IF YOU’RE AN AMERICAN, A STRANGE FEELING bubbles up inside you when, after getting to know the Japanese soldiers training and digging trenches on the lonely island of Iwo Jima in anticipation of the enemy’s arrival, you see the Marines finally land on its volcanized shores, marking the start of the gruesome 1945 battle that shall rage for the rest of Clint Eastwood’s Letters From Iwo Jima. We’re not accustomed to watching Our Boys from a distance — especially in World War II films — as we do here, their helmeted heads bobbing up and down behind mounds of blackened earth; they look like aliens descended on this tiny but significant outpost in the Pacific theater. (It calls to mind the end of last year’s Turtles Can Fly, when the Americans invade Iraqi Kurdistan.) This is a difficult place — literally and figuratively — for us to reconcile, so ingrained is our instinct to root for the home team.
Eastwood takes it to yet another level later on, when a Marine, grenade in hand, charges toward a Japanese solider we’ve come to love. Whether our sense of patriotism is rawhide-tough or plastic-flimsy, we can’t help but root for the other side in this particular duel. Eastwood has a firm grip on our hearts and minds, and he takes full advantage, dragging us where he will. His intention is to show us the Marines we saw stop and shoot bullets on Iwo Jima in last year’s Flags of Our Fathers weren’t fighting unfeeling barbarians whose humanity was superseded by their devotion to abstractions, like honor and the blessed Emperor.
On the contrary. The characters he and first-time scribe Iris Yamashita single out as the ones we should sympathize with are worth our prayers. Especially Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), the former baker conscripted into the Imperial Army with a pregnant wife back home; he writes deeply felt letters to her, the contents of which he delivers via a voice-over narration (thankfully) just shy of maudlin. Another letter-writer (and thus narrator) worthy of our sympathy and more is Lt. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), who lived in America for a time, meeting and greeting its military officers years before war between The Land of the Rising Sun and the Home of the Brave was even imagined.
Despite his devotion to honor and the Emperor, the general cares too much for his troops to order them to commit suicide — at least not while there’s still hope of winning. Up and until the film’s last moments, he represents the Western ideal of self-preservation, not the Eastern one of self-sacrifice. And Saigo, who early on declares to a friend as they shovel dirt under an unforgiving sun, “Damn this island. The Americans can have it,” is even more of a hero from this side of the Pacific. (One wonders how many Americans in Baghdad feel the same way under a similarly unforgiving sun.)
Besides another Japanese officer — and Olympic equestrian champ — Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), who also lived in America and found more than enough to like about it, and the brooding, mysterious Shimizu (Ryo Kase), the others we meet are less fully explored. This is unfortunate, because Lt. Ito (Shidou Nakamura) and Captain Tanida (Takumi Bando) represent the elements of the Japanese mind of the time Americans struggle to understand: the fierce devotion to death in the name of honor, both personal and national. Eastwood and his actors present them as sadistic perversions, leaving the Japanese kamikaze-mentality as enigmatic as that of the Islamic suicide-bomber’s. It’s a major missed opportunity.
But the only one. Eastwood more convincingly dismantles myth in Letters than he did in Flags. (Also, Mount Suribachi, the spot where Marines hoisted Old Glory and entered patriotic iconography and the central focus of Flags, looms even larger in Letters, even if the act of raising it is seen from afar.) The notion that every Japanese soldier was willing to die and that their officers would order them to do it is effectively put to bed via the baker and the general. Yet Letters falls short of perfection for another reason than just the missed opportunity to mine the philosophically foreign.
As with Flags, Eastwood shifts between past, present and future, in an attempt to place the battle in a historical context, and add an extra dimension to the characters. Unhappily, with this technique comes cheap irony. Witness the flashback in which the general is asked by an American woman what he would do if Japan found itself at war with her country. Here, as in other similarly contrived moments, we feel like asking, as Saigo does when he spots the massive American fleet floating toward the island, “Is this some kind of a joke?” No, it’s not, though on a few occasions, Eastwood almost turns his otherwise serious movie into one.
Letters From Iwo Jima
Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara. Directed by Clint Eastwood.
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