REVIEW: "LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA"

"Letters From Iwo Jima," Clint Eastwood's spare and poetic companion piece to "Flags of Our Fathers," is an engrossing and revealing look at that same World War II battle. This time it’s told from the viewpoint of the doomed Japanese soldiers who want to believe the propaganda that tells them they are destined to win because "Americans are weak-willed and inferior. ... They let their emotions interfere with their duty...."

"Letters" is the film I was hoping for from "Flags": a war narrative, expertly told, powerfully acted and filled with moments of brutal truth and savage grace.

"Flags" looked at Iwo Jima from the U.S. point of view, focusing in particular on the Marines and the Navy corpsman who became symbols of American heroism when a photographer snapped a picture of the men raising the flag atop the Iwo Jima mountain that the Japanese called (we learn in "Letters") Suribachi. The movie jumped back and forth in time, and played out somewhat like an overlong thesis paper: Eastwood tells us from the start that the film is going to critique the ways in which military action and sacrifice are spun into myth by government propagandists, so we learn little new by the time the movie ends 132 minutes later.

"Letters" avoids this problem by pretty much adhering to a linear narrative. Although the film opens in the present day with diggers on Iwo Jima uncovering a cache of Japanese letters from the war, the story quickly moves into the past, and we soon forget we are watching a sort of flashback.

As a chronicler of one of the most monumental battles in modern history, Eastwood not only has the scope of vision to show how, on a grand scale, the battle progressed for the defenders in strictly military terms, but also the little details about the Japanese soldiers themselves. A lesser director would have gone for stock heroics or brave samurais committing suicide. This is a quieter, braver film than that, preferring to focus instead on real-life people.

The script, whose Japanese dialogue is translated through subtitles, is by newcomer Iris Yamashita, with story input from one of "Flags"' screenwriters Paul Haggis ("Million Dollar Baby," "Crash," and "The Black Donnellys"). Credit is also given to the letters for home written by the Japanese soldiers who defended Iwo Jima and the personal correspondence of the commanding Japanese general Tadamichi Kuribayahi, titled "Picture Letters From Commander in Chief."

As in "Flags," we see how soldiers become unwitting fodder for their country's war effort. The flawed "Flags" tells the story of the three American men who obeyed their superior officers and willingly accepted the guise of heroic mascots in a public relations blitz to raise support for the war on the home front. "Letters" instead focuses on the 36-day battle for the island of Iwo Jima. We're confronted with images of Imperial Japanese military men who not only are expected to serve their emperor and suffer starvation, disease, and overwhelming odds in his name but also die by either their own hand or the enemy's rather than face the cultural ignominy of defeat. Again, Eastwood uses the muted color palette employed in "Flags," rendering the island's muck and caves in nearly black-and-white tones, brightened only by the flash of a gun muzzle or iconic flag.

In "Flags" we saw how the Americans were lured onto the beaches of Iwo Jima by the silence of the Japanese who were holed up in the island's mountain caves while holding their fire until the troops became sitting ducks. "Letters" takes us inside those caves, where the outnumbered Japanese soldiers--suffering from dysentery, hunger, and demoralization--still held onto their ideals of dying honorably for their country. Just a handful of men we are shown think through their objectives for themselves.

When the Americans finally appear, swarming ashore in well-armed, well-fed waves, the Japanese fight, but more out of a sense of their backs being to a wall (propaganda having told them that the Americans are not only weak and emotional soldiers, but savages who won't take them prisoner) than any airy notion of Duty or Honor.

These men could easily be stand-ins for the members of the American Confederacy. Theirs is a story of individuals fighting a losing battle valiantly, which is always romantic. And, in this case, epic.

The structure of "Letters" is fairly basic, following a mix of soldiers from different ranks as they get ready for the inevitable American invasion. It's the dead end of the war, with the Japanese Combined Fleet and air force almost entirely destroyed, and the island's garrison digging in for a desperate last stand--Iwo Jima was the first island considered actual Japanese territory to be assaulted by the Americans, and so had extra significance.

The screenplay brings to life four indelible characters, all of whom know there is little chance they'll leave the island alive. Lt. Gen. Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe of "Last Samurai," "Batman Begins," and "Memoirs of a Geisha") is the untraditional officer, in command of Iwo Jima’s garrison. He fights with the irony that, having spent time in the United States before the war as a military attache, he reveres Americans and understands the industrial and resource mismatch Japan faces.

Saigo (Japanese pop star Kazunari Ninomiya) is an irreverent young baker who just wants to stay alive to see his newborn daughter.




The aristocratic Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara) is a famous equestrian who competed in the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics.

Private Shimizu (Ryo Kase) was trained in the elite school for the Kempeitai, the Gestapo-style military police charged with maintaining Japan’s internal security and the people’s patriotism. But Shimizu found himself shipped off to Iwo Jima for disobeying orders to kill a dog. We see, as well, the old-guard officers who would shoot any soldier who tries to surrender, and who, when defeat seems inevitable, order their men to die with honor by blowing themselves up with grenades. Eastwood's depiction of the horrors of war--and the atrocities committed on both sides--has a shocking intimacy.

At Iwo Jima--where, presumably, the stars of "Flags" are elsewhere storming the beaches--a cross section of post-feudal, pre-modern Japanese society mounts a defense of the volcanic island (of black sand and no charm), which is considered part of the Japanese homeland. The dichotomous relationship between the officer class and the enlisted men in the Japanese force is one of the more poignant aspects of "Letters."

Some like General Tadamichi and Baron Nishi, who live the imperial tradition of bushido as an honorable birthright. Gentlemen warriors both, they sip wine and bemoan this age of mechanized warfare and the mindless, dehumanizing nationalism gripping their beloved homeland.


Other officers, like Lieutenant Ito (Shidou Nakamura of "Fearless") have made it into a form of fundamentalism that ultimately proves poisonous to the Japanese cause.


"Letters from Iwo Jima" somewhat dispels the barbaric image of the Japanese soldier who history has taught us would commit suicide before being caught and would kill his fellow soldier rather than allow him to surrender. And though many Japanese did follow their emperor’s murderous and suicidal orders, "Letters" also shows the other humanistic side of the soldiers who longed to be home with their loved ones; who didn’t want to die rather than be captured; and who didn’t necessarily believe that this piece of rock was worth getting killed over. Not one to take sides, Eastwood doesn’t mince images in portraying the brutal side of the American soldiers either, particularly when they assassinate in cold blood two Japanese soldiers who had surrendered in good faith.

Unlike in "Flags," Eastwood spends more time exposing the back-stories of the soldiers and, more interestingly, the claustrophobic surroundings they were forced to live in during the battle. These young men were stationed in miles and miles of tunnels built within the mountain caves, and the viewer senses the dour and unsanitary living conditions these soldiers had to endure, and the psychological damage that such a confinement can create. In fact, while there were more battle scenes in "Flags," here most of the action takes place within the caves with focus centred almost exclusively on the characters' emotional and spiritual downfall.

Context can magnify the impact of art, and it seems obvious that "Letters from Iwo Jima" derives some of its current power from the fact that the United States has been embroiled for almost four years in a war in Iraq against a foe that is little understood by Americans.

Whatever profound differences distinguish the current conflict from World War II, a similarity is the reality that the enemy (on every side) is defined most forcefully in ways that are expedient to the political aims of the war's promoters--in ways that demonize the "otherness" of the foe.

Part of Eastwood's achievement in "Letters" is to erase this otherness. "Be proud to die for your country," a Japanese officer tells a soldier, just as his American counterpart might; "Always do what is right, because it is right," an American mom writes her soldier son in a letter read aloud in the film by an admiring Japanese translator. Another of Eastwood's achievements is to demonstrate that the ideas conveyed by these quotes can be contradictory, even if some people might consider such a notion subversive.

Such messages would be ineffective if "Letters from Iwo Jima" weren't a frequently exciting film and a model of classical movie storytelling and craftsmanship. Just as "Unforgiven" is a Western and "Million Dollar Baby" is a fight film, whatever ideas those Eastwood features might otherwise convey, "Iwo Jima" is thoroughly rewarding as a straight war movie. (The leisurely buildup to the carnage might frustrate those more interested in explosions than emotions, however; the sirens heralding the first U.S. attack don't sound until 45 minutes into the 142-minute film, and the invasion itself doesn't occur until 11 minutes later.)

Upon Tadamichi’s arrival to Iwo Jima, Kuribayashi orders an immediate halt to all the trench-digging at Iwo’s black-sand beaches much to the dismay of convention-bound officers overseeing their fortification. The beach will fall to the Americans no matter what, he argues; the battle for the island will have to be fought from under Iwo Jima. He orders his men to excavate miles of tunnels connecting the island's caves instead of relying on machine-gun bunkers on the beaches to stop the enemy.

By the time the massive U.S. armada is spotted on the horizon, more than 18 miles of tunnels have been dug under Iwo's crust and throughout Mount Suribachi, the volcanic mass anchoring the island (and atop which the American flag would soon be raised).
The American commanders figured it would take five days to capture Iwo Jima, a barren volcanic island, and make it a beachhead for their final attack on Japan.
The Japanese were badly outnumbered, their fleet was destroyed and fighter planes had been redeployed to defend the Mainland. Ammunition and medicine was in short supply, dysentery was raging, morale was low, and the Japanese troops were subsisting on a diet of worms, weed soup and foul water. Told that death defending the "sacred homeland" island of Iwo Jima is an honorable fate, the wry Saigo says of a fellow soldier's expiration: "Kashiwara died of honorable dysentery."


But the battle rages on for a remarkable six weeks, at a cost of 20,000 Japanese troops Only 136 surrendered to the Americans, who took over 7000 casualties. This Alamo-like last stand, masterminded by Kuribayashi, anticipated the tactics of the Viet Cong used against American soldiers in the Vietnam War.

Kuribayashi's unconventional strategy is derided especially by the more fanatical officers like Lt. Ito, though. Ito leads a mutiny after U.S. troops take Mount Suribachi--the famous raising of the flag is seen, strikingly, from a great distance. Ironically, Ito is one of the few taken prisoner by the end.

"Letters" has some of the same problems as "Flags," though, most notably a certain cool remove from its subjects, though it benefits from a much tighter focus and a higher quality of acting. Eastwood seems at times unwilling to really throw the viewer into the savagery of the fighting (Iwo Jima being one of the most vicious and drawn-out battles ever waged), almost as though he knows that by giving us more thrilling battle scenes, he may be shocking viewers, but he'll also be thrilling them. It appears that one of the great progenitors of American cinematic violence has finally just become sick of it all. He knows that however brave the soldiers, smart the strategy, or necessary the struggle, war is always by definition a bloody waste. The tragedy of this film is not just that the Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima died for no reason, but how many of them died knowing it.

While it lacks the theoretical complexity and timely importance of "Flags,"
"Letters" is a significant development in the genre: No American war film, let alone one made during a time of war, ever embedded itself so deeply in the enemy camp. Even "Tora! Tora! Tora!" relied on Japanese filmmakers to tell the "other side" of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Tellingly, Eastwood offers a very different version of a "Flags" scenario in which a young Marine is yanked off the battlefield and sadistically tortured to death. Here, a seriously wounded U.S. soldier is pulled into a cave and tenderly nursed by Lt. Colonel Nishi, and the act of mercy leads to the film's strongest moment. He tells the American boy (in one of two brief English-language segments) of a long-ago visit from Hollywood royalty Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. As Nishi translates aloud the dying soldier's final letter from home, the Japanese soldiers draw closer, each hanging on every word as if it had been written by his own mother.

In a magical instant, all that separates two nations at war disappears. This is sentimentality of the best kind, a touching display of male bonding amid terror and aching loneliness.

Even as it promotes understanding, the movie doesn't dilute reality. The harsh conditions of Japanese military service and the grim finality of certain Japanese traditions aren't denied. We see an officer beating two "unpatriotic" soldiers with a bamboo cane, and ritual suicide with grenades is depicted graphically.

Like its predecessor, "Letters" is staggeringly impressive as a technical achievement; one can only be amazed and inspired that Eastwood chose to tackle the most logistically complicated and ambitious movies of his career as a septuagenarian (he's now 76). Like "Flags," the movie is almost entirely leached of color; only the explosions of bombs and the sunburst of the Japanese flag add shades of red to the brown and gray.

Unlike "Flags," the movie was complicated by its language: "Letters" was shot in Japanese, with English subtitles translating the dialogue for U.S. viewers, which may discourage the casual U.S. viewer. "Letters" is a hit in Japan, though. Apparently, the language barrier that existed between Eastwood and his actors didn't hurt the film. In the case of "Letters," it would never have worked without the Japanese dialogue, the tone of the language being as essential to the characters' identity as their devotion to duty and resolve to fight to the death.

Directed by Eastwood without a false note, this is a powerful, brilliantly acted film that presents war as a necessary kind of hell in which there are no true victors. Superbly acted, unblinking and unhysterical, it looks beyond politics into the hearts and minds of the men we needed to call "the enemy," and lets us see ourselves.


Conceived after the first film was in production and made at a fraction of the cost, its director dismissed it in early interviews as "my little indulgence." "Letters" was supposed to be a tag-on coda to "Flags." If "Flags" is more complex in its ambitions and structure, the leaner, simpler "Letters" is even more emotionally devastating. Eastwood’s movie stands in the company of the greatest antiwar movies.