “Letters From Iwo Jima.” (Paul Haggis, of “Million Dollar Baby” and “Crash,” worked on both scripts.)
A far-reaching view
This mix of writers helps Eastwood develop the wider angle he wants. In a way, he’s borrowing a page from one of his favorite moviemakers, Japan’s Akira Kurosawa, director of the multiple-viewpoint classic “Rashomon” (1950) and also of “Yojimbo” (1961), which was remade by Sergio Leone into Eastwood’s starmaking 1964 western, “A Fistful of Dollars.” Kurosawa was hired for 1970’s “Tora! Tora! Tora!” to re-create the Japanese side of the Pearl Harbor attack, with another Eastwood favorite, John Ford, discussed for the American scenes. (Ford was never hired, and Kurosawa was replaced.)
Many movie buffs salivate at the thought of the “Tora! Tora! Tora!” mutual admirers Ford and Kurosawa might have made. But Eastwood’s two-sided view almost fills that gap.
Sometimes the double vision is dark indeed. “Flags” shows Beach’s Ira poring over shots of the Japanese executing enemy prisoners. Later, in “Letters,” there’s an eerie echo when two Americans similarly ignore the white flags carried by two surrendering Japanese — and shoot them.
In a magnificent act of empathy, Eastwood gives us the good (as well as the bad and ugly) on both sides of Iwo Jima. He and his actors — especially Beach as vulnerable Ira, Phillippe as self-sacrificing Doc, and Watanabe as gallant Kuribayashi — bring out gentler or more idealistic notes than we expect. We see the humility and fellow feeling of the trio on the bond drive, the humanity with which one wounded American is treated — and those moments counter-balance the shocking scenes of carnage, pain, death and grenade-shattered corpses. It isn’t easy to see an opposite point of view, especially in wartime. But that empathy, that humanity radiates through both films — which together give us a twin vision of World War II’s bloody, legendary battle, from ground zero and high on the mountain, where the flags were raised.
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mwilmington@tribune.com
