Story Highlights
• CNN.com's Tom Charity: New Eastwood film 'a masterpiece'• 'Letters From Iwo Jima' tells battle story from Japanese POV
• Film has strong performances, steady, reflective direction
(CNN) -- There aren't many examples of war films made from the vantage point of 'the enemy,' but perhaps there should be more.
Orson Welles told Sam Peckinpah that 'Cross of Iron' (Peckinpah's 1977 film about Germans on World War II's Eastern Front) was the best antiwar film he had ever seen, and Lewis Milestone's 1930 best picture winner, 'All Quiet on the Western Front,' still holds up.
Clint Eastwood's reverse angle on the brutal battle for Iwo Jima is a remarkable companion piece to 'Flags of Our Fathers,' and the better of the two films. It is also the only American movie of the year I won't hesitate to call a masterpiece.
Shot almost entirely in Japanese, and even more monochromatic than its predecessor, the film has a more linear trajectory than 'Flags,' only leaving the barren Pacific island for a handful of brief flashbacks when a soldier swaps his rifle for a pen and reminisces to loved ones he never expects to see again.
The device is a good one, permitting Eastwood to strike the same rueful, reflective key he found in 'Unforgiven,' 'Bridges of Madison County' and 'Million Dollar Baby,' even in the midst of nightmarish combat scenes. It also allows us access to fears and sentiments proud Japanese soldiers would be unlikely to express aloud. Indeed, the first time we see Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), he is beaten by an officer for a casual defeatist remark.
Saigo's fatalism is more honest than that of the Imperial High Command, which neglects to advise General Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) that the naval fleet has been destroyed and with it any hopes for victory. In any case, the general realizes that the best he can do is delay the Americans for as long as possible.
He orders miles of tunnels to be dug out of the island's volcanic rock, and draws up plans to consolidate his beleaguered forces through a series of strategic withdrawals. The plans outrage his subordinates, indoctrinated in Bushido ('way of the warrior'): death before dishonor.
None of the four characters we get to know best in Iris Yamashita's screenplay share this crazed militaristic mindset, but even the two relatively enlightened officers, Kuribayashi and Lt. Vegas pro 13 serial key 1tr. Col Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara) cannot break free from its bonds. Ken Watanabe makes the general a shrewd and charismatic leader, but if the film has a hero, it's Saigo, the least conventionally heroic of the lot. He's an infantryman who still thinks of himself as a baker, and who is at greater risk from his own army's suicidal zeal than the American onslaught.
In a pivotal sequence, Nishi -- a horseman who competed in the Los Angeles Olympics of 1932 -- orders his medic to treat a mortally wounded American GI with what remains of their morphine. Later he translates a letter from the dead man's mother for the benefit of his men. They are surprised and touched by its simple, heartfelt sentiments, and what they reveal of the enemy their rulers have systematically demonized: 'Come home safe; do the right thing because it is right ..,' she writes.
'My mother said the same things to me,' Shimizu (Ryo Kase), a disgraced military policeman, admits to Saigo. He deserts, but in the midst of battle, even surrender is dangerous. He sits, oblivious, with another POW, while two GIs callously decide their fate over a smoke.
The Pacific campaign was tremendously hard-fought, culminating in the firebombing of Tokyo and the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Twenty-one thousand Japanese troops died in the intense fighting on Iwo Jima, a volcanic island a mere eight square miles in area.
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Eastwood's spare, fluid, eloquent movie shows atrocities on both sides, squarely attributes the worst of these to Japan's military-Imperial dictatorship, and gently sifts the black sands of Iwo Jima for moments of solace, grace and mercy.
'Letters From Iwo Jima' runs 141 minutes and is rated R. For Entertainment Weekly's take, click here.
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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.
But of course there are other, contrasting stories, a handful of which form the core of ’s harrowing, contemplative new movie and the companion to his 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 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.
Continue reading the main storyThe 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.
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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.
“Letters From Iwo Jima” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes extremely graphic combat violence.
LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA
Opens today in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Directed by ; written (in Japanese, with English subtitles) by Iris Yamashita, based on a story by Ms. Yamashita and Paul Haggis; director of photography, Tom Stern; edited by Joel Cox and Gary D. Roach; music by Kyle Eastwood and Michael Stevens; production designers, Henry Bumstead and James J. Murakami; produced by Mr. Eastwood, Steven Spielberg and Robert Lorenz; released by Warner Brothers Pictures and DreamWorks Pictures. Running time: 141 minutes.
WITH: Ken Watanabe (Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi), Kazunari Ninomiya (Saigo), Tsuyoshi Ihara (Baron Nishi), Ryo Kase (Shimizu), Shidou Nakamura (Lieutenant Ito) and Nae (Hanako).
Letters From Iwo Jima Blu Ray Review
Letters From Iwo Jima
DirectorClint Eastwood
WritersIris Yamashita, Tadamichi Kuribayashi, Tsuyoko Yoshido
StarKen Watanabe
RatingR
Running Time2h 21m
GenresDrama, History, War
- Movie data powered by IMDb.com
Last updated: Nov 2, 2017
Letters from Iwo Jima Blu-ray Review
Taking a black page from history, Eastwood delivers a stark, unflinching and humanist portrait of Japanese soldiers.
Reviewed by Greg Maltz, September 22, 2007
Clint Eastwood's Japanese perspective of the battle of Iwo Jima is like a cloud. In shifting shades of foreboding and despondence, the film delivers an account of events with the action of a war epic, the detail of a documentary and the emotional impact of a drama. Collectively, the experience of the Japanese troops takes on many forms. Some characters, including the leader, Lt. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), are too complex to pin down firmly. Others, like the bumbling Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), are motivated only to return to their family and care nothing for the war or their superiors. From idealistic honor to bitter defeat to heartbroken fatalism, the spirit of the soldiers is given life decades after the war from the words they wrote on Iwo Jima. Using the troops' handwritten letters as a vehicle for his film, Eastwood attempts to focus his lens on the humanity of a battle that was inhuman.
Hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned, the Japanese forces on Iwo Jima were concerned less with how to win than with how to die. Once mainland Japan leadership established that no reinforcements, tanks or planes could be spared in the defense of Iwo Jima, Kuribayashi and his men knew that the battle was essentially a suicide mission. Eastwood shows in brutal detail that the Japanese code of honor led many troops to pull their grenade pins and hold the explosive charges against their chests with grisly results. Other soldiers engaged in banzai missions at the command of their leaders. While those offensive tactics were largely effective against the poorly trained Chinese forces Japan faced earlier in the war, the US military made short work of the charging Japanese soldiers. Still, Letters from Iwo Jimo shows how the Japanese dug in to the island's rugged terrain to inflict maximum damage to the Americans.
At many points, the film dovetails with Flags of Our Fathers, Eastwood's sister production that portrays the war from the U.S. soldiers' perspective. In fact, both films were shot at the same time to make use of closely linked scenes. But where Flags of Our Fathers was mostly unsuccessful in establishing a strong emotional bond between the audience and the soldiers, Saigo was the key to the power of Letters from Iwo Jima. Through Saigo, the audience experienced not only the overall horror endured by Japanese forces, but also the moments of humanity. Saigo was the one character guided purely by human instincts and not by Japan's reckless chain of command. What the movie doesn't show is that Japan badly terrorized the people of China, the Philippines and other Asia/Pacific countries in the most inhuman ways imaginable. Iwo Jima was America's stepping stone--a key strategic base to eventually put a stop to Japan's war machine. And that is why the battle of Iwo Jima, in spite of its barren locale, was a critical front in the war and a worthy focal point in history.
Letters from Iwo Jima Blu-ray Review
Taking a black page from history, Eastwood delivers a stark, unflinching and humanist portrait of Japanese soldiers.
Reviewed by Greg Maltz, September 22, 2007
Clint Eastwood's Japanese perspective of the battle of Iwo Jima is like a cloud. In shifting shades of foreboding and despondence, the film delivers an account of events with the action of a war epic, the detail of a documentary and the emotional impact of a drama. Collectively, the experience of the Japanese troops takes on many forms. Some characters, including the leader, Lt. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), are too complex to pin down firmly. Others, like the bumbling Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), are motivated only to return to their family and care nothing for the war or their superiors. From idealistic honor to bitter defeat to heartbroken fatalism, the spirit of the soldiers is given life decades after the war from the words they wrote on Iwo Jima. Using the troops' handwritten letters as a vehicle for his film, Eastwood attempts to focus his lens on the humanity of a battle that was inhuman.
Clint Eastwood Iwo Jima Movie
Hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned, the Japanese forces on Iwo Jima were concerned less with how to win than with how to die. Once mainland Japan leadership established that no reinforcements, tanks or planes could be spared in the defense of Iwo Jima, Kuribayashi and his men knew that the battle was essentially a suicide mission. Eastwood shows in brutal detail that the Japanese code of honor led many troops to pull their grenade pins and hold the explosive charges against their chests with grisly results. Other soldiers engaged in banzai missions at the command of their leaders. While those offensive tactics were largely effective against the poorly trained Chinese forces Japan faced earlier in the war, the US military made short work of the charging Japanese soldiers. Still, Letters from Iwo Jimo shows how the Japanese dug in to the island's rugged terrain to inflict maximum damage to the Americans.
At many points, the film dovetails with Flags of Our Fathers, Eastwood's sister production that portrays the war from the U.S. soldiers' perspective. In fact, both films were shot at the same time to make use of closely linked scenes. But where Flags of Our Fathers was mostly unsuccessful in establishing a strong emotional bond between the audience and the soldiers, Saigo was the key to the power of Letters from Iwo Jima. Through Saigo, the audience experienced not only the overall horror endured by Japanese forces, but also the moments of humanity. Saigo was the one character guided purely by human instincts and not by Japan's reckless chain of command. What the movie doesn't show is that Japan badly terrorized the people of China, the Philippines and other Asia/Pacific countries in the most inhuman ways imaginable. Iwo Jima was America's stepping stone--a key strategic base to eventually put a stop to Japan's war machine. And that is why the battle of Iwo Jima, in spite of its barren locale, was a critical front in the war and a worthy focal point in history.