Letters from Iwo Jima (Clint Eastwood)
Eastwood's companion piece to
Flags of Our Fathers that recreates the WWII battle from the Japanese perspective, it is moving, thoughtful, frightening and poetic - just about everything the other movie wasn't. A Japanese cast blissfully speaking Japanese is led by international star Ken Watanabe as General Tadamichi Kuribayashi who in the summer of 1945 was given the unenviable task of defending the small island of Iwo Jima about 500 miles south of Tokyo. Unenviable because as the General learned after he had arrived, Japan had not only been misleading its people on how well they were doing in the Pacific Theater but had even misled the command. The air and naval support plus thousands more soldiers and tanks General Kuribayashi was expecting were not to be had. The Imperial Naval fleet was in disarray by mid-'45 and the General realized he and his 22,000 men were left on a futile suicide mission where they must hold the island for as long as possible against the overwhelming might of the American forces closing in. Victory was impossible. The best they could hope for was to drag the battle out for weeks rather than days, until virtually every Japanese soldier was dead.
Watanabe is perfect in the role, and Kuribayashi is presented as a thoughtful, energetic and slightly unconventional officer who has a deeper code of honor than many of his other officers initially assess. While there is some discontent among those officers, to the regular soldiers he is the most admirable commander they could hope for. The soldier we spend the most time with is a young man named Saigo, played very well by former Japanese pop star Kazunari Ninomiya. He is a humble baker who has been drafted into service, and while he certainly loves his country he has no blind knee-jerk patriotism and loves his wife and infant son much more than the black volcanic sand he is defending on Iwo Jima. Through a handful of flashbacks we see Saigo, General Kuribayashi and a couple of the others in their lives before the War, and through some of their letters we learn a bit more. Once the American invasion begins, the true horror and honor of war is displayed on screen.
Knowing he had no air or naval support, Kuribayashi didn't plan to hold the beaches and airfield as he would have in a conventional attack but readied for the battle by digging into the rocks and volcano on the island, creating an massive network of caves to hide his men and artillery. While unconventional, it was a brilliant plan given what he had to work with. Brilliant up to a point, as he knew he was only prolonging the inevitable American victory. Most of the men too realize that they will not leave the island alive much less victorious, but they fight on anyway. As they run out of ammo and hope, some stationed in Mt. Suribach commit suicide (by grenade, which is a messy way to go and part of the horror Adam Beach's Ira Hayes witnessed in
Flags that haunted him). The rest of the soldiers tried to make their way across the island to the command post buried underground. It is a Hellish journey, and the few that make it all the way arrive to no food and water and just as much desperation as they had fled.
The battle scenes are graphic and kinetic, and the final dignified assault that Kuribayashi leads his men on is poetic, but like any great war movie it is great because it shows the humanity of the men fighting and is essentially anti-war in its message. Not that there isn't honor to be found in the sacrifice, but that there is more honor to be found in life. Clint's decision to make this in addition to
Flags of Our Fathers is a cinematic gift.
GRADE: A
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