thedrifter
01-18-07, 08:59 AM
Posted on Thu, Jan. 18, 2007
Iwo Jima's other side told well
Japanese soldiers also had stories, which Eastwood develops in 2nd film on battle
By Bruce Newman
San Jose Mercury News
Judging by Letters From Iwo Jima, Clint Eastwood's vastly superior companion piece to Flags of Our Fathers, there was almost as much letter writing as shooting going on during that pivotal battle in the South Pacific.
As a massive American invasion force confronted the tiny volcanic island, the 22,000 Japanese soldiers sent to defend it had plenty to think -- and write home -- about. They had already been told not to plan on coming back.
By the time the battle was over, almost all of them were dead. Fortunately, some of their letters survived, and have been transformed into the screenplay for Letters (by Iris Yama****a). It is a remarkable account of battle, and of men who have usually been portrayed in American war movies as faceless, interchangeable ``Japs'' or ``Nips.'' Eastwood's film doesn't seek to glamorize or glorify the Japanese, just to point out that they had stories, too.
The movie, which is spoken almost entirely in Japanese and subtitled in English, shows the same battle as Flags of Our Fathers, this time from a perspective that's not only very different from Eastwood's earlier version -- released in October, and a bit more prone to sentimentality -- but surprisingly similar in at least one way to John Wayne's Sands of Iwo Jima.
As was customary in Wayne's war pictures, Sands of Iwo Jima was as much about waving the American flag as it was about planting it on Mount Suribachi. That pivotal scene -- made famous by one of World War II's most iconic photographs -- is re-enacted in Wayne's 1949 blood-and-guts epic. But the movie's emotional climax comes when Wayne's men rush to his body after his character is killed by a cowardly Japanese sniper (in those days, there was no other kind) and discover a letter written to his ex-wife and son, in which the gruff leatherneck pours out all the thoughts and feelings he kept bottled up while he was alive.
Apparently there was something about that island that made people want to get a few things off their chest.
In Letters From Iwo Jima, the first correspondent we encounter is a private in the Japanese infantry, who suspects that he is about to become cannon fodder on one of the black sand beaches where he has been digging for weeks. Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya) writes to his wife, who is at home raising a child he has never met. ``This is the hole that we will fight and die in,'' he tells her as we watch him shoveling sand. ``Am I digging my own grave?''
The garrison's new leader, Gen. Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe, who played another doomed warrior in The Last Samurai) is rumored among the men to have lived in America before the war, as indeed he did. Kuribayashi is as genial as Saigo is glum, but in his letters, the general has no illusions about the fate that awaits him and the men under his command.
As mediated history, the movie's only obvious failing is the way in which it withholds almost any sense of the passage of time, of which there is about eight month's worth. It's not clear how long the soldiers prepare for the anticipated invasion, or how long it goes on when the Americans finally arrive. Inside the caves the Japanese used as bunkers, it sometimes seems as if days pass with only fleeting references to how long it's been since the soldiers have had food, water or ammunition. Eventually, the thing they run out of most decisively is time.
But Eastwood isn't interested in making Daily Diaries From Iwo Jima. The battle, which went on for more than a month, is elongated into a kind of hellish symphony of combat, with movements in varying shades of light and darkness.
For all of that, Eastwood seems to pull back somewhat from the massive firefight the Marines waged to get to the top of Mount Suribachi in Flags of Our Fathers. There are some concise, brilliant battle sequences -- as when the American fighter planes converge on the island for the first time, and we see the bombs clearly as they fall -- but as its title implies, this is a more intimate portrait of soldiers than Flags.
Not only is the physical vantage point reversed from the earlier film (cameras, like guns, are now tilted down), the sheer sprawl of destruction is brought down to a human size. Nowhere is this more evident than a terrifying scene in which a group of trapped soldiers are ordered to die honorably, rather than be captured. One after another, they blow themselves up with hand grenades.
For anyone unfamiliar with the Japanese military's cultural embrace of suicide as a way of dying with honor during World War II, this movie might come as a grisly surprise. At first, it seems as if only the most fanatical members of the officer corps will seek to enter paradise this way. But in the end, even characters unassailably intended to be seen by American audiences as sympathetic choose to either blow their brains out or have their heads lopped off with the sabers they carry.
Because of the movie's intimate scale, the enactment of these suicides seems a shocking form of ``otherness'' by an enemy who was not really like us. Flags of Our Fathers took a more traditional cinematic approach to the Japanese soldier as an implacably savage warrior. But this movie manages with great economy to show that soldiers on both sides had far more in common than they thought.
After all, the assault on Iwo Jima by the Americans and the defense of it by the Japanese -- considered vital to the outcome of the war by both sides -- constituted one of history's bloodiest acts of mass suicide.
Ellie
Iwo Jima's other side told well
Japanese soldiers also had stories, which Eastwood develops in 2nd film on battle
By Bruce Newman
San Jose Mercury News
Judging by Letters From Iwo Jima, Clint Eastwood's vastly superior companion piece to Flags of Our Fathers, there was almost as much letter writing as shooting going on during that pivotal battle in the South Pacific.
As a massive American invasion force confronted the tiny volcanic island, the 22,000 Japanese soldiers sent to defend it had plenty to think -- and write home -- about. They had already been told not to plan on coming back.
By the time the battle was over, almost all of them were dead. Fortunately, some of their letters survived, and have been transformed into the screenplay for Letters (by Iris Yama****a). It is a remarkable account of battle, and of men who have usually been portrayed in American war movies as faceless, interchangeable ``Japs'' or ``Nips.'' Eastwood's film doesn't seek to glamorize or glorify the Japanese, just to point out that they had stories, too.
The movie, which is spoken almost entirely in Japanese and subtitled in English, shows the same battle as Flags of Our Fathers, this time from a perspective that's not only very different from Eastwood's earlier version -- released in October, and a bit more prone to sentimentality -- but surprisingly similar in at least one way to John Wayne's Sands of Iwo Jima.
As was customary in Wayne's war pictures, Sands of Iwo Jima was as much about waving the American flag as it was about planting it on Mount Suribachi. That pivotal scene -- made famous by one of World War II's most iconic photographs -- is re-enacted in Wayne's 1949 blood-and-guts epic. But the movie's emotional climax comes when Wayne's men rush to his body after his character is killed by a cowardly Japanese sniper (in those days, there was no other kind) and discover a letter written to his ex-wife and son, in which the gruff leatherneck pours out all the thoughts and feelings he kept bottled up while he was alive.
Apparently there was something about that island that made people want to get a few things off their chest.
In Letters From Iwo Jima, the first correspondent we encounter is a private in the Japanese infantry, who suspects that he is about to become cannon fodder on one of the black sand beaches where he has been digging for weeks. Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya) writes to his wife, who is at home raising a child he has never met. ``This is the hole that we will fight and die in,'' he tells her as we watch him shoveling sand. ``Am I digging my own grave?''
The garrison's new leader, Gen. Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe, who played another doomed warrior in The Last Samurai) is rumored among the men to have lived in America before the war, as indeed he did. Kuribayashi is as genial as Saigo is glum, but in his letters, the general has no illusions about the fate that awaits him and the men under his command.
As mediated history, the movie's only obvious failing is the way in which it withholds almost any sense of the passage of time, of which there is about eight month's worth. It's not clear how long the soldiers prepare for the anticipated invasion, or how long it goes on when the Americans finally arrive. Inside the caves the Japanese used as bunkers, it sometimes seems as if days pass with only fleeting references to how long it's been since the soldiers have had food, water or ammunition. Eventually, the thing they run out of most decisively is time.
But Eastwood isn't interested in making Daily Diaries From Iwo Jima. The battle, which went on for more than a month, is elongated into a kind of hellish symphony of combat, with movements in varying shades of light and darkness.
For all of that, Eastwood seems to pull back somewhat from the massive firefight the Marines waged to get to the top of Mount Suribachi in Flags of Our Fathers. There are some concise, brilliant battle sequences -- as when the American fighter planes converge on the island for the first time, and we see the bombs clearly as they fall -- but as its title implies, this is a more intimate portrait of soldiers than Flags.
Not only is the physical vantage point reversed from the earlier film (cameras, like guns, are now tilted down), the sheer sprawl of destruction is brought down to a human size. Nowhere is this more evident than a terrifying scene in which a group of trapped soldiers are ordered to die honorably, rather than be captured. One after another, they blow themselves up with hand grenades.
For anyone unfamiliar with the Japanese military's cultural embrace of suicide as a way of dying with honor during World War II, this movie might come as a grisly surprise. At first, it seems as if only the most fanatical members of the officer corps will seek to enter paradise this way. But in the end, even characters unassailably intended to be seen by American audiences as sympathetic choose to either blow their brains out or have their heads lopped off with the sabers they carry.
Because of the movie's intimate scale, the enactment of these suicides seems a shocking form of ``otherness'' by an enemy who was not really like us. Flags of Our Fathers took a more traditional cinematic approach to the Japanese soldier as an implacably savage warrior. But this movie manages with great economy to show that soldiers on both sides had far more in common than they thought.
After all, the assault on Iwo Jima by the Americans and the defense of it by the Japanese -- considered vital to the outcome of the war by both sides -- constituted one of history's bloodiest acts of mass suicide.
Ellie