Friday, February 09, 2007
There were two films I anticipated more than any other last year, and both were from Clint Eastwood.
Flags of Our Fathers made my top ten of 2006, and the second installment of the Iwo Jima battle films, should I be allowed to revise my 2006 list 2 months into 2007, ranks even higher.
Flags has been criticized for being too patriotic, while
Letters is less so. But I have a feeling
the "patriotism" of the second is shadowed by the fact that it's a whole other national brand.
Letters is done almost entirely in Japanese with subtitles. From an American standpoint I don't know enough about Japanese history and culture to label it patriotic, though it won't surprise me if someone from Japan thought it was. For me,
Flags is easy to label as a salute to our soldiers, to our military past. Eastwood's not apologetic about that, nor should he be; he's from a generation that came of age in the War and post-War years, so you bet he's got an emotional attachment to the story, but I still don't think it's an empty patriotic nod. If it was such a flag-waving American myth that's come back to give us context for the war in Iraq, why the hell would he waste his time creating the same story from the Japanese perspective?
It's clear Eastwood is more interested in the all-around perils of this story, after all, taken together the two movies make either side out to be the enemy. I'd have to flip through my mental Rolodex of war movies to know for sure, but I believe
Letters was the first time I was rooting
against the Americans on the battlefield.
War movies are a tough sell to a lot of people because they're turned off by the violence, whether it's stylized or realistic. My big sister, for one, won't go near a movie where she might see blood. Surely this limits one's options, particularly nowadays when violence isn't violent unless we see the full motion of a limb being torn off, or blood spurting from the jugular. I for one prefer war movies and Westerns from the 30s, 40s, and 50s where if a character was shot up or stabbed, it was staged in a way that excluded a picture of their guts spilled across the sidewalk. What happens in many John Ford movies, for instance, is a shot of a character's face as he (or she—but usually he) looks at the massacre. The horror expressed on those characters' faces tells us a lot more than if we were to see the mangled body with our own eyes; gore takes on a deeper meaning when we see how characters react when they're looking at it. It means there's consequence to the imagery, rather than
blood for the sake of blood.Some of my favorite films happen to be some of the bloodiest:
Taxi Driver is practically a gore flick as it climaxes, and continuing with Scorsese,
The Departed was one of my highest ranked films of 2006. These are films, though, where the
violence is not gratuitous; its characters are emotionally involved with the violence they see, or even participate in.
Likewise,
Letters from Iwo Jima is violent enough to make your stomach turn, but it's not a hack 'em and slash 'em flick, it's an historical tale. War, by nature, is violent, bloody, putrid; in between the scenes of bombings, missile attacks, and soldiers set afire by flame throwers there is a very personal story that can't be told without it. Both
Letters and
Flags are personal memoirs as much as they are battle films. The flashback sequences in
Flags to me, means just as much as General Tadamichi Kuribayashi's (Ken Wantanabe) words scrawled on paper in the letters he writes to his family during battle.
In
Flags, the flashback is used for its characters to contextualize the victory at home against the nightmarish battlefield memories they can't shake. In
Letters, the General writes letters home to help him walk though the hours of impending death. Neither side of this war story is emotionally victorious. Everyone's fucked up from the war. That's Eastwood's point, and it sure as hell transcends the real flag waving bullshit of post-9/11.
