Whitman news since 1896

Whitman Wire

Vol. CLIV, Issue 6
Whitman news since 1896

Whitman Wire

Whitman news since 1896

Whitman Wire

‘Letters From Iwo Jima’

by Teal Greyhavens
COLUMNIST

I have not seen Flags of Our Fathers, and from what I can tell that’s probably why I didn’t like Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima as much as most critics seem to. The two movies tell the story of the 1945 battle for the tiny island of Iwo Jima, first from the American perspective (in Flags) and then from the Japanese point of view. Letters is nominated for Best Picture at this year’s Academy Awards, and has garnered about as much critical praise as Eastwood’s 2004 winner Million Dollar Baby. It’s a technically accomplished picture, and a superb gesture from mainstream Hollywood, but I have one problem, and that’s that the movie essentially hinges on a gimmick.

Telling a war story from the enemy’s point of view is one grandiose gimmick, of course, but it would have been much more if the film had actually gone somewhere original with its original premise. Sadly, Letters from Iwo Jima, aside from being in Japanese and featuring Japanese protagonists killing Americans, is a pretty humdrum war movie. Its tried-and-true lessons––––the enemy is people too! war is terrible! sometimes orders must be questioned!––––are rattled through with a sort of brash flatness, as though the changed-point-of-view trick makes narrative ingenuity unnecessary. There are strong scenes, but war movies carry the burden of taking material that is naturally powerful––––fathers dying with pictures of their children in hand would make dirt cry––––and piecing it together so that it amounts to insight and not just impact. Eastwood seems so confident in the idea of his movie that he’s accidentally put it on autopilot.

The situation on Iwo Jima before the arrival of the Americans, as portrayed in the film, is something like the slow dawning on board the Titanic post-iceberg. The gifted general Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), who has spent some time in America and is sad to now face them as the enemy, tries and tries again to order reinforcements from the mainland, but none come. The Americans are coming with 100,000 men; the Japanese have 20,000. In an inspired strategy, Kuribayashi has his men dig a series of caves and tunnels into the island’s rocky bluffs for defense; this leads to what must have been an eerie landing for the Americans, who are allowed to move well onto the beach before being fired on. From there, the battle winds all over the island, over 35 days, and by the end the Japanese are devastated.

As the defense in the movie slowly and inexorably turns hopeless, and we’ve spent more than an hour inside the snaking caves and tunnels, we feel the oppressive claustrophobia and weariness of battle as few other movies have made us feel––––and while that is an achievement, it isn’t really leavened with any thought. We can’t be impressed that we’re seeing things from the Japanese point of view for two and a half hours––––at some point an independent story has to develop, and Letters’ is lackluster.

The real question is what reception the film would have had without Flags of Our Fathers. The one-two punch of seeing Iwo Jima from the American perspective and then the Japanese is a clever experiment, but could either film stand on its own, or be worthy of Best Picture? I don’t think so. Enough war movies have won that award, and there have been plenty of foreign films that show the “other” side. Why should this one, filtered through one of the most American of all directors, be so special?

It’s a funny thing to see this movie as a Whitman student. We’ve been awash in recognize-the-Other, abandon-your-culturocentrism for quite a while now. Has that, perhaps, informed my apparently high standards for this act of cultural diplomacy? Eastwood’s movie, though probably the biggest dose of the “enemy” most Americans will have seen in a long time, struck me as still so steeped in fundamentally American value systems, and infused with such a subtle indictment of Japan’s cultural/military sensibilities, that I wondered if this film might actually be more dangerous than the standard woo-hoo-America patter. It’s well and good to pat yourself on the back for walking in someone else’s shoes, but you’d better make sure you actually wore their shoes, and not the American imitation brand. My suggestion? For a lesson in the Japanese military way of life, try something by a little-known director named Akira Kurosawa.

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