Revisiting the Battle

When we last left him in October’s "Flags of Our Fathers," director Clint Eastwood was up to his neck in the blood and surf of Iwo Jima. In that film, we watched as American Marines landed on the beach and were cut to pieces by the Japanese who lay waiting in the island’s caves, unseen and faceless.

Now, in "Letters from Iwo Jima," Eastwood revisits the battle, this time from the side of the Japanese.

As the Marines from the 28th raise the flag on Mt. Suribachi, we wait with the Japanese, as they wait for death in the tunnels below.

"Letters" is nothing if not an act of generous revisionism.

The Japanese soldier of wartime American war movies — bowlegged, bucktoothed, and cruel — is given his humanity back. In "Letters," it’s the Americans we can’t see: Off in the distance, in the corner of a frame, a small flag is raised. That’s all we see of Joe, Hank and Ira of the 28th Marines. In their place is General Tadamichi Kuribayashi of the Empire of Japan.

Kuribayashi is the empathetic center of Eastwood’s film. The general’s wartime letters, recently unearthed at Iwo Jima after 60 years, form the film’s narration. ("Letters" was filmed in Japanese with English subtitles. Consequently it won a Golden Globe for "Best Foreign Language Film," though by those same standards Mel Gibson’s "Apocalypto" also qualified. It’s further proof that the studios are run by focus-groups: nothing hard-to-place need apply.)

Far leaner than "Flags of Our Fathers," Eastwood’s second film is austere, almost a study in stoicism: red sun, black sand, and the dull lead glow of cinematatographer Tom Stern’s camera. As played by Ken Watanabe ("The Last Samuarai"), Kuribayashi is a noble figure. Having lived in the United States for five years, he is a professed admirer of American culture, in particular, the 5 million automobiles that roll off Detroit’s assembly lines. He knows that Japan will lose the war, for the same reason.

So it’s death on "Sulfur Island." Before the battle, Kuribayashi tells his men that they will not live to return home. A telegram from Tokyo tells him the same: No support for Iwo Jima, and no reinforcements. Less than 300 surrendered. As one soldiers asks: "Am I digging my own grave?"

Yes.

Wretchedly so.

Of the estimated 20,000 Japanese troops on the island, only 1,083 survived the 40-day battle; the Japanese on Iwo Jima died for the honor of their country, whether they wanted to or not. Eastwood records the mass suicides in the caves as soldiers, led by fanatical officers, pull the pin on their own grenades. Those who surrender are beheaded. There is something awful in one Major Ito, as he sends his men on a pointless banzai charge. Confronted by crazy nationalism, we begin to root for the cowards. The hapless Private Saigo (played by the Japanese pop-star Kaznuri Ninomiya) is a conscript to the war and wants no part of it. With his oversized pants and clownish manner, Saigo is a bad soldier whose indiscipline is a sign of his humanity.

If the insight of "Flags of Our Fathers" was the way a moment of wartime heriocs is often followed by a life’s worth of survivor’s guilt, in "Letters from Iwo Jima" we see the way war interrupts civilization. Kuribayashi and Saigo are decent men. "Letters" is essentially self-contained, a war film that makes no reference to the indecency of the Japanese cause, the long list of death marches and wartime cruelty, which may strike some viewers as naive. Eastwood’s indictment of war occurs in the action of the film itself, when, in two scenes, a captured American soldier is bayoneted to death by his captors and, in another, an unarmed Japanese soldier is shot while holding on to a white flag.

Both are young men, about to die a long way from home.