Letters from Iwo Jima
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Nothing smarts like a lost battle. Although Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima makes an engaging case for the relevance of individual perseverance amid warfare, it’s still a downer to watch hordes of Japanese soldiers off themselves in the face of certain defeat. The story encapsulates a month-long confrontation in early 1945 between the United States and Japan on a sulfuric landmass in the middle of the Pacific with no easy way out. Earlier this year, Eastwood’s first exploration of the events, Flags of Our Fathers, exclusively identified with American soldiers—while their enemy lurked intangibly in the shadows. Despite a few justified jabs at rampant star spangling (a single patriotic photograph distracted the folks back home from the ongoing casualties of war), Eastwood curiously chose to conclude by glorifying the survivors and washing away the trauma of casualties with facile sentimentalism.
Letters from Iwo Jima, which takes the Japanese perspective and adopts their language, avoids the temptation of an incredulous feel-good climax. It shoots a menacing scowl at Flags of Our Fathers and never lets up—like watching a showdown between Schindler’s List and Shoah.
Of course, Eastwood doesn’t blacken the material; history takes care of that. A certain success for the Americans, the battle of Iwo Jima was a suicide mission for the Japanese military, which eventually settled for putting up a valiant fight and losing its stronghold in order to discourage its enemies from invading mainland Japan. The movie, directed from a screenplay by Japanese-American Iris Yamashita, captures a rapid decline in organization: Strategies are established and promptly forgotten, leaving only the deeply involving tragedy of personal failure.
At the center of the operation, Lt. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) provides a complex moral quandary. Gentle at heart, he once frequented dinner parties with American diplomats and now wields his familiarity with the Western mindset in order to oppose it. Other characters seek an exit strategy, particularly the humble baker Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), who questions the point of committing suicide when surrendering yields the same outcome. Backstories unfold through voiceovers and (occasionally drawn-out) flashbacks triggered when the men compose notes to loved ones and pontificate on mortality.
As a narrative device, the letters are disarming because of their straightforward mode of address. The technique has a simplistic technical structure, creating the misleading air of a low-budget production. Eastwood’s minimalist aesthetic intentionally belies the devastating action sequences. American bombs ravage the Japanese bases, the camera careens wildly across destruction, and troops swarm the shores, literally overwhelming the frame. The Japanese, claustrophobically jammed into tunnels and barracks, transition from warriors into figures of sympathy. The sole evidence of an American filmmaker lies during an intriguing interaction between a wounded U.S. soldier and his captor, who touchingly discovers that the dying man holds a letter of his own. Arguing that universality of emotion transcends partisan battle lines, Eastwood justifies his year-end double bill. If the patriotism in Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima contradict each other, the paradox is a necessity.
