Directed by Clint Eastwood. Screenplay, Iris Yamashita,
based on "Picture Letters From Commander in Chief" by Tadamichi Kuribayashi,
edited by Tsuyoko Yoshida; story, Yamashita, Paul Haggis.
Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase, Shidou Nakamura
Clint Eastwood's "Letters From Iwo Jima" springs from an admirable impulse: This companion piece to Eastwood's flawed yet complex "Flags of Our Fathers" sets out to tell the story of the Battle of Iwo Jima from the viewpoint of the Japanese soldiers who fought and died there. Eastwood, working from a script by Iris Yamashita (the story is by Yamashita and Paul Haggis), hopes to humanize these soldiers, showing them as inexperienced young men who loved their families, who were under orders from their superiors to fight viciously, and who were victims of a culture in which dying honorably was considered far more important than preserving life.
The impulse is commendable; the movie isn't. More than 6,000 American soldiers were killed during the 36-day battle; the number of Japanese troops killed was 21,000, which included most of the soldiers defending the island. The Japanese were notoriously vicious fighters. (Firsthand accounts from servicemen who fought in the Pacific arena, like William Manchester's memoir "Goodbye, Darkness," are numerous and remarkably consistent. And the idea of the Japanese as ruthless warriors isn't just a Western prejudice, as the Chinese who survived the Rape of Nanking would tell you.) There's no doubt that Americans at the time of World War II, including civilians, found it all too easy to caricature the Japanese as the "other." Even Bugs Bunny cartoons portrayed the Japanese as something other than human. As Paul Fussell wrote in his essay "Thank God for the Atom Bomb," "Among Americans it was widely held that the Japanese were really subhuman, little yellow beasts, and popular imagery depicted them as lice, rats, bats, vipers, dogs, and monkeys." He goes on to note that "some of the marines landing on Iwo Jima had 'Rodent Exterminator' written on their helmet covers." You could see characterizations like that in movies made during the war, like the 1943 "Bataan."
So it's easy to understand why Eastwood would want to make a movie like "Letters From Iwo Jima" -- its dialogue is in Japanese, with English subtitles -- which focuses on the experience of several young Japanese soldiers, chief among them Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), and their relationship with their superiors. "Letters From Iwo Jima" shows us these young, untested men -- the Japanese counterparts of the touchingly green youngsters Eastwood shows us in "Flags of Our Fathers" -- being ordered to dig miles' worth of tunnels on the island. They face starvation, exhaustion and disease. And they're trained to fight ruthlessly for the honor of their nation -- and to kill themselves rather than face defeat. One sequence in particular gives a good sense of the cultural attitudes that have been ingrained in these young men: In a flashback, we see Saigo answering a knock at the door and learning that he's been called up to serve, which means he'll have to leave his young, pregnant wife. Neighbors flutter around the couple, congratulating Saigo for having received the privilege of being asked to fight, oblivious to the dismay and apprehension on their faces.
Eastwood's sympathy doesn't stop with the young soldiers: He shows Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi (played by Ken Watanabe, a wonderful actor who's far too limited by the roles he's usually given), who led the Japanese defense and was greatly respected by American generals as well as his own men, making little sketches, based on happier times, to send home to his son. (In real life Kuribayashi's drawings survived, almost miraculously, and have been collected in a book, "Picture Letters From Commander in Chief," which is one of the sources for Eastwood's movie.)
But Eastwood is so busy humanizing Japanese soldiers that he ends up rewriting history. Early in the movie, before the battle has begun, we see the Olympic champion show-jumper Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara) arrive on the island with his horse; when the fighting starts, he's going to lead the men, on horseback, in the charge. The sequence is intelligent, and somewhat touching, for the way it suggests an ancient, civilized (as much as war can ever be civilized) approach to battle. But in a very brief later scene, we see another officer showing his men the red cross displayed on the bags of American medics, urging them to kill these men whenever possible.
This is one of the few instances in the movie where Eastwood faces up to the more vicious tactics of Japanese soldiers: Mostly, we see young Japanese men fearing for their lives, coming close to starvation and knowing they're fighting a losing battle. They clutch pictures of their families and loved ones, a convention that's been used in war movies for years, sometimes badly and sometimes well, to underscore the humanity and innocence of American soldiers. Of course, Japanese soldiers felt those things, too. It's terrible when a soldier, any soldier, has to leave his children. But using a person's ability to procreate as a way of making the case for his or her basic human decency will only take you so far. (In 50 years are we going to be seeing movies like "Lynndie England: Misunderstood Mommy"?)
Near the very end of the picture, some American soldiers encounter a corpse, and the commanding officer warns them that it may be booby-trapped. It's the first mention of booby-trapped corpses in the movie, an afterthought that's never explained, as if Eastwood were hoping to slip it in without our noticing -- as if he'd hoped we wouldn't leave the movie wondering which one of these fresh-faced young Japanese kids might have booby-trapped a dead body.
Eastwood knows, as we all do, there were atrocities committed on both sides, not just at Iwo Jima but throughout the war. (I shiver every time I see, in Paul Fussell's "Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays," a '40s-era Life magazine photo of a nicely dressed American blond contemplating the human skull before her on her desk -- the skull of a Japanese soldier, sent to her by her GI sweetheart.) But Eastwood can't bring himself to deal with any genuine complexity here. He wants to make the case that in wartime, people who are essentially good can do horrible things. But downplaying the horror of atrocity has the unintentional effect of making it seem almost reasonable, a way of saying, "See? People sometimes have a reason for doing very bad things." It's a reduction that absolves humans of responsibility rather than challenging them to accept it.
The bitter truth is that "Flags of Our Fathers" -- a picture in which Eastwood actually gives some thought to the way we consider the young men (and now women) who fight our wars to be disposable -- made barely a blip on our movie-awareness radar when it was released last fall. (The movies were filmed back-to-back, partly on location on Iwo Jima, although they have completely separate casts.) But "Letters From Iwo Jima," a far more forced, unshaped picture, has already received far more attention, and just a few weeks back, the Hobbits at the National Board of Review sent a scroll from Middle-earth decreeing it their movie of the year. The suggestion seems to be that, at last, we're ready to accept our former enemy as human. They deserve a better -- and a tougher -- movie than this one.
"Letters From Iwo Jima" represents something rare in the history of war movies -- a case of a filmmaker from one country sympathetically telling a combat story from the perspective of a former enemy. The second installment in Clint Eastwood's ambitious and enterprising account of one of the Pacific war's most ferocious conflicts, the film is the stylistic twin of "Flags of Our Fathers" but different in feel due to its intimacy, concentrated focus and, inevitably, the nature of its Japanese military characters. Well received at its premiere in Japan, where it opens Dec. 9, this piercing, astutely judged picture faces limited commercial prospects due to its Japanese-language dialogue alone. But after the more respectful than passionate critical response to "Flags," which has fallen short of B.O. expectations, "Letters" may well fire Eastwood's many partisans with renewed vigor, spelling sustained biz on select screens.
"All Quiet on the Western Front" was about Germans in World War I, but from a pacifist p.o.v.; "Tora! Tora! Tora!" included the Japanese angle on Pearl Harbor; the central characters in "The Blue Max" and "Cross of Iron" were Germans. Scattered other examples certainly exist. All the same, there are few moments in Hollywood cinema of any era as oddly unsettling as the one here, in which an American Marine charges toward the protagonists and is so manifestly perceived as the enemy.
That unfortunate young man is bayonetted to death by his Japanese captors. But the film's true intent comes across the second time a Yank is nabbed by the doomed members of the Imperial Army, when the injured grunt movingly establishes an unlikely bond with his aristocratic Japanese interrogator. There were compelling reasons why the war was fought, but the unusual focus of "Letters" is the humanity of the Japanese soldiers who longed for home just like anyone else, knowing they would never leave the tiny strip of land alive.
Naturally, U.S. war films of the era painted the Japanese as the most maniacal and barbaric of fighters, and many veterans and historians, Americans, Chinese and others, insist this was true. Pic might have done well to mention the emperor's endorsement of the "Death Before Surrender" edict of early 1945. But "Letters" makes the case that even the Japanese were divided among themselves.
"There's nothing sacred about this island," says one heretical conscript. "The Americans can have it." The official line was that the invaders were weak-willed and undisciplined, but two of the top Japanese officers depicted here had spent time in the U.S. before the war, liked the country and had friends there. To echo the primary theme of "Flags," nothing is as clear-cut as it seems; the situation is never as black-and-white as any side's propaganda would have it.Considered from the Japanese angle, Iwo Jima resembles the Alamo, a futile if heroic last stand against an enemy force too overwhelming to withstand, although withstand it they did, for much longer than their opponents imagined possible.
Elegantly but with dramatic bite, Eastwood unfolds the story of some of the men who put up the resilient fight, emphasizing the way their personalities were expressed through crisis rather than ideology or stock notions of bravery and heroics. Screenplay by first-timer Iris Yamashita, a Japanese-American who worked out the story with "Flags" scenarist Paul Haggis, maintains an intimate focus within a grand context, and is based on sentiments expressed in long-dead soldiers' letters seen at the outset being dug up on Iwo Jima.
Initial stretch provides an opportunity to paint a more detailed portrait than "Flags" could of the desolation of the 5 mile by 2�-mile strip of black volcanic rock and sand. In the wilting summer before the invasion, the assembled Japanese troops were scraping by with no resources. Rescuing them from torpor and the savage punishments of severe officers is Lt. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), the impressive former chief of the Imperial Guard sent to prepare the island for the anticipated American assault.
Within the limits of a tradition defined by loyalty and obedience, Kuribayashi is his own man. Taking the measure of the inhospitable bit of real estate on extensive walks, he undercuts by-the-book officers, to their fury, and soon has a weary, ineffectual admiral sent home. Whereas the Japanese customarily believed in beachhead defenses, the new general orders the construction of miles of tunnels and caves from which his 20,000 men can most advantageously battle the arriving Americans.
Kuribayashi quickly befriends the dashing Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), an aristocrat with a meager supply of Johnnie Walker. The shared scotch serves as a reminder of the America they both know personally; Kuribayashi was there as a student and young officer, Nishi as an equestrian at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics. Their quiet moments to converse are privileged ones, especially in light of what lies ahead.
At the opposite end of the hierarchy are Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a simple baker and mildly impudent everyman who longs only to see his infant daughter, and the sensitive Shimizu (Ryo Kase), whose shortcomings as an MP have earned him this lamentable posting. With rabid exceptions, the Japanese here are dedicated, ready to kill the enemy and resigned to whatever their fates may be, even as they may have mixed minds about fighting and mostly wish they were somewhere else.
Their hideaways secure, the men wait and wait some more. Suffering from centipedes, a steady diet of weed soup and bad water, one soldier quips, "We'll be dead before the Americans get here." And there's nothing but bad news from the outside world, as their navy is wiped out and hoped-for reserves won't be arriving after all. Finally, with the U.S. fleet on its way from Saipan, Kuribayashi levels with his men: They should not expect to survive, but must each endeavor to kill at least 10 of the enemy before dying themselves.
Battle commences an hour in, and the general's tactics immediately prove their worth, as the Americans sustain heavy losses as they swarm the beach. But in a particularly disturbing interlude, in one cave a group of ultra-traditionalists decide to "die with honor."
In due course, Mount Suribachi is taken, and this time Eastwood hauntingly offers the historic flag-raising from the Japanese perspective at the opposite end of the island. With troops separated in different locations, a festering split in the Japanese command bursts, and one particularly fanatical officer, Lt. Ito (Shidou Nakamura), goes his own way in defiance of Kuribayashi. Deterioration of the Japanese position is slow but inevitable.
An artier,more impressionistic approach might have emphasized the unbearable psychological pressure induced by prolonged confinement, deprivation and bombardment. The claustrophobic element is obviously mandatory, but Eastwood allows the film to breathe by moving the action around in space and time, combined with the engaging characters who occupy centerstage.
A man of his time but with a refinement that suggests an earlier era, Kuribayashi is the sort of man any army would want to have in charge. In Watanabe's beautifully nuanced performance, he is smart, cunning and imaginative, always several steps ahead in his thinking and therefore never ruffled. His composure in the face of certain doom is remarkable, his fate an expression of both his love of country and his broader sense of himself as a man of honor and arms.
Ihara is a treat as the bon vivant whose sense of style isn't impaired even by hell on earth, while Kazunari offers a lively, easily accessible commoner whose emotions are simple and direct.
Due partly to the preponderance of dark interiors, "Letters" seems even more like a black-and-white film than did "Flags," the color in Tom Stern's strongly composed lensing drained nearly to the vanishing point. One panoramic shot of the American fleet aside, CGI work seems minimal here, as a bit of location footage from the island itself has been discreetly amplified by stand-in landscapes shot in California, with a little work in Japan to top it off. The superbly varied interiors represent the final work of the late, great production designer Henry Bumstead, along with James J. Murakami. Regular Eastwood editor Joel Cox was here partnered with Gary D. Roach. Spare score this time was composed not by the director, but by son Kyle Eastwood and Michael Stevens.
Possibly the one thing missing from this microcosmic look at an epochal battle is the bigger picture, a sense of the staggering slaughter that took place over a six-week period at a cost of 26,000 lives. "Flags" imparted something of an idea of this, although not in its totality and certainly not for the Japanese, of whom only 216 survived. Taken together, "Flags" and "Letters" represent a genuinely imposing achievement, one that looks at war unflinchingly -- that does not deny its necessity but above all laments the human loss it entails.
One breathtaking shot haunts me above all others in Letters From Iwo Jima, Clint Eastwood's profound, magisterial, and gripping companion piece to his ambitious meditation on wartime image and reality, Flags of Our Fathers. Where Flags chronicled the terrible battle for the Japanese island of Iwo Jima in February of 1945 from the American point of view (some 7,000 U.S. soldiers died), Letters looks at the same fight from the opposing side, where the losses topped 20,000. And so the POV shifts from that of Yanks mowed down as they stormed Iwo's black sand to that of the Japanese soldiers holding those bunkers with a resourcefulness and discipline bred in the bone.
Committed to what may well be suicide on behalf of their emperor and country, the men known by Allied forces as ''the enemy'' struggled with insufficient arms and supplies, with dysentery and thirst, with conflicting commands, and with simple human fear. And at one point deep into the fighting (meant to be a quick win for the Allies, the combat went on for 36 days), the camera casually looks over the shoulders of some exhausted, determined, probably doomed Japanese troops at what appears to be a large hill far in the distance. On the top of that hill is a tiny dot that appears to be a waving flag. It is of no consequence to the genial grunt soldier Saigo (J-pop star Kazunari Ninomiya, a charmer), or the elegant Olympic equestrian champ and fighting man Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), or the enlightened general Tadamichi Kuribayashi (The Last Samurai's dashing Ken Watanabe) charged with leading his men for the glory of Japan.
That's it: all the hope, hype, and heartbreak signified by the iconic flag in Flags of Our Fathers compacted � dismissed! � with one glance. It takes a filmmaker of uncommon control and mature grace to say so much with so little superfluous movement, and Eastwood triumphs in the challenge. Letters From Iwo Jima enthralls in the audacity of its simplicity. Here is the West's war, mirrored in the East, fought by soldiers also born of mothers who worried, and grieved.
There are certain assumptions that American audiences, perhaps without realizing it, are likely to bring to a movie about World War II. The combat picture has been a Hollywood staple for so long � since before the actual combat was over � that it can sometimes seem as if every possible story has already been told. Or else as if each individual story, from G.I. Joe to Private Ryan, is at bottom a variation on familiar themes: victory against the odds, brotherhood under fire, sacrifice for a noble cause.
Hiro Abe plays the role of Lt. Col Oiso in a scene from �Letters From Iwo Jima.�
But of course there are other, contrasting stories, a handful of which form the core of �Letters From Iwo Jima,� Clint Eastwood�s harrowing, contemplative new movie and the companion to his �Flags of Our Fathers,� which was released this fall. That film, partly about the famous photograph of American servicemen raising the flag on the barren volcanic island of Iwo Jima, complicated the standard Hollywood combat narrative in ways both subtle and overt. It exposed the heavy sediment of individual grief, cynicism and frustration beneath the collective high sentiments of glory and heroism but without entirely debunking the value or necessity of those sentiments.
�Letters,� which observes the lives and deaths of Japanese soldiers in the battle for Iwo Jima, similarly adheres to some of the conventions of the genre even as it quietly dismantles them. It is, unapologetically and even humbly, true to the durable tenets of the war-movie tradition, but it is also utterly original, even radical in its methods and insights.
In December 2004, with �Million Dollar Baby,� Mr. Eastwood almost nonchalantly took a tried and true template � the boxing picture � and struck from it the best American movie of the year. To my amazement, though hardly to my surprise, he has done it again; �Letters From Iwo Jima� might just be the best Japanese movie of the year as well.
This is not only because the Japanese actors, speaking in their own language, give such vivid and varied performances, but also because the film, in its every particular, seems deeply and un-self-consciously embedded in the experiences of the characters they play. �Letters From Iwo Jima� is not a chronicle of victory against the odds, but rather of inevitable defeat. When word comes from Imperial headquarters that there will be no reinforcements, no battleships, no air support in the impending fight with the United States Marines, any illusion of triumph vanishes, and the stark reality of the mission takes shape. The job of these soldiers and their commanders, in keeping with a military ethos they must embrace whether they believe in it or not, is to die with honor, if necessary by their own hands.
The cruelty of this notion of military discipline, derived from long tradition and maintained by force, is perhaps less startling than the sympathy Mr. Eastwood extends to his characters, whose sacrifices are made in the service of a cause that the American audience knows to be bad as well as doomed. It is hard to think of another war movie that has gone so deeply, so sensitively, into the mind-set of the opposing side.
Since the fighting that Mr. Eastwood depicts is limited to a single, self-contained piece of the Japanese homeland, the bloody roster of Japanese atrocities elsewhere in Asia and the South Pacific remains off screen. But this omission in no way compromises the moral gravity of what takes place before our eyes. Nor does it diminish the power of the film�s moving and meticulous vindication of the humanity of the enemy. (Mr. Eastwood also, not incidentally, exposes some inhumanity on the part of the American good guys, a few of whom are shown committing atrocities of their own.)
Any modern military organization depends, to some extent, on the dehumanization of its own fighters as well as their adversaries. (In �Flags of Our Fathers� the Japanese are all but faceless, firing unseen from bunkers and tunnels dug into the mountainside; in �Letters From Iwo Jima� we see the grueling work and strategic inspiration that led to the digging of those tunnels.)
An army needs personnel, not personalities, and one of the functions of the art and literature of war � especially on film, which exists to consecrate the human face � is to compensate for this forced anonymity by emphasizing the flesh-and-blood individuality of the combatants. Think of the classic Hollywood platoon picture, with its carefully distributed farm boys and city kids, its quota of blowhards and bookworms, all superintended by a wise, crusty commander. Even as they approach stereotype, those characters give names, faces and identities to men who have gone down in history mainly as statistics.
Historians estimate that 20,000 Japanese infantrymen defended Iwo Jima; 1,083 of them survived. (The Americans sent 77,000 Marines and nearly 100,000 total troops, of whom close to 7,000 died and almost 20,000 were wounded.) The Japanese commander was Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, whose illustrated letters to his wife and children, recently unearthed on the island, were a source for Iris Yamashita�s script. Played by Ken Watanabe, Kuribayashi, who arrives on Iwo Jima with a pearl-handled Colt and fond memories of the years he spent in America before the war, is a dashing, cosmopolitan figure. He arouses a good deal of suspicion among the other officers for his modern ideas and for the kindness he sometimes displays toward the low-ranking soldiers.
The general is a practical man (those tunnels are his idea) in an impossible circumstance, and Mr. Watanabe�s performance is all the more heartbreaking for his crisp, unsentimental dignity. He anchors the film � this is some of the best acting of the year, in any language � but does not dominate it. Much as the Imperial Army may have been rigidly hierarchical, Mr. Eastwood�s sensibility is instinctively democratic. As the battle looms, and even as the bombs, bullets and artillery shells begin to explode, he takes the time to introduce us to Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a guileless baker with no great desire to give his life for the glory of the nation; Lieutenant Ito (Shidou Nakamura), who will settle for nothing else; Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), an Olympic equestrian who once hobnobbed with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks; and Shimizu (Ryo Kase), who Saigo suspects is an agent of the secret police.
It is customary to use the word epic to describe a movie that deals with big battles, momentous historical events and large numbers of dead. But while some of Mr. Eastwood�s set pieces depict warfare on a large scale, the overall mood of �Letters From Iwo Jima,� as the title suggests, is strikingly intimate. Even though the movie has a blunt, emphatic emotional force, Mr. Eastwood also shows an attention to details of speech and gesture that can only be described as delicate.
He is as well acquainted as any American director (or actor) with the language of cinematic violence, but he has no equal when it comes to dramatizing the ethical and emotional consequences of brutality. There is nothing gratuitous in this film, nothing fancy or false. There is the humor and the viciousness of men in danger; there is the cool logic of military planning and the explosive irrationality of behavior in combat; there is life and death.
As in �Flags of Our Fathers,� nearly all the color has been drained from the images, a technique that makes the interiors of the caves and tunnels look like Rembrandt paintings. The anxious faces seem to glow in the shadows, illuminated by their own suffering. At other times, in the hard outdoor light, Tom Stern�s cinematography is as frank and solemn as a Mathew Brady photograph.
A few scenes serve as hinges joining this movie to �Flags of Our Fathers.� While �Letters From Iwo Jima� seems to me the more accomplished of the two films � by which I mean that it strikes me as close to perfect � the two enrich each other, and together achieve an extraordinary completeness. They show how the experience of war is both a shared and a divisive experience, separating the dead from the living and the winners from the losers, even as it binds them all together.
Both films travel back and forth in time and space between Iwo Jima and the homelands of the combatants. In �Flags of Our Fathers� the battle itself happens mainly in flashback, since the movie is in large measure about the guilt and confusion that survivors encountered upon their reluctant return home. In �Letters From Iwo Jima� the battle is in the present tense, and it is home that flickers occasionally in the memories of men who are certain they will not live to see it again.
Clint EASTWOOD's film, "Letters From Iwo Jima," takes audiences to a place that would seem unimaginable for an American director. Daring and significant, it presents a picture from life's other side, not only showing what wartime was like for our Japanese adversaries on that island in the Pacific but also actually telling the story in their language. Which turns out to be no small thing.
Made back to back with Eastwood's recently released "Flags of Our Fathers," "Letters" deals with the same World War II battle in completely opposite ways. Unlike that big-budget, structurally complex film, shot on location with recognizable actors, "Letters" is a simpler and more straight-ahead picture, shot in Japanese on the Warner Bros. lot with a $20-million budget (and a 32-day shooting schedule) that would have made it eligible for this year's Spirit Awards.
Though each project stands on its own merits, like the panels of a diptych they inevitably inform one another. Individually and as a unit, these films are a cry against the awful, horrifying futility of war, a cry made all the more poignant because it is made by a man who has been an avatar of on-screen mayhem.
But while each film reinforces the other, it is "Letters" that is finally the more remarkable accomplishment, a feat of empathetic cross-cultural connection that Eastwood (working from a script by Iris Yamashita from a story by her and "Flags' " Paul Haggis) more or less willed into existence.
Initially inspired by a book of illustrated correspondence home from Iwo Jima's commander, Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi (potently played by "The Last Samurai's" Oscar-nominated Ken Watanabe), Eastwood has, against considerable odds, made a film that feels both Japanese (to the point of being accepted there by audiences and critics alike) and like one of his own.
What Eastwood seemed to sense intuitively was the connection between his own themes of men being men and the challenges of masculinity, and the notions of honor, duty and heroism that are embedded in Japanese culture and tradition. While it is far from clear that any other American director could have made a Japanese film or that Eastwood, for that matter, could have made one in yet another culture, the fit here is unexpectedly strong.
Also, though making the film in Japanese may sound arbitrary (the script was translated from English, and subtitles appearing below the images), the reality is the opposite. When actors speak in their own language, they bring an entire world with them; they give a sense of reality to their culture that, for instance, even as fine an actor as Marlon Brando couldn't create for his German soldier in "The Young Lions." Paradoxically, the difference in language makes the similarities between people that "Letters From Iwo Jima" wants to emphasize so much the stronger.
"Emphasize," however, is a word that doesn't completely suit the characteristic restraint Eastwood has brought to his work here. He has so eliminated nonessentials, so gone away from showy directorial flourishes, that his only fingerprints are the absence of fingerprints, the way he allows us to be unaware that we are watching a directed film at all.
This is especially true once "Letters" gets past its framing device of the modern discovery of a cache of correspondence on the island. At that point we flash back to 1944 and see a young soldier named Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya) and a friend digging trenches on Iwo Jima and doing what soldiers everywhere do: complaining ("Damn this island; the Americans can have it") and wishing they were back home.
Saigo doesn't know it yet, but his days of trench digging are about to end. A new commander is coming to the island, an unorthodox, energetic individual so consumed with his mission he has trouble sleeping. This is Kuribayashi (played by Watanabe with intelligence, concern and a feeling for command), a leader who pushes a heretical strategy even though it alienates many of his officers.
Rather than meet the Americans on the beaches, the general decides to dig in in the interior of the island, creating an underground world of 18 miles of tunnels and thousands of hollowed-out rooms and caves.
Kuribayashi increasingly understands that defending this island is a suicide mission, that the only kind of success he can hope for is inflicting so many casualties on the Americans that they will lose heart. To do this, he must convince his men, many of whom are determined for reasons of honor to take their own lives, that fighting to the death should be their mission.
Kuribayashi has an additional reason for sadness. Both he and his closest comrade, Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), who was an equestrian gold medalist at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, have spent considerable time in America and feel a sense of regret that a country they are so connected to is their enemy.
We discover this and more in part from the letters, read in voice-over by Watanabe, which the general sends home, letters that also have inexpressibly poignant details like an apology to his wife for not getting the kitchen floor taken care of before he shipped out.
We also hear letters from Saigo to his wife, Hanako (Nae), as well as flashbacks that focus on how reluctant this former baker was to go to war. We get similar insight into Shimizu (Ryo Kase), who was part of the zealous kampetai, or military police, before his current posting. And we witness an encounter with an American prisoner that reinforces this theme of unexpected kinship between adversaries.
For one of the engines driving "Letters" is a compelling other-end-of-the-telescope phenomenon that plays out both literally � the raising of the American flag on Mt. Suribachi was up close and personal in "Flags" and a tiny speck in the far distance here � and metaphorically.
Though war movies traditionally encourage our patriotic blood lust by making the enemy faceless or worse, we realize here, as the fighting begins, that the people we badly wanted dead in the first film are precisely those who we are made to care deeply about here and whose bravery this film so admires.
It's not that we want the Japanese to win the war; it's that we absolutely do not want these men we've come to know intimately to lose their lives. The laconic, pitiless way Eastwood shot the violence of battle underscores what a waste it all is, underlines the futility that so many have to die because of the misguided ideology of a few in leadership positions.
That notion is summarized beautifully in, of all places, a short story by Sholem Aleichem, the great Yiddish writer. He tells of a naive young man drafted into a European army in World War I who is commanded to shoot when the enemy attacks. The attack comes, the recruit doesn't shoot and the enraged officer points at the enemy and repeats the order. "Over there?" the man asks, confused. "But there are people over there."
There's a moment in "Letters From Iwo Jima" where the profundity of what Clint Eastwood is doing blindsides you with a wallop. The Japanese general Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe ) emerges from a cave during the fifth day of the epic World War II battle and spies, a mile or so away, a handful of ant-like figures raising a US flag on Mount Suribachi. It's glimpsed on the right side of the screen for a wobbly second and then it's gone: One of the iconic images of the 20th century, viewed through the wrong end of history's telescope.
That famous photo was the focus of Eastwood's other Iwo Jima movie, "Flags of Our Fathers" -- the center from which the film's many concerns radiated out. Reviewing the honorable, overloaded "Flags" last fall, I wrote: "As gifted as this director is, this isn't the sort of thing he does best." "Letters From Iwo Jima," by contrast, is very much the sort of thing Clint Eastwood does best.
Eloquent, bloody, and daringly simple, the movie examines notions of wartime glory as closely as "Flags of Our Fathers" dissected heroism. The 20,000 troops sent to defend the desolate island -- the first piece of Japanese soil threatened by the Allies -- understand they have no chance of winning. The Imperial navy and air force have been destroyed at the battle of Saipan, and there are no reinforcements coming. The approaching U S armada is overwhelming in size and firepower. Advises one officer bleakly, "In my opinion, general, the best thing to do would be sink the island to the bottom of the sea."
Eastwood is much more interested in how men react to certain death than in replicating the order of battle, though, and "Letters" plays like "The Alamo" as remade by Jean Renoir , the visionary humanist of "Grand Illusion ." We're introduced to characters on every level of the defending forces, from the squabbling, hidebound top brass to the exhausted soldiers, and we come to understand that each man -- as do all men in war -- falls into one of two camps: the deluded ideologues and the stressed pragmatists.
Characters like Lieutenant Ito (Shido Nakamura ), Captain Tanida (Takumi Bando ), and Colonel Adachi (Toshi Toda ) belong to the former, beating their men in the name of Imperial honor and advocating tactics more cruelly macho than sensible. The potential for, even the attraction to, wartime atrocity sneaks in: Ito shows his men a photo of a U S Army medic and tells them to shoot soldiers wearing similar uniforms. Suicide, that noble samurai ideal, is revealed as pathetically useless when administered, in one of the movie's most upsetting scenes, by a hand grenade held against the belly.
This, says "Letters," is why Japan lost the war, taking so many and so much down with it. Other characters, by contrast, recognize their leaders' death-wish folly and struggle to outlive it. Watanabe's General Kuribayashi is an enlightened officer who has traveled in and admires America. He mourns that it has come to this while exhorting his men to fight to the bitter end. The upper-class Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara ), a former Olympic equestrian who arrives on the island complete with his horse, is revealed to be compassionate and kind, sharing memories of the States with a wounded G I (Lucas Elliott ).
Not all the Japanese look so kindly on their captives, of course. Slowly, though, a central figure emerges from the chaos: Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya ), a simple foot soldier -- a baker back home -- who has a grunt's cynicism toward martial endeavor. Let the officer s proclaim what they will, it's the Saigos of the world who dig the trenches and take the bullets. Over the course of "Letters," this character becomes witness, friend, conscience, catalyst, commemorator, and -- he hopes -- survivor. In the pitch darkness of this movie, his innate goodness becomes a lifeline.
As the Japanese were barely seen in "Flags of Our Fathers," Americans are hardly glimpsed here, the uncomfortable implication being that we go to war against aspects of ourselves. (This may be especially true of aggressors: When one Imperial soldier describes Americans as weak-willed and ruled by their emotions, you can hear the panic in his voice.) At times, "Letters From Iwo Jima" convulses with gore; at others, the movie seems to sense the earth turning placidly beneath its characters' feet. The territory covered is similar to Terrence Malick's "The Thin Red Line," but with a lot less poetic mucking about.
Written by Iris Yamashita and Paul Haggis and based on the real General Kuribayashi's posthumously published correspondence, "Letters" represents filmmaking so assured it can take your breath away. Eastwood has pruned all affectation from his directing style, leaving a movie that feels straight and true. Tom Stern's cinematography is leached of colors except for the red sun on the flag and the orange blooms of bombardments: action and consequence. Only the score by Michael Stevens and Eastwood's son Kyle, pretty and discreet as it is, feels a touch obvious.
Whether a film about a long-demonized wartime enemy, told in a foreign language with English subtitles, can reach a mass American audience remains to be seen. "Letters" is so good, though, and its maker working at such a level of mastery and respect, that one hopes for the best. Eastwood views his doomed losers with a humane and pitiless sigh; he has made a movie full of ghosts, and it haunts.
Letters from Iwo Jima is a unique American-made war movie for at least two reasons: it depicts the battle from the perspective of the losers and it represents the United States as the "enemy." Coupled with Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima provides director Clint Eastwood's complete statement about the 1945 Battle of Iwo Jima. Although Flags of Our Fathers deals as much with how a photograph from the battle was used as propaganda on the home front as it does with the actual combat, Letters from Iwo Jima remains entrenched upon the island from start to finish (except for a few character-building flashbacks). In terms of its structure, this is more what we expect from a war movie than what Flags of Our Fathers offers. The only character common to both films is the island's rough terrain.
The movie begins in late 1944, several months before the conflict, with the arrival of General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) on Iwo Jima. The Japanese realize this will likely be an American target and they dispatch the general to ready the defenses. To this end, he re-deploys artillery from the beaches to the high ground and commissions a series of tunnels designed to protect from air attacks and connect various Japanese strong points. His tactics are scoffed at by some, who see them as cowardly, but applauded by others. As a counterpoint to the General's perspective, the movie provides the point-of-view of a common solider, Saigo (pop star Kazunari Ninomiya), who plays a more important role in events than one might initially suppose.
Although Eastwood does an adequate job of developing the characters into more than paper-thin soldiers, this isn't a character-based piece, and that limits its effectiveness. The movie fascinates because of the unusual rhythms it imparts to a familiar genre: the war film. The Japanese, for example, do not in general believe in surrender, so we know from the start that most of the people in this movie are going to be dead by the time the end credits roll. Instead of surrender, the Japanese options include suicide attacks and blowing themselves up with grenades. Both occur during the course of the movie. This is dying with honor. For many watching the film, the impulse will be to think "what a waste."
Previous movies about Iwo Jima have presented the Japanese as a faceless, implacable enemy. While they put up a stiff defense, they are not as invulnerable as they have been portrayed to be. They are short on men, food, water, and ammunition, are rejected by the mainland when they request reinforcements, and have no air cover. Much of their communications equipment is broken so in many cases the General has no way to reach his men in the field. Human messengers are unreliable; many never reach their destinations. The army is also rife with mutinous thoughts. Some sub-commanders, thinking Kuribayashi to be weak and pro-American (he spent time in the United States and is friendly with some American officers), ignore his orders to fall back and instead commit suicidal frontal attacks. In the end, the Japanese are almost wiped out, but they take a surprisingly large number of Americans with them. To the degree that Iwo Jima is costly to the United States, it is the result of Kuribayashi's strategies. Had he not been hampered by poor communications and recalcitrant officers, he might have done more damage.
Eastwood makes some interesting stylistic choices. Most of the movie is shot in near black-and-white. Occasional muted flashes of color can be observed, especially when there are explosions but, for the most part, the movie is monochromatic. This may be intended as an homage to older World War II movies or it may be an attempt at a pseudo-documentary approach. The battle sequences are effectively presented with good CGI and lots of explosions. There's plenty of gore, although the movie is less visceral than its companion piece. In Flags of Our Fathers, Eastwood seems influenced by Saving Private Ryan. His approach to Letters from Iwo Jima is less bloody. (The black-and-white also defuses the impact of the viscera.) Actually, the movies doesn't show a lot of detailed battle action; it stays with the characters, many of whom don't see a lot of action.
The only actor likely to be familiar to American audiences is Ken Watanabe, who is perhaps best known from The Last Samurai. Watanabe exudes a calm, confident aura - perfect for a general who understands he will not survive this mission and has made peace with that fact. He has a job to do and intends to do it to the best of his ability. Before leaving his wife, he makes sure his affairs are in order. Oddly, the thing that worries him the most is not dying on Iwo Jima, but whether the kitchen floor will be finished. Watanabe's performance places Kuribayashi in good company amidst a large group of brilliant, effective cinematic generals whose on-screen portrayals don't overly exaggerate reality.
Another performer worth singling out is Kazunari Ninomiya, a popular Japanese singing star. Saigo is as far from the stereotype as any character in the film. American movies about World War II demonize the Germans and Japanese. Saigo, however, is just an ordinary guy who thinks the battles are pointless and wants to go home to be with his wife and newborn daughter. Ninomiya's performance brings out the human qualities of Saigo, making viewers reflect about how powerless the pawns are in any war.
Of the 100,000 U.S. troops that participated in the battle of Iwo Jima, nearly 7000 died and 20,000 were injured. The Japanese defenders numbered around 20,000 and only 1000 survived. Iwo Jima, because of its timing and publicity value more than its strategic importance, became one of the Pacific Theater's best known conflicts. With his two 2006 movies, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, Eastwood has stripped away some of the misconceptions about the battle and provided new perspectives. Taken together, the films offer an imperfect but interesting interpretation of history. Of the two, the more straightforward and better focused Letters from Iwo Jima is the stronger movie.