ENTERTAINMENT / Review
Flags of Our Fathers
By Kenneth Turan
Updated: 2006-10-23 16:11
"Flags of Our Fathers" is a story of extremes. It's the story of great
heroism on a tiny island, of a photograph taken in 1/400 of a second that
wreaked havoc with the lives of everyone in it and influenced the course
of a war.
It's also a very American tale, set 60 years ago but startlingly relevant
today, which intertwines and often contrasts bravery and chicanery,
idealism and disillusion, war and propaganda, truth and national
security. This sad true story wrings you out emotionally because it's
concerned with the deaths of young men in battle and what happens when
the needs of those who survive clash with what society expects and
politics demands.
A narrative like this requires a measured, classical style to be most
effective, and it couldn't have found a better director than Clint
Eastwood. After two best picture Oscars, 26 films behind the camera and
more than 50 years as an actor, Clint Eastwood knows a gripping story and
how to tell it. He found this one in James Bradley's book about the
celebrated Feb. 23, 1945, flag-raising on Iwo Jima, a narrative that was
nearly a year on The New York Times bestseller list and has 3 million
copies in print.
Bradley (who co-wrote the book with Ron Powers) was not a disinterested
World War II historian. His father, Navy corpsman John "Doc" Bradley, was
the only non-Marine of the six men who raised the flag and figured in Joe
Rosenthal's iconic photograph.
Bradley also was one of the three who survived perhaps the most hellish
battle of the war only to be brought back to the U.S. and exhibited like
a prize heifer in a crucial war bonds tour, nicknamed the Mighty 7th,
which saw the raising of an unprecedented and much-needed $26.3 billion
for the war effort. The author's quest to understand how that unnerving
combination of experiences whipsawed his father and his comrades is the
engine that powers the book and this gripping, emotional film.
Certainly everything about the Iwo Jima firestorm and its aftermath
turned out to be so much larger than life that it led to three previous
films, a Johnny Cash song and the 100-ton statue of the six men that
dominates Arlington National Cemetery.
Twenty-seven Congressional Medals of Honor, the most ever for one battle,
were earned on Iwo Jima; one-third of all Marines who died in World War
II were killed on that 7 1/2-square-mile island, as were 95 percent of
its 22,000 Japanese defenders, whose story Eastwood will tell in a
parallel film, "Letters From Iwo Jima," to be released in early 2007.
Making this carnage that much more poignant was the fact that most of it
was happening to boys/men in their teens and early 20s. Eastwood and his
casting director, Phyllis Huffman (who, like veteran production designer
Henry Bumstead, died before the film was released), tried hard to select
actors who either were young or looked it. The result is a strong
ensemble that includes Ryan Phillippe, Jesse Bradford and Adam Beach as
the three flag-raising survivors and Barry Pepper as their sergeant.
Written by William Broyles Jr. (himself a former Marine) and Paul Haggis
("Million Dollar Baby," "Crash"), "Flags of Our Fathers" opts for an
opening that is structurally complex, touching lightly on most of the
situations and viewpoints the film will eventually flesh out.
The first shot is of a young soldier (Phillippe) alone in the devastated
lunar landscape that was Iwo Jima in combat (these sequences were shot in
Iceland, which has similar black sand beaches). This, we learn in
seconds, is a recurring dream an elderly Doc Bradley has of himself on
Iwo, desperately looking for the close buddy, Ralph "Iggy" Ignatowski
(Jamie Bell), that he has unaccountably become separated from.
In addition to Bradley in combat and in retirement, we witness the fuss
Rosenthal's photo, considered perhaps the most reproduced shot in
history, made from the moment it was first seen. And we also get a
glimpse of the surreal nature of the ensuing bond tour; the first
flag-raising we see is not the real thing but a garish re-creation before
100,000 spectators at Chicago's Soldier Field.
We also hear photographer Rosenthal as he attempts to explain why his
picture touched a national nerve. "What we do in war, the cruelty is
almost incomprehensible," he says. "But somehow we need to make sense of
it. The right picture can win or lose a war. I took a lot of other
pictures that day, but none of them made a difference. Looking it at, you
could believe the sacrifice was not a waste."
It's at this point that the men who raised the flag are introduced
softly, not really differentiated from the others in their units.
Although "Flags" eventually shows us all six, it concentrates on
experienced Sgt. Mike Strank (Pepper, a veteran of "Saving Private Ryan")
and the three men who will make it back alive.
First among equals is Bradley, the calm, centered undertaker-in-training
whose character is well served by Phillippe's naturally haunted air. Most
problematic as a soldier is handsome Rene Gagnon (Bradford), a.k.a. "our
own Tyrone Power," who literally joined the Marines because he liked the
uniform.
Then there is Ira Hayes ("Smoke Signals' " Beach), an American Indian
from the Pima tribe, a soldier whose grim experiences putting up with
constant prejudicial put-downs and surviving the most brutal hand-to-hand
combat are the emotional heart of the film. With the Japanese so
entrenched in a system of underground bunkers and tunnels that many
Marines never saw an enemy soldier alive, the landing at Iwo is
portrayed, in the film's action centerpiece, as especially devastating in
the "Saving Private Ryan" tradition. As shot by Eastwood veteran Tom
Stern, the battle is pure, pitiless chaos, a unflinchingly graphic look
at the split-second randomness of who stays alive and who is savagely cut
down.
Compared to this brutality, the two flag-raisings that took place on Iwo
Jima's Mount Suribachi (the film is careful to explain this often
misunderstood situation) ended up being no big deal at all, mundane
moments that were the equivalent, as one of the survivors said, of
"becoming a hero for putting up a pole." But that is precisely what
happened. It happened because no one counted on the torrential effect of
that photograph, which, among other things, ended up on 150 million
postage stamps. The trio of surviving flag-raisers are air-lifted back to
the States, in Hayes' case very much against his will, and in effect
media-ganged into an extensive public relations tour to raise that
much-needed money.
The bulk of "Flags of our Fathers" cuts back and forth between the tour
and the men's flashbacks to the hellacious combat on Iwo, detailing the
reality the survivors are haunted by, a reality that makes them
powerfully uncomfortable with being lionized for their connection to what
they consider to be a misleading picture.
This conflict between the reality of the flag-raising and the image the
government insisted on projecting for its own needs (a conflict that
including refusing to correct a misidentification of one of the dead
flag-raisers) is the "Flags of Our Fathers" theme that resonates most
pointedly today.
It is interesting to note, in this age of the overblown Jessica Lynch
story and President Bush's "Mission Accomplished" aircraft carrier
speech, that the need to create media heroes and the determination to use
war for political/governmental purposes has hardly gone away.
The war in Iraq was likely not high on anyone's mind when this film was
conceptualized, but the echoes of the current conflict turn out to be
inescapable.
As he did in "Unforgiven," "Mystic River" and "Million Dollar Baby,"
Eastwood handles this nuanced material with aplomb, giving every element
of this complex story just the weight it deserves. The director's lean
dispassion, his increased willingness to be strongly emotional while
retaining an instinctive restraint, continues to astonish. We are close
to blessed to have Eastwood still working at age 76 and more fortunate
still that challenging material like "Flags of Our Fathers" is what he
wants to be doing.
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