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Letters from Iwo Jima
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| Year: |
2006
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Director: |
Clint Eastwood
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| Stars: |
Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase, Shido Nakamura, Hiroshi Watanabe, Takumi Bando, Yuki Matsuzaki, Takashi Yamaguchi, Eijiro Ozaki, Nobumasa Sakagami, Luke Eberl, Sonny Saito, Steve Santa Sekiyoshi, Mark Moses, Roxanne Hart
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| Genre: |
War |
| Rating: |
  6 (from 3 votes) |
| Review: |
The War in the Paciific is reaching its most terrible height, and the Japanese army have despatched troops to the island of Iwo Jima to defend it against the approaching onslaught of the American military. One of those soildiers is Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), who does not want to be there when he feels the pull of home, and the wife, baby daughter and once-flourishing bakery he left behind. He believes all of this has been ruined by the war, and dreads his own death at the hands of the Americans, with his lack of enthusiasm all too plain to be seen by his martyrdom-obsessed officers. However, a new general, Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) has arrived, and they will have an unexpected connection...
Letters from Iwo Jima was the companion piece to director Clint Eastwood's other movie on the same subject, Flags of Our Fathers, only this time the story was told from the side of the Japanese. Screenwriter Iris Yamashita, with the help of Paul Haggis, had less to work with here as many of the Japanese troops were killed in the battle so their stories went unrecorded, and it's true that in spite of having the letters of the real life General Kuribayashi to study, the gaps in the actual narrative have the sense of being filled with conventional war movie plotting that would operate just as well for the Americans as it would their rivals.
It never gets quite so bad that the Japanese soldiers seem like Americans played by Oriental actors, but without genuine personal tales to rely on, the film looks seriously overpraised. This in spite of a fine performance from Ken Watanabe, who should have been the focus of the film as Saigo is simply too much of the generic "little man caught up in a war he doesn't understand" making the viewer wait through unilluminating lowest in the chain dramatics which feature him when you really want to be getting back to the General. After all, he has an intriguing perspective on the conflict having been an attaché to the United States some years before.
His recognition that the Americans were not all as bad as his country made out puts him in a difficult position as he, for the purposes of Eastwood's vision, is a "Good Japanese" as there would be the idea of the "Good German" in Europe around the time this is set. An entirely laudable notion, as one should not tar every member of a nation with the same brush because of the war atrocities that were carried out in their name, but in spite of hard-edged combat scenes, the impression is that the filmmakers were pussyfooting around the more sobering facts about the depths the Japanese were prepared to sink at this time. I don't mean it should have been a Men Behind the Sun worst of humanity exploitation item, but sentimentalism is not exactly a million miles away.
In fact, the film practically breaks down in tears when it contemplates the waste of life that this one battle resulted in, yet fails to go deeper into why it had to happen at all. At least with Flags of Our Fathers there was a questioning tone about the heroics, here those actions are accepted without much querying: the Japanese order of things was so strict that it created horrible tragedies, the Americans epitomised the nobility of war that the Japanese would have been well to recognise sooner, that sort of thing. There's a scene late on which has two characters discussing the letter they found on a dying American soldier that has them mull over the possibility that their enemy was not any worse than they were, fair enough, but you half expect them to conclude that the United States is the greatest country in the world in the process. So this was a worthy effort, but did little of the useful teaching it so obviously set out to do. Music by Kyle Eastwood and Michael Stevens.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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| Clint Eastwood (1930 - )
Becoming a superstar in the late 1960s gave Clint Eastwood the freedom to direct in the seventies. Thriller Play Misty for Me was a success, and following films such as High Plains Drifter and The Outlaw Josey Wales showed a real talent behind the camera as well as in front of it. He won an Oscar for his downbeat Western Unforgiven, which showed his tendency to subvert his tough guy status in intriguing ways. Another Oscar was awarded for boxing drama Million Dollar Baby, which he also starred in.
Also a big jazz fan, as is reflected in his choice of directing the Charlie Parker biopic Bird. Other films as director include the romantic Breezy, The Gauntlet, good natured comedy Bronco Billy, Honkytonk Man, White Hunter Black Heart, The Bridges of Madison County, OAPs-in-space adventure Space Cowboys, acclaimed murder drama Mystic River, complementary war dramas Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima and harrowing true life drama Changeling. Many considered his Gran Torino, which he promised would be his last starring role (it wasn't), one of the finest of his career and he continued to direct with such biopics as Jersey Boys, American Sniper and The Mule to his name. |
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