Dir.
Clint Eastwood, US, 2006, 141 mins
Cast: Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo
Kase
Review by Peter Fraser
The Battle for Iwo Jima took place between
the US and Japan from February 19 to March 26 1945 in the
final year of the Second World War. Iwo Jima is an island
lying roughly 600 miles south of Tokyo in the north-west
Pacific Ocean. The island was strategically important for
the US as a base for long-range fighters in a prospective
bombing campaign of mainland Japan, which was a preferred
alternative to a very costly land invasion. Losses to the
Japanese Navy and Airforce had already been so heavy that
the Japanese forces had to be concentrated elsewhere, leaving
Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima with a mission to delay the
inevitable victory of the US for as long as possible. Their
mission was essentially a suicide mission and when the Americans
finally captured Iwo Jima, and the islands surrounding it,
they launched the brutal bombing campaign that led to the
Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs on August 6 and August 9 1945,
forcing the Japanese surrender and, after the Allied victory
in Europe on May 8, the end of World War II.
Letters from Iwo Jima covers the Battle of Iwo Jima from
the Japanese side and is Clint Eastwood's companion to his
film Flags of Our Fathers, which chronicled the American
side of the battle. Unlike Flags, which used the iconic photograph
of the US flag-raising on Iwo Jima as a means to explore
the broader US context, Letters concentrates on the battle
itself. The viewer's reaction to the film, and their estimation
of its worth in relation to Flags, will perhaps largely depend
upon whether the viewer feels that the film gains or suffers
through lack of context.
However, Letters seems to succeed best when it concentrates
upon the action on the island itself rather than in its somewhat
redundant, simplistic and overly sentimental flashbacks.
A certain amount of sentimentality is understandable given
that these flashbacks are the recollections of the soldiers
fighting but also problematic since the flashbacks offer
the only window into the civilian lives of the soldiers and
broader Japanese culture and society.
It's an interesting refutation of the 'show not tell' model
that many seem to consider a sacrosanct of cinematic language.
In this instance it might have been better to remain true
to the film's understatement, which makes the battle scenes
and the film generally more powerful, and have the soldiers
themselves verbalise their backgrounds rather than indulging
in baroque flourishes that undermine the film's immediacy.
The strong suit of Letters is that of Eastwood as a director:
a spare humanism, verging upon minimalism, which recalls
the great Japanese directors. In this respect Eastwood is
well served by the script of Japanese writer Iris Yamashita,
adapted from the Japanese novel 'Picture Letters from Commander
in Chief', and the cinematography of Tom Stern, which emphasises
the desaturated environs of Iwo Jima ('sulphur island') and
the sepulchral darkness of the Japanese tunnels, focusing
on the performances of the actors and lending the film allegorical
depth.
Of the performances, Ken Watanabe and Kazunari Ninomiya
are excellent in their central roles as the General and a
young soldier respectively, effectively conveying the contrasting
experiences of warfare for the officers and the soldiers.
Of the allegory, because Iwo Jima was important purely for
strategic and symbolic reasons, and as a lump of volcanic
rock seems to have little else to recommend it, the island
seems in the abstract to serve as the perfect setting for
a grand metaphor regarding the futility of war, only emphasised
by the film's stark visuals and its lack of context. Of course
in reality the Battle of Iwo Jima did have practical consequences
and many would feel that to consider such a battle futile,
instrumental after all in ending World War II, would be to
do a grave disservice to the soldiers who fought. It's equally
true that while in the abstract armed conflict might be futile
so, in the abstract, the rest of human behaviour might be
too, but like the rest of human behaviour armed conflict
has sometimes achieved the results desired by at least some
of its participants. Similarly, some American critics of
a nationalistic bent have criticised the film for a rather
too sympathetic depiction of the Japanese, particularly the
noble Watanabe and the youthfully insecure Ninomiya, that
in their view neither squares with Japanese behaviour during
the war, nor the likely realities of warfare per se.
To this, one can reply that Letters works best as an anti-war
allegory, that warfare seems more futile than many other
human endeavours and is, at the very least, a highly regrettable
aspect of human existence. Equally, while the lead characters
might be sympathetic they are no more so than their equivalents
in US films about US armed forces and Letters is remarkably
even-handed in depicting atrocities on both sides. The film's
liberal intention of showing that soldiers generally fight
for the same things and that people, whether US or Japanese,
ultimately have a lot in common seems pretty laudable, particularly
given that it has undoubtedly been made as a conscious riposte
to stereotypes perpetuated during the war and afterwards.
It means that unlike Flags, the film achieves a broader resonance.
It's just regrettable that any film should still have to
work so hard to assert that the 'enemy' is 'human' after
all.
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