Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
1/23/07
In its' history, the United
States has fought two kinds of wars: those we won, and those we were
able to pull back from with our nation's way of life unchanged. I
think that's one of the fascinations of the US Civil War, the notion that
the breakaway Confederacy actually lost in a way alien to the US military
experience. Clint Eastwood had already told the story of the price
our troops paid for one of our greatest military triumphs in Flags of
Our Fathers. Now, in its' extraordinary companion piece Letters
From Iwo Jima, he turns things around to show us the horror of true
defeat as experienced by the Japanese troops who fought the Battle of Iwo
Jima.
The film begins well before
the US invasion, but at a time when Japanese forces know it's coming.
Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a baker drafted into service, wearily digs trenches
with his friend Nozaki (Yuki Matsuzaki) under the harsh command of Lieutenant
Ito (Shido Nakamura). Then, a new commander arrives: General Tadamichi
Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) has been to the United States, and has greater
knowledge of and respect for the enemy than his counterparts. As
battle after battle is lost and the resources he can call upon for support
dwindle to nothing, Kuribayashi shifts his resources away from the beach
to digging massive tunnels that will allow his men to make a long, futile
stand for the island. His goal is not victory, but rather the longest
possible battle, to buy more time for the Japanese mainland, perhaps only
so that his family will survive a few more days before a US invasion.
Of course, we know that invasion
would never come (except to those living in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, for
whom what came was far worse), but that kind of hindsight is pivotal to
one's appreciation of Letters From Iwo Jima. When the battle
arrives, it is long and brutal, and the horror of watching the characters
perish one after another is not the war movie horror to which we are accustomed:
we know Imperial Japan will fall, and we know its' cause was not just.
To underscore this fact, the film intercuts flashbacks to the earlier lives
of Saigo and Simizu (Ryo Kase), a would-be Secret Police officer who was
dismissed for not being sufficiently cruel. Meanwhile, the lives
of Kuribayashi and Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), an Olympic Gold Medalist
who dined with the Hollywood elite before the war, show clearly what Japan
had to gain from greater openness with the rest of the world. Every
drop of blood shed in the name of Hirohito's Empire is wasted, making the
tragedy and horror of those sacrifices all the more powerful. After
Flags
of Our Fathers' epic battle sequences, what we get here is much more
claustrophobic and low-key: for the Japanese, the battle was primarily
glimpsed through holes in their tunnels through which they fired and were
fired upon. Even the famous US Flag atop Mount Suribachi is glimpsed
only for a moment, so far in the distance we barely know what it is.
Unlike Flags of Our Fathers,
which was primarily told from the common soldier's perspective, Letters
From Iwo Jima is very much concerned with battle strategy. Kuribayashi
has a clear plan to make the United States pay the highest possible price
for the island, knowing he cannot win, but the old-guard commanders under
him are unwilling to shift gears and often openly defy his orders.
Most shocking is one sequence where Saigo's division, having failed to
hold Suribachi, is ordered to fall back and join other troops to the North.
But their commanders prefer an “honorable death” and demand that their
soldiers commit suicide on the spot rather than follow their General's
commands.
Watanabe is wonderful as
always, but the movie's best performances come from Ninomiya and Ihara.
Saigo puts a human face on the common Japanese soldier and the Baron is
a fascinating historical figure caught even more firmly between two worlds
than Kuribayashi. A sequence where he orders his men to care for
a wounded American solider with whom he briefly bonds is quite powerful.
One objection I had never
experienced at a foreign language film before is that I really disliked
the color and font of the subtitles. They were white, often against
white backgrounds (Tom Stern's intriguingly stark cinematography often
renders the movie effectively black-and-white) and hard to read, cutting
down on the amount of time I had to look back up at the actors and watch
their performances.
So, I guess the big question
is, how did Eastwood's double-sided war movie experiment work out?
More focused and structurally sound, Letters From Iwo Jima is the
better of the two movies (although I liked Flags of Our Fathers
a great deal as well), but both gain impact from each other. Aspects
of the Japanese strategy that seem alien (their ability to pop out of and
pull Americans into holes in the ground, for instance) in Flags
makes perfect sense when laid out here. By the same token, Letters
is able to focus on the Japanese battle strategy without giving a moment's
though to that of the other side because we've already seen it laid out
in the previous film. And taken together, the movies illustrate an
important lesson: that each war has two sides, and that no enemy casualty
is simply a “foreign devil”, but a man whose own hopes and dreams die with
him. |
