Letters from Iwo Jima (movie review)

While I really like Clint Eastwood’s later movies, I never thought I’d say this and I mean it in a very positive way- “Letters from Iwo Jima is much more deeply subversive than Michael Moore’s Farenheit 9/11.”

Has Dirty Harry gone Communist? No, Eastwood’s companion picture to Flags of Our Fathers which shows the thirty five day battle of Iwo Jima from the Japanese perspective is actually humanist. Much like Das Boot. Wolfgang Petersen’s (1981) German take on life and death on a U-Boat in the North Atlantic, Letters makes its viewers see Japanese soldiers not only as men of honor, but as individuals with wives, children, and doubts about their duties. It is one of those war pictures that identifies the real enemies for both sides-fanatic patriotism, demonization of the enemy, ignorance, and the loss of the capacity to think and feel at an individual level.

At their heart, Letters and Flags are not only deeply anti-war, they are deeply anti-Iraq war. From its quiet beginning which starts with the arrival of General Korabayashi, Ken Watanabe (kind of Japan’s uber-actor in American movies he was also the male lead in Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha) through a final movement that combines near constant gunfire with moments of poetic absurdity straight out of Celine, Eastwood’s point is simple. There are two kinds of enemies in war. The first is those people commonly identified as the enemy, in this case it’s the Americans and the Japanese. The second more critical enemy is the struggle by those on both sides to preserve their humanity, aka the enemy within.

Iris Yamashita and Paul Haggis’s (Crash) screenplay manage this by interweaving the perspectives of six characters who each represent different strata of Japanese society and levels of devotion to the traditional Japanese warrior code.

1) Saigo, Kazunari Ninomiya, is the most modern character. A baker, drafted into the war, whose wife has recently had their first baby, Saigo is simply determined to come home alive. In the meantime, he keeps his morale by constantly writing letters home to express his love for his wife.
In real life, Ninomiya was a member of the Japanese equivalent of the boy band, N Synch.
2) General Kuribayashi, Watanabe, is deeply patriotic and highly competent, but he has also spent time in America. He sees little sense in sending his men to a pointless death, yet does everything he can to defend the island. It likely should have been a five day operation since the Japanese had neither air or naval support. The battle took over a month.
It’s a very similar role to the Baron, his role in Memoirs of a Geisha, but Letters has the advantage of not “orientalizing” the Japanese and humanizing them instead.
3) Lieutenant Ito, Shido Nakamura, is the gung-ho (wow, I get to use that word in its actual context) junior officer who blindly insists on playing out the role of the uber-patriot. For most of the movie, he also has no perspective on the real situation and lacks any capacity to think about the real significance of his actions. Ito’s character is treated with a sweetly sublime level of irony that makes Tom Berenger’s character in Platoon look wooden and amateurish.
Ito is also vaguely reminiscent of some of the characters in The Final Days, the movie about Hitler's last days and life inside the bunker.

4) Baron Nishi, Tsuyoshi Ihara, is a dignified member of the ruling class who like Kuribayashi never loses sight of the connection between being both a warrior and a man of honor. He is also something of a celebrity which again is used in the storyline to tremendous effect in a scene with an American prisoner that spins irony into deep feeling for both sides.
5) Shimizu, Ryo Kase, plays a character thought to be a spy from the Kempaitai, kind of a Japanese version of the SS.
6) Fujita, Hiroshi Watanabe, plays a deeply loyal and professional junior officer who understands, but never openly questions.

In the meantime, Letters uses cinematography that slips between little patches of color to World War 2 vintage black and white. This evokes the feel of old-time war movies, Private Ryan (Spielberg co-produced Letters as well) being perhaps the last of those, while periodically reminding the viewer with the color that this movie also steps two full generations in the future away from that perspective. A team of Japanese archaeologists who locate the letters at the beginning and the end of the movie in two scenes with little to no dialogue gives the film just enough distance to let the viewer know that Eastwood wants the feel of old-time war movies, but not the perspective.

One of the tricky things about historical war movies is that the viewer knows who wins. Letters manages to lighten matters with bits of humor at key moments and keeping the different characters eventual fates in doubt even in the cases of those you know who will die. This is best exemplified by a double chase scene in which Saigo seeks to keep hold of a recently emptied honey bucket while being fired on by the approaching American fleet. The scene combines terror, humor, and the absurdity of war into a handful of frames by alternating Saigo's facial reactions and a fisheye shot of
a horizon-filling American invasion fleet.

Eastwood has won best picture twice for Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby. While I thought that Martin Scorcese’s The Departed was excellent, I’d say that Letters is Eastwood’s greatest achievement as a director particularly when paired with Flags of Our Fathers.

The fascinating thing about Letters is that it tells the story of the battle from the Japanese perspective with American characters appearing only in cameos, yet the ending of the movie reminds us as eloquently as any movie I’ve seen about what is most critical about being “American” in any war.
There was a time when Clint Eastwood was thought to be conservative and even deeply reactionary in his movie making. While Letters-Flags certainly appear to be the product of some other Eastwood incarnation from say Magnum Force or the Original Dirty Harry, the truth is that Clint Eastwood’s movie characters and outlook remain deeply conservative in the best sense. To see them and appreciate them is to understand just how far America has strayed from the best of that tradition.
Watch Letters and ask yourself what the movie says about the limits of American power, the need for understanding and respect of other cultures, the tragic destructiveness of blind patriotism.
I’m not exactly sure why the right isn’t calling for Clint Eastwood’s head and boycotting his movies. Letters is telling us with all its pure cinematic eloquence through its depiction of the “Last Good War” that today’s America is no longer Dirty Harry’s America. If you combine it with Flags of Our Father’s condemnation of hoopla, exploitation, and the use of patriotism as political theater, Eastwood the director makes a deeply political statement by being unswervingly artistic.
The end result is both a great movie and a work which as we debate the “virtues” of the “Surge” more people need to see, appreciate, and ultimately act on.


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