| HOME | FILM | ESSAYS | WUYUETIAN |
Early in Flags of Our Fathers, there's an unspoken insight that deepens the sadness of a sequence in which mostly green U.S. troops hit the beach on Iwo Jima. Japanese dug in and camouflaged just beyond the sand wait for the first patrol to find no enemy and call the mass of troops ashore, and then they mow down the first wave of oncoming men. From the scenes leading up to the battle, it's clear that the loss of those American lives was just assumed, an inevitable cost of the battle. But soon after, the massive U.S. force is able to get to those first Japanese dugouts with grenades and flamethrowers. The first line of Japanese was doomed, too.
There's much to like and more to admire in Flags of Our Fathers, but it would be a stronger film if more observations like that one were left up to the viewer. The story follows three of the servicemen who helped raise the famous flag on Iwo Jima on day five of what became a 35-day battle. After the battle, they were sent home for a long national tour of war bond rallies, including one at which they recreated the flag-raising on a papier-mache mountain. Flags makes the point that America -- especially the cash-strapped Treasury -- needed heroes and an image of victory rather than a complicated truth. The film shows the reality that there were two flag-raisings and that half the men in the photograph died before the battle was over. Basing the film on the book Flags of Our Fathers, by James Bradley and Ron Powers, Eastwood follows the three photo heroes throughout their tour and into the years beyond. But the only coherent point of this story is that they weren't heroes at all -- or at least, no more than their comrades were. It's an important lesson, but not one that takes two hours and 12 minutes to give. The rest of their story, as reality will do, goes off in several directions and doesn't provide the clear dramatic arcs that Eastwood seems to want to deliver.
Where Flags is strongest is in the battle. Thanks to good writing and direction, the action is easy to understand and consistently suspenseful. There are no cheap victory thrills here, just grim surprises, sudden deaths, and fear. It's on a par with Saving Private Ryan, though on a smaller scale. It appears that Eastwood drew heavily on real news photos, many of which are shown over the closing credits, to create the look of the battle scenes. In any case, the scenes have a sense of realism. They were actually shot on a beach in Iceland, with Mt. Suribachi added with computer graphics, but as in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a good battle story keeps us from noticing.
From Iwo Jima, the movie shifts back and forth to the post-battle bond drive. The tour comes across as it probably did to the men involved in it: one rally, reception and train station after another. And the focus here is on Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), an American Indian who endured jokes and racism but was overcome with guilt and developed a drinking problem. His story simply isn't consistently interesting enough to carry half the movie, and Beach isn't the strongest actor in the cast. That honor belongs to Ryan Philippe as John "Doc" Bradley, tempering moral questioning with martial stoicism. In one scene where he has to embroider the truth for a dead soldier's mother (Myra Turley, in a brief but excellent performance), the tension is palpable. However, most of the time the stateside action pales in comparison to the battle. That's also true for the lengthy scenes of author Bradley (Tom McCarthy) interviewing his father and the third flag-raiser. Flags has its heart in the right place, and Eastwood deserves a lot of credit for making it as part of a pair with Letters from Iwo Jima, which will tell the Japanese side of the story. But once off the island, his old-fashioned technique doesn't match his modern instinct to exchange myths for truth.