After watching Flags of our Fathers, Clint Eastwood's elegiac new World War II movie, I can't wait to watch Letters from Iwo Jima, the second of two movies Eastwood directed back-to-back examining the events leading up to and the aftermath of the battle in Iwo Jima.
It's probably challenging enough when a young director decides to tackle back-to-back productions. A young Robert Zemeckis did it with the two Back to the Future sequels, and Quentin Tarantino did it with Kill Bill which started out as one movie but ended up being two movies, released a few months apart. But while Zemeckis and Tarantino's films were solidly in the realm of cartoonish pop fiction, Eastwood, now 76, gives us deep, moving movies based on real-life events that examine a pivotal moment in the history of the United States -- and for that matter, in world history.
The raising of the U.S. flag in the Japanese island of Iwo Jima, we are reminded by Flags of our Fathers, was the catalyst that helped secure popular support of the war effort, which at the time was badly dependent on Americans' purchases of war bonds to finance the military operations in Europe and the Pacific.
As Flags of our Fathers is happy to remind those of us who weren't around in WWII, the Associated Press photo of the six soldiers who raised the U.S. flag in Iwo Jima made the front page of every newspaper in America, and stoked American support for the war effort, while making the soldiers involved overnight heroes. The film is based on the book by James Bradley and Ron Powers; Mr. Bradley's father, John Bradley, was one of the six soldiers who helped plant the flag on the island's highest point, on the fifth day of the month-long U.S. offensive that was believed to be critical in the fight against Japan.
"Doc" Bradley (Ryan Phillipe), Ira Hayes (Adam Beach) and Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) were the only three of the flag-raisers who survived the bloody Iwo Jima offensive, and were promptly shipped back to the U.S. to become part of the military's P.R. tour to boost sales of war bonds.
The movie moves constantly back and forth in time, starting with one of the participants speaking out in the present, then moving swiftly back to 1945, to the day U.S. troops first landed on Iwo Jima; most of the movie swings back and forth between the later U.S. tour and the horrifying battles in Iwo Jima. Over and over again, the movie makes the point that these soldiers didn't think of themselves as "heroes," partly because they were doing their job, but also because they couldn't feel proud of many of the things they had to do in the field of battle. In the end, most of what kept them moving forward was simply looking out for each other.
It speaks very highly of Eastwood that he picked the actors who were right for the movie, because Flags of our Fathers simply wouldn't work as a star vehicle. The three leads are relatively unknown, and they don't particularly stand out in the many scenes of the Iwo Jima battles -- as bloody and unrelenting as anything since Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, and maybe more so (Spielberg served as executive producer of this movie).
Sadly, the lack of star power may have cost Flags of our Fathers at the box office, where it had a relatively soft debut, opening in third place. Whether the movie will have enough staying power through the holiday season, as Hollywood moves into the Academy Award season, remains to be seen.
(At this point, Eastwood's companion piece to Flags of our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima, is scheduled to open early in 2007. That movie will tell the same story through the Japanese perspective, and will be mostly in Japanese -- so its box-office prospects can't be much better than those of the first movie.)
There can be little doubt, even months before the opening of Letters from Iwo Jima, that these two movies will stand as some of the finest films ever made about World War II.
"Flags of our Fathers" opens October 20, 2006 and is rated R. Drama, War. Directed by Clint Eastwood. Written by William Broyles Jr, Paul Haggis. Starring Adam Beach, Barry Pepper, Jamie Bell, Jesse Bradford, John Slattery, Melanie Lynskey, Neal McDonough, Paul Walker, Robert Patrick, Ryan Phillipe.
