Eastwood's letter home is stamped with realism.
In his companion to
Flags of Our Fathers
, Clint Eastwood shows the process by which young soldiers become unwitting fodder for their country's war effort. The flawed
Flags
, which was released last fall, tells the story of the three American men who obey their superior officers and willingly accept the guise of heroic mascots in a public relations
blitz to raise support for the
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war on the home front.
Letters from Iwo Jima
instead looks at the story of the 36-day World War II battle for the island of Iwo Jima from the Japanese perspective.
We are confronted with images of military men who are expected to not only serve their emperor and suffer starvation, disease and overwhelming odds in his name, but also die by either their own hand or the enemy's rather than face the cultural ignominy of defeat.
Of the two films,
Letters
is more accomplished and more satisfyingly told. Again, Eastwood uses the muted color palette, rendering the island's muck and caves in nearly black-and-white tones, brightened only by the flash of a gun muzzle or iconic flag.
In
Flags
, we saw how the Americans were lured onto the beaches of Iwo Jima by the silence of the Japanese, who were holed up in the island's mountain caves while holding their fire until the troops became sitting ducks.
Letters
takes us inside those caves, where the outnumbered Japanese soldiers-suffering from dysentery, hunger and demoralization-still hold on to their ideals of dying honorably
for their country. There are but a handful of men we are shown who think through their objectives for themselves. One is Kuribayashi,
played by Ken Watanabe (
The Last Samurai
), an original military thinker who is clearly disappointed by his superiors' decision to doom
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his plan. The other strategic character is Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a conscripted soldier taken from the arms of his pregnant wife, who wants to survive in order to return home to the child he has yet to meet.
The impulse to survive despite dishonor is shown to be unpatriotic to the Japanese warrior code, and it is this aspect of the film that most humanizes these soldiers. These are not the Japanese of American war movies, who are generally portrayed as barbaric others, nor are they exactly the harsh and inhumane fighters and captors that history has revealed them to be in places like Bataan, China and the notorious POW camps.
Letters
shows us at least a handful of warriors who resist their orders to die in suicide missions, who want to return alive to their loved ones and whose capacity to think for themselves puts them at odds with their orders. The humanistic approach makes
Letters
a war story for the ages.
