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MOVIE: Letters From Iwo Jima
Directed By Clint Eastwood * Written by Iris Yamashita * Starring Ken Watanabe * Released by Warner Brothers
Reviewed by Rusty Pipes
Letters From Iwo Jima is a rare and incredibly moving account of the second world war from the Japanese side. Ultimately it's far more moving than its companion piece, Flags of Our Fathers. Where Flags is mostly about post traumatic stress, Letters is mostly about the trauma itself, or more precisely, the human sacrifice of soldiers involved in a hopeless last stand.
Few movies carry the historical impact of this story. Director Clint Eastwood takes advantage of many scenes he made for Flags and of course the real setting of Iwo Jima itself. In the first film we see the American fleet pounding Suribachi with bombs and broadsides, in Letters we see the receiving side of that pounding. The realism with which the fighting is portrayed in both films is as poignant and lasting as anything in Saving Private Ryan. Flags, however, suffers somewhat from too many flashbacks; its story telling becomes very disjointed. Iwo has flashbacks too, but it is far more cohesive and it rumbles toward the demise of the Japanese garrison like a hellbound train.
Letter writing by the soldiers provides the narrative force of the movie as they write to loved ones on the Japanese mainland. They start with the arrival of their new commander, General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, at the tiny outpost a few months before the American attack. The real Kuribayashi had been to America and, among the Japanese commanders, he understood better than anyone what he was up against. He knew all the soldiers would die but his tactic was to make the battle as costly as possible so that the Americans would think twice about invading the Japanese homeland. To that end he had his soldiers build miles of tunnels into the tiny island, in order to fight almost entirely from underground. His tactics worked. Hugely outnumbered and outgunned, his soldiers held out for several weeks on an island only a few miles long.
Comparisons to the Last Samurai are inevitable as it's another story of devotion to duty in a lost cause, and it also featured Ken Watanabe. Here in his native Japanese Watanabe excels as Kuribayashi. Less familiar to Americans is Tsuyoshi Ihara as Baron Nishi, a dashing Olympic horseman who's joined the doomed forces. Even more central to the story is Kazunari Ninomiya's portrayal of Saigo, a foot soldier who used to be a baker in Tokyo and whose main desire is simply to return to his wife and unborn child. It is his interactions with the other soldiers and the often suicidal officers that bring home the desperation they all must have felt.
Most war movies are kill-em-all affairs where the enemy is faceless. Letters, however, gives back humanity to the other side with unforgettable force. Moreover, in the combination of Letters From iwo Jima and Flags Of Our Fathers, Clint Eastwood has made a powerful, uniquely detailed and quite unprecedented view of both sides of a monumental struggle. He gives his audience a new level of understanding to what all soldiers go through and how similar their experiences really are. Maybe someday we will have enough knowledge to make a pair of movies about Iraq in the same way.
The Skinny:
Did I enjoy the movie?: It was a learning experience more than enjoyment.
Would I go to see it again?: Right now I have battle fatigue, but this story will drag me in again, no doubt.
© 2007 - Rusty Pipes