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Film review

Another side of the story

Letters From Iwo Jima offers a different perspective on the heroic World War II battle - from the Japanese side of the lines.

By Steve Persall
Published January 18, 2007

Ken Watanabe, right, plays a general commanding Japanese forces on Iwo Jima in Letters from Iwo Jima.
	[Warner Bros.]

Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima and its companion Flags of Our Fathers couldn't be more different, yet they're inexorably joined.

Calling them companion pieces isn't entirely accurate; thematically, they're as adversarial as the World War II combatants they revere. Each could exist without the other, but each offers only one side of a momentous stance on patriotism and its exploitation.

The Americans in Flags of Our Fathers who victoriously raised Old Glory over Iwo Jima became poster boys for war bonds, uncomfortable with being celebrated for doing their duty and guilty about leaving brothers behind. Japanese troops in Letters From Iwo Jima become part of the grinder effect, practically sentenced to death by leaders seeking defeat with honor.

The common denominator of Eastwood's films is humanity as a casualty of war. Everyone who fought on Iwo Jima was a noble victim, the films declare. Heroism is honored in both movies even as its risks and reasoning are damned. Politics aside, the U.S. and Japanese troops facing the unknown on an isolated slab in the Pacific weren't that different: proud and ready to give all for their countries.

Letters is the bolder cinematic gamble: mostly drained of color except fire and blood reds, spoken almost entirely in subtitled Japanese by unknown actors, with the exception of Ken Watanabe The Last Samurai, Memoirs of a Geisha as the general defending Japanese soil against impossible odds. Rather than awesome battleground images, Eastwood usually keeps Letters claustrophobically pinned inside caves where Japanese troops hid, and where many committed suicide with hand grenades rather than surrender.

The iconic flag-raising atop Mount Suribachi is only a distant, almost unnoticed dot on the screen. Eastwood doggedly maintains the Japanese perspective, even when the two films aesthetically cross paths.

The effect is similar to German and French trenches housing drama in All Quiet on the Western Front and Paths of Glory, an impression of war much different than the jingoistic American war movies Flags of Our Fathers deconstructed. Foes without faces are given plenty of countenances: defiant, scared, homesick, brave, all those human qualities that know no borders. Flashbacks show what they left behind in Japan and likely won't see again.

Some may not appreciate seeing "the enemy" portrayed as something other than the bloodthirsty savages described by propaganda. Atrocities committed by Japanese troops in other battles don't figure into Eastwood's film. Some will misguidedly consider that a whitewash.

One fascinating scene shows a captured U.S. soldier comforted by a Japanese officer with stories of celebrity brushes in Hollywood. Watanabe's character studied in the U.S. and regrets that a country he admires is an opponent.

Letters From Iwo Jima doesn't sympathize with the enemy; it empathizes with their position as pawns in a brutal game with constantly changing rules. Japanese defense of Iwo Jima was strategically akin to defending the Alamo. Observing fighters so devoted to a lost cause is at once inspiring and heartbreaking. Eastwood masterfully instructs viewers to reassess a worthy enemy and realize at heart that they were us.

Review

Letters From Iwo Jima

Grade: A

Director: Clint Eastwood

Cast: Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase, Shido Nakamura, Hiroshi Watanabe, Takumi Bando

Screenplay: Iris Yamashita, based on the book Picture Letters From Commander in Chief by Tadamichi Kuribayashi and Tsuyoko Yoshido

Rating: R; graphic violence, profanity

Running time: 142 min.

[Last modified January 17, 2007, 07:06:38]