Battle cry

Lt. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) is ordered to defend the island of Iwo Jima in Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima. (Merie W. Wallace/Warner Bros. Pictures)

Clint Eastwood’s bookend films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima make up a project of considerable artistic ambition and scope: two epics at once steeped in, and yet deeply sceptical of, the war-film genre and its mythologies. Flags, which was released last fall, took apart notions of heroism. It followed three soldiers who participated in the raising of the American flag on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima in 1945; the iconic photograph of the event was used to help sell the war at home. Letters from Iwo Jima turns that film’s perspective inside out. Here, the story centres on soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army who were charged with defending the arid, grubby outpost. (“There’s nothing sacred about this island,” gripes one disenchanted draftee, “the Americans can have it.”) Letters from Iwo Jima focuses on the weeks leading up to and including the 36-day battle that would leave more than 6,000 American and 20,000 Japanese soldiers dead.

It’s not the first American war movie to star the enemy; the pacifist-minded Oscar winner All Quiet on the Western Front, for instance, was set in the German trenches of the First World War. But Eastwood — not a political director in the conventional sense — is less interested in making an anti-war movie than he is in humanizing the Japanese, who have long been caricatured in Hollywood films about the Second World War. At Iwo Jima, they were outnumbered (20,000 troops versus America’s 110,000), short on weapons and suffering from dysentery. In its pathological denial of its impending defeat, the Imperial military command gave the island’s sitting-duck troops no air or navy support, effectively abandoning them to martyrdom.

While Flags of Our Fathers sought, in part, to understand what it means to live with the consequences of war, the men in Letters from Iwo Jima have given up all hope of surviving. This is a film about honour, duty and certain death. In other words, it’s the kind of story to which Eastwood — one of Hollywood’s most romantic anti-romantics — is typically drawn. In his hands, the film looks handsome, classic (he evokes John Ford to stunning effect) and self-assured. Cinematographer Tom Stern, who also shot Flags of Our Fathers, makes the movie as sun-bleached and stark as the island itself; the black, volcanic sand looks like it was imported directly from Club Med Hades. The monotone grey is relieved only by the lurid yellow-orange blasts of weapon fire, the deep red sun emblem on the Japanese flag and maroon gushes of blood. The soldiers’ silent wait for the American attack in the dark gloom of Mount Suribachi’s tunnels is shiveringly creepy in its claustrophobia and sense of doom.

At a time when America is deep in the suck of war against an enemy thought to be as death-infatuated as the Japanese were perceived to be in the ’40s, it’s gutsy to make a film in which the audience is asked to sympathize — if not entirely root for — the other side. Shooting it almost entirely in Japanese (with English subtitles) is riskier still. Yet this spectacularly filmed, superbly acted elegy falls short of being a great film due to Eastwood’s decision to transport the standard American foxhole types to the Japanese-dug caves of Iwo Jima. The sympathetic everyman? Check. The sadistic, by-the-book captain? Check. The soldier with a secret? The noble, handsome leader? Check and check.

Japanese soldiers tend to their wounded in Letters from Iwo Jima. (Merie W. Wallace/Warner Bros Pictures)

That noble leader, Lt.-Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi (whose recently unearthed letters are one of the film’s sources), is played with intelligent grace by Ken Watanabe (The Last Samurai). A worldly ex-cavalry man who once lived in the U.S., Kuribayashi immediately understands that his job is not to win the battle, but to hold off the Americans for as long as possible. Surveying the island, he dispenses with the traditional defence-line trenches, amid protests from his rigidly delusional commanders. Instead, he directs his troops to dig tunnels into the rocky peaks. From there, they will fend off the Americans against all odds, using the general’s knowledge of U.S. warfare against them. At first, the only officer to grasp the good sense of this strategy is Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), a dashing Olympic equestrian with Hollywood connections who rides his horse into the encampment like a gentleman warrior of a bygone era. Representing the grunts is Saigo (winningly portrayed by sweet-faced pop star Kazunari Ninomiya), a baker-turned-reluctant-soldier who wants nothing more than to live to see his wife and baby.

That these three idealized characters are also the most American-seeming in their thinking and sympathies is no coincidence — in fact, this might be the film’s most contentious misstep. In its admirable quest to make the Japanese soldiers relatable, the film whitewashes the specifics of the Second World War-era Japanese military, notorious for the horrors it committed in the Pacific war theatre. The troops were trained and expected to kill themselves rather than shame their country. And in Letters, this is revealed, devastatingly, when, one by one, defeated Japanese soldiers — some stoic, some in tears — clutch exploding grenades to their chests. It’s a mercifully fleeting scene, but I found myself wanting to know more about the mindset and the histories of the men making that sacrifice. That’s a war story that hasn’t yet been told.

It’s no surprise to discover the hand of Paul Haggis at work here; he co-wrote the story with first-time screenwriter Iris Yamashita. The Crash writer-director has a self-congratulatory impulse to whack audiences over the head with his grasp of nuance; no matter that his characters tend to fall into overly simplified types, i.e. the family man, the fanatic and Generic Wounded Soldier Number 87. There’s a moving, if clichéd, scene in which Baron Nishi reads his troops a letter he finds on a dead marine. It’s from the young man’s mother. The soldiers listen in tear-choked silence to familiar endearments and family gossip before a massive shelling sends them back to fighting the dead man’s comrades. The letter-from-home moment is a war-movie convention, but the actors sell it with a wrenching mix of homesickness, grief, compassion and regret flickering across their faces. Moments later, one soldier goes to great pains to explain that the letter made him realize that maybe the Americans aren’t so bad after all. I could feel Haggis’s fingers twitch in delight as he boldfaced, italicized and underlined this notion: The enemy is just like me! Later on, that soldier’s fate at the hands of the Americans reveals a fascinating, if incongruous, cynicism. Had this latter vein been mined deeper, the film would have been much richer.

In its best moments, Letters from Iwo Jima does something rare and even thrilling: tally the human cost of war from the enemy’s perspective. If only it had gone further and trusted moviegoers to empathize with people who didn’t act and think exactly like them.

Letters from Iwo Jima opens Jan. 12 across Canada.

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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