thedrifter
01-07-07, 10:30 AM
Surrender and Survival in the Crucible of Battle
By A. O. SCOTT
THE obvious novelty of Clint Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima” is that this quintessentially — you might even say iconically — American filmmaker has made a World War II movie from the Japanese perspective. This does not mean, of course, that he is on the side of the enemy, but his camera is very much at the side of the Japanese soldiers, and in their midst. Hewing to the visual and narrative conventions of ground-level combat realism, Mr. Eastwood’s film is less concerned with why they fight — they fight for the doomed, dubious cause of Empire, sometimes in the face of their own disillusionment, skepticism or indifference — than with how they fight. Which is to say, for the most part, how they are defeated and how they die.
These are not simple matters, though the immediate causes of the individual and collective losses are clear enough: the Japanese forces are outnumbered and outgunned, defending their grim little island without hope of support or reinforcement from the sea or the air. They move through a maze of tunnels dug into the volcanic rock, firing out at the advancing marines. They are crushed under rocks, pierced by bullets, immolated by flamethrowers, blown apart by artillery rounds. And, with increasing frequency, they die by their own hands, at the command of their superior officers, for whom any retreat, even for tactical purposes, is tantamount to surrender: a humiliation worse than physical death.
Survival, according to this conception of military honor, is itself a form of failure, and it must be harshly punished. Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya) and Shimizu (Ryo Kase), two soldiers who have escaped from a scene of collective suicide, thus receive a brutal welcome when they are brought to a cave inhabited by Lieutenant Ito (Shidou Nakamura) and his men. The lieutenant, a zealot who will seek his own death later on, commands Saigo and Shimizu to kneel and unsheathes his sword, preparing to behead them. “It was your duty to stay in your position until death,” he says. “You should have died with your fellow troop members.”
Never mind that the two soldiers were obeying orders. (And never mind that neither one is an especially willing warrior.) General Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), the highest-ranking officer on Iwo Jima, had instructed their unit to abandon its position so as to concentrate the remaining forces elsewhere on the island. Instead their captain, choosing ancient custom over the explicit directions of a superior officer, put a bullet in his head, after watching his men, one by one (except for Saigo and Shimizu), clutch live grenades to their chests.
Just as Ito’s blade is about to complete the job he believes those grenades — or American bullets — should have done, a calm voice from off screen interrupts the execution: “I don’t want you to kill my soldiers needlessly.” The camera turns to discover General Kuribayashi, who tells Ito to put down his sword and informs him that the order to retreat and regroup came from him. Ito responds that Suribachi, the rocky hill where the American flag can be seen flying, a tiny flutter on the horizon, has been lost. “Fight for your fallen brethren until the end,” Kuribayashi tells Ito, and as he walks back into the gloom of the tunnel the camera rests on Ito’s face, a mask of defiance and submission.
The tunnels were dug on Kuribayashi’s orders, and they provide Mr. Eastwood and his cinematographer, Tom Stern, with a rich, somber palette of light and shade, in which the faces of the soldiers emerge suddenly from the gloom, their individuality illuminated even as it threatens to be extinguished. The flash of Ito’s sword, and his placement in the frame — shot from a low angle, roughly from Saigo’s point of view — evoke, for a moment, a familiar canon of movie images.
Mr. Eastwood does not generally traffic in allusions or visual quotations; his visual style is decidedly classical, rather than postmodern, emphasizing plainness, transparency and the efficient delivery of narrative information. But in the sequence of shots that make up this scene it is possible to glimpse shadows of John Ford and Akira Kurosawa, two masters of martial cinema in whose company Mr. Eastwood now unequivocally belongs.
The shot from a darkened, enclosed space toward a sliver of daylight in which a figure is framed was one of Ford’s signatures, and Mr. Nakamura in his samurai pose is likely to remind viewers of Toshiro Mifune. These echoes can hardly be called self-conscious, but neither do they seem entirely accidental. The tension between individual initiative and military discipline, the professional conflicts that beset men at arms, the contradictory impulses toward glory, survival and sacrifice that warfare brings out: these are themes that recur in Ford’s westerns and combat pictures (most of them involving the war against Japan) and also, with a different cultural and historical inflection, in Kurosawa’s feudal epics.
“Letters From Iwo Jima,” a Japanese-language film from a director steeped in Hollywood tradition, is not just an exercise in cross-cultural sympathy, but also a work of cultural synthesis. The behavior of the characters may be shocking at times, but it rarely feels exotic or strange, because the codes that govern their actions are so clearly articulated. So too are the shadowy ethical zones where conventional norms and attitudes seem insufficient, immoral or counterproductive.
Saigo, for example is a conscript dragged from his bakery and his pregnant wife to serve on Iwo Jima, and he takes a jaundiced view of the war. It is increasingly clear that his will to survive is at least as strong as Ito’s will to die. Shimizu, for his part, is too sensitive to do what the war and his nation require of him.
It is also clear from the start that Kuribayashi’s ideas about military procedure run against the grain of imperial custom. His intervention marks the second time he has rescued Saigo from punishment, and decency is one of his notable traits. But even though Ito derides the general as “a weak American sympathizer,” he is nonetheless a rigorous and ruthless tactician, and a man who takes evident pleasure in the disciplined practice of his profession, even though he knows that his highest professional achievement will most likely be his own death.
From the moment he sets foot on Iwo Jima, Kuribayashi goes about his job with alacrity. Even in the darkest moments of battle a smile plays across his face, the smile of a man consumed by his work. It has not escaped notice that Kuribayashi, gruff, wily, upright and humane, standing a bit apart from everyone else, resembles some of the men Mr. Eastwood has played over the years. But he is less Mr. Eastwood’s surrogate — the part he might have taken for himself — than his alter ego: a man doing his job so thoroughly and so well that his heroism, his art, is almost invisible.
Ellie
By A. O. SCOTT
THE obvious novelty of Clint Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima” is that this quintessentially — you might even say iconically — American filmmaker has made a World War II movie from the Japanese perspective. This does not mean, of course, that he is on the side of the enemy, but his camera is very much at the side of the Japanese soldiers, and in their midst. Hewing to the visual and narrative conventions of ground-level combat realism, Mr. Eastwood’s film is less concerned with why they fight — they fight for the doomed, dubious cause of Empire, sometimes in the face of their own disillusionment, skepticism or indifference — than with how they fight. Which is to say, for the most part, how they are defeated and how they die.
These are not simple matters, though the immediate causes of the individual and collective losses are clear enough: the Japanese forces are outnumbered and outgunned, defending their grim little island without hope of support or reinforcement from the sea or the air. They move through a maze of tunnels dug into the volcanic rock, firing out at the advancing marines. They are crushed under rocks, pierced by bullets, immolated by flamethrowers, blown apart by artillery rounds. And, with increasing frequency, they die by their own hands, at the command of their superior officers, for whom any retreat, even for tactical purposes, is tantamount to surrender: a humiliation worse than physical death.
Survival, according to this conception of military honor, is itself a form of failure, and it must be harshly punished. Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya) and Shimizu (Ryo Kase), two soldiers who have escaped from a scene of collective suicide, thus receive a brutal welcome when they are brought to a cave inhabited by Lieutenant Ito (Shidou Nakamura) and his men. The lieutenant, a zealot who will seek his own death later on, commands Saigo and Shimizu to kneel and unsheathes his sword, preparing to behead them. “It was your duty to stay in your position until death,” he says. “You should have died with your fellow troop members.”
Never mind that the two soldiers were obeying orders. (And never mind that neither one is an especially willing warrior.) General Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), the highest-ranking officer on Iwo Jima, had instructed their unit to abandon its position so as to concentrate the remaining forces elsewhere on the island. Instead their captain, choosing ancient custom over the explicit directions of a superior officer, put a bullet in his head, after watching his men, one by one (except for Saigo and Shimizu), clutch live grenades to their chests.
Just as Ito’s blade is about to complete the job he believes those grenades — or American bullets — should have done, a calm voice from off screen interrupts the execution: “I don’t want you to kill my soldiers needlessly.” The camera turns to discover General Kuribayashi, who tells Ito to put down his sword and informs him that the order to retreat and regroup came from him. Ito responds that Suribachi, the rocky hill where the American flag can be seen flying, a tiny flutter on the horizon, has been lost. “Fight for your fallen brethren until the end,” Kuribayashi tells Ito, and as he walks back into the gloom of the tunnel the camera rests on Ito’s face, a mask of defiance and submission.
The tunnels were dug on Kuribayashi’s orders, and they provide Mr. Eastwood and his cinematographer, Tom Stern, with a rich, somber palette of light and shade, in which the faces of the soldiers emerge suddenly from the gloom, their individuality illuminated even as it threatens to be extinguished. The flash of Ito’s sword, and his placement in the frame — shot from a low angle, roughly from Saigo’s point of view — evoke, for a moment, a familiar canon of movie images.
Mr. Eastwood does not generally traffic in allusions or visual quotations; his visual style is decidedly classical, rather than postmodern, emphasizing plainness, transparency and the efficient delivery of narrative information. But in the sequence of shots that make up this scene it is possible to glimpse shadows of John Ford and Akira Kurosawa, two masters of martial cinema in whose company Mr. Eastwood now unequivocally belongs.
The shot from a darkened, enclosed space toward a sliver of daylight in which a figure is framed was one of Ford’s signatures, and Mr. Nakamura in his samurai pose is likely to remind viewers of Toshiro Mifune. These echoes can hardly be called self-conscious, but neither do they seem entirely accidental. The tension between individual initiative and military discipline, the professional conflicts that beset men at arms, the contradictory impulses toward glory, survival and sacrifice that warfare brings out: these are themes that recur in Ford’s westerns and combat pictures (most of them involving the war against Japan) and also, with a different cultural and historical inflection, in Kurosawa’s feudal epics.
“Letters From Iwo Jima,” a Japanese-language film from a director steeped in Hollywood tradition, is not just an exercise in cross-cultural sympathy, but also a work of cultural synthesis. The behavior of the characters may be shocking at times, but it rarely feels exotic or strange, because the codes that govern their actions are so clearly articulated. So too are the shadowy ethical zones where conventional norms and attitudes seem insufficient, immoral or counterproductive.
Saigo, for example is a conscript dragged from his bakery and his pregnant wife to serve on Iwo Jima, and he takes a jaundiced view of the war. It is increasingly clear that his will to survive is at least as strong as Ito’s will to die. Shimizu, for his part, is too sensitive to do what the war and his nation require of him.
It is also clear from the start that Kuribayashi’s ideas about military procedure run against the grain of imperial custom. His intervention marks the second time he has rescued Saigo from punishment, and decency is one of his notable traits. But even though Ito derides the general as “a weak American sympathizer,” he is nonetheless a rigorous and ruthless tactician, and a man who takes evident pleasure in the disciplined practice of his profession, even though he knows that his highest professional achievement will most likely be his own death.
From the moment he sets foot on Iwo Jima, Kuribayashi goes about his job with alacrity. Even in the darkest moments of battle a smile plays across his face, the smile of a man consumed by his work. It has not escaped notice that Kuribayashi, gruff, wily, upright and humane, standing a bit apart from everyone else, resembles some of the men Mr. Eastwood has played over the years. But he is less Mr. Eastwood’s surrogate — the part he might have taken for himself — than his alter ego: a man doing his job so thoroughly and so well that his heroism, his art, is almost invisible.
Ellie