PDA

View Full Version : Eastwood provides Japanese view of ‘Iwo’ At the movies



thedrifter
02-02-07, 07:12 AM
Posted on Fri, Feb. 02, 2007
Eastwood provides Japanese view of ‘Iwo’ At the movies

By Jim Emerson
Universal Press Syndicate

“Letters from Iwo Jima” ****

For a fraction of a second at the beginning of Clint Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima,” you may think that you are gazing overhead at a field of stars.

In fact, you are looking straight down into the ground, at waves of black sand on the volcanic island where, over the course of five weeks in February and March 1945, an invasion force of 100,000 Americans (two-thirds of them U.S. Marines) fought 22,000 entrenched Japanese infantrymen. Only 1,083 Japanese survived the battle, while 6,821 Americans were killed and 20,000 wounded.

It’s a simple establishing shot: a tilt up from the beach where the Allied forces landed to Mount Suribachi, a rocky knob on the southern tip of the island where the Japanese holed up in a network of tunnels and bunkers, and on top of which the famous, iconic image of the raising of an American flag was taken.

That classically heroic-looking photo, and the collateral damage from its exploitation as a propaganda tool to sell war bonds, was the subject of Eastwood’s 2006 “Flags of Our Fathers,” the companion piece (or other half) of “Letters From Iwo Jima,” though it doesn’t really matter which one you see first.

The opening moments of “Letters” have a cosmic zoom-like effect, taking us from the timeless and abstract (stars/sand) into a specific place and time: “Iwo Jima 2005,” as a title denotes.

It was on this barren little sulphuric spec in the Pacific Ocean, only about five miles from one end to the other, that so many people fought and died 60 years ago.

“Flags of Our Fathers” ended with a similar motion, going from memory-images of surviving American soldiers frolicking in the surf, to the stars and stripes atop Mount Suribachi and the battleships in the harbor, and finally up into the sky (another reason you might think you’re looking up rather than down at the start of “Letters”).

The camouflaged artillery that proved so deadly and menacing in “Flags” has, by the start of “Letters,” become rusty relics at a war memorial site. Archeologists explore Suribachi’s caves and tunnels, still marveling at how the soldiers ever managed to build them. And then we’re on the beach again, in 1945, as Japanese soldiers prepare for the invasion they know is coming by digging trenches in the sand.

It looks like a futile, Sisyphean effort. In a letter to his wife (heard in voice-over), one of the diggers, a puppy-faced former baker named Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya, in a thoroughly winning performance), writes philosophically: “This is the hole that we will fight and die in.”

They might have died a lot sooner if they’d stuck with this ill-conceived sand strategy. When the new commander, Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi (the always-commanding Ken Watanabe), arrives at Iwo Jima, he immediately changes plans, ordering men and artillery to dig in on higher ground. These are the preparations for the massive ambush we see in “Flags of Our Fathers.” The Japanese, who are seen as fierce, highly organized fighters in “Flags,” aren’t as well-prepared, or well-equipped, as we may have thought.

Dashing Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), the Olympic equestrian star who has partied with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford in Hollywood, appears on the island with his horse, as a symbolic morale-boost for the men. But Nishi approaches the subject of the reality on the ground in a roundabout way during a conversation, over a bottle of Johnnie Walker, with Kuribayashi: “When you think about it,” Nishi offers, “it is regrettable that most of the combined fleet was destroyed.”

This is the first news Kuribayashi has had of that particular catastrophe, but he already knows he doesn’t have the support, manpower or weaponry he needs to resist the pending invasion. (Again, parallels to underequipped American soldiers being asked to hold ground in Iraq without the necessary material support from their leaders at home is a part of the movie’s frame of reference.)

“The Imperial Headquarters is deceiving not just the people, but us, as well,” Kuribayashi says. It’s a line that could have been adapted from “Flags of Our Fathers,” which was also an examination of various forms of propaganda, codes of honor and morale-boosting use of nationalistic symbols that are among the primary weapons in any war.

When young Saigo is conscripted into the Japanese army, he and his pregnant wife are stunned at the response of his neighbors and friends who, like brainwashed cultists, keep repeating that he is fortunate to be chosen to die for his country.

The emphasis here is on the honor conveyed by death itself – something we see later in the film when soldiers, aware that they’re engaged in a hopeless battle, choose to kill themselves rather than fight to the death.

One can’t help but recall the words attributed to Gen. George S. Patton in 1944: “Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. You win it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”

In both his films, Eastwood empathizes with the “expendable” soldier on the ground, the “poor bastard” who is only a pawn in a war conceived by generals and politicians, some of whom have never come anywhere near a battlefield or a combat zone.

And Eastwood fully commits to a boots-on-the-ground POV: The raising of the American flag, presented as a routine, off-hand task to the soldiers in “Flags of Our Fathers” (and which would have remained that way if a photographer had not been present), is glimpsed only obliquely from afar by the Japanese in “Letters From Iwo Jima.”

Life or death, heroism or folly: It all comes down to which side you’re on, and which piece of ground you’re occupying, at any given moment in the battle.

Ellie

thedrifter
02-02-07, 07:18 AM
Posted on Fri, Feb. 02, 2007

'Iwo Jima' star Watanabe finds Japanese commander had soft side

BY MICHAEL WHITE
Bloomberg News

After agreeing to star in "Letters From Iwo Jima," Ken Watanabe read the correspondence of the Japanese general who turned the Pacific island into the U.S. Marine Corps' bloodiest battleground.

In those papers, Watanabe found the human side of Tadamichi Kuribayashi, a distinguished officer who opposed war with the United States and, in his spare moments, wrote thoughtful, poignant letters to his family.

"Some of the letters are so intimate," Watanabe said. "He can never show his weakness on the battlefield, but in the letters home, that was the only time he could say what he wanted to say and even show his softer side."

Watanabe's portrayal of Kuribayashi has helped lift the Japanese-language film to critical and box-office success. "Letters From Iwo Jima" was nominated for four Academy Awards, including best film and a best director nod for Clint Eastwood, and won a Golden Globe for best foreign-language film from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

In Japan, the film spent five weeks at No. 1 after its Dec. 9 debut, collecting $36.7 million. The movie, which played in only five U.S. theaters until expanding last week, has taken in $5.1 million domestically.

Before his research, Watanabe, 47, knew little about Iwo Jima and nothing about the man he plays. The history of the battle isn't taught in schools in Japan and, until the film had its debut there, wasn't a conversation topic.

'I

had to learn about the history of World War II and why the Pacific war started, what wrong decisions were made by the Japanese government," Watanabe said. "For the Japanese, Iwo Jima is an unfortunate event, so people don't like to talk about it."

Watanabe is best known to American audiences for his supporting role opposite Tom Cruise in "The Last Samurai," which earned him an Oscar nomination. Other U.S. films include "Memoirs of a Geisha" and "Batman Begins."

Kuribayashi's letters, illuminated through flashbacks, help provide the emotional balance in a film that also focuses graphically on the close-quarters combat that typified the battle. Watanabe said a trip to Kuribayashi's hometown and meetings with his descendants helped round out the character.

The battle, fought to provide a base for U.S. fighter planes escorting bombers to Japan, took the lives of almost 7,000 Marines and sailors and more than 20,000 Japanese soldiers, according to Dan Crawford, head of the reference branch of the U.S. Marine Corps' History Division in Quantico, Va.

When he first heard that Eastwood was making "Flags of Our Fathers," Watanabe sent out feelers to see if there was a role for a Japanese actor. He was told there were no Japanese parts. Months later, Eastwood called him to say he had decided to make a second film showing the Japanese side of the fight and asked Watanabe to take the starring role.

"I was surprised that Clint even thought about doing this movie, showing it from the Japanese side," Watanabe said. "I got a call from him, and we met and talked. It started there."

For Watanabe, the purpose of Eastwood's two-film project was illustrated during the one day that the cast was allowed to film on Iwo Jima itself.

After shooting several scenes, a small group of cast and crew climbed to the top of Mount Suribachi. The prop master, Mike Sexton, took out two small flags, one American and the other Japanese. Watanabe held the U.S. flag and Sexton the Japanese as the small group paused to remember those who died on both sides.

"I totally recognized this movie's meaning," Watanabe said. "Sixty-one years ago we were enemies, but right now, today, we can make this film together."

Ellie

thedrifter
02-02-07, 08:58 AM
War film is letter perfect

PETER HOWELL
(Feb 2, 2007)

It is February 1945, the endgame of the Second World War, and the American assault on the strategic Japanese island of Iwo Jima is gaining ground.

Lt. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), the unflappable commander of Iwo's 22,000 Japanese troops, gazes wordlessly from a distance towards Mount Suribachi, the highest point on the narrow isle of rock and sulphur.

He can barely make out the U.S. flag flying on the summit, proclaiming American dominance.

"Suribachi has fallen," his bitter subordinate Lt. Ito (Shidou Nakamura) tells Kuribayashi. But the flag, as tiny and indistinct as it is, says it all. The Americans are winning, and the defence of Iwo has become a suicide mission for Kuribayashi and his men.

This scene in Letters from Iwo Jima, Clint Eastwood's majestic conclusion of his two-part meditation on the true cost of war, is the muted flip side to the heavy symbology of Flags of our Fathers, in which the raising of the Stars and Stripes was the story.

Iwo Jima is restrained where Flags was heavy handed, and it is much the better picture for it. In seeking to tell the Japanese side of the Battle of Iwo Jima, a conflict most people know only from the iconic photo of Marines raising the flag on Suribachi, Eastwood exhibits more than just unusual sympathy for a foreign aggressor.

He frees himself from the albatross of indecision that bedevilled him in Flags, a worthy film freighted with mixed messages. By focusing so resolutely on the Marines in the Iwo Jima photo, and guiltily assessing the celebrity hoopla that attended them back home, he was unsure of what he was really trying to say. Was it really so terrible to wave the flag about a flag raising when it served to raise billions of war-relief dollars to save untold American lives?

Letters From Iwo Jima suffers from no such split personality. Eastwood remains on the island, shifting perspective from the beaches of the American landing to the hilltop caves and tunnels the Japanese dug to give them what they thought would be a tactical advantage over the invaders.

He views the situation with compassion commensurate to Kuribayashi's. But Letters, presented mostly in Japanese with English subtitles, is by no means an apologia for Japan's role in the Second World War. Eastwood shows vile behaviour and cruel acts on both sides.

The unspoken message of the film, which screenwriter Iris Yama****a penned in concert with Flags scribe Paul Haggis, is that war is a battle of competing symbols and ideologies that have no meaning. We create artificial divisions to hide the fact that we are all the same under the skin, with the same hopes, desires and fears.

You may well find yourself cheering for the Japanese side, and shuddering every time a U.S. marine comes into the frame. The enemy of Flags, largely unseen behind guns and armour, suddenly becomes flesh-and-blood people who are simply fighting for their country and their own survival.

Watanabe's noble countenance and Ninomiya's genial smile reveal the depth of personality of a land often reduced to clumsy stereotypes.

The film's aspect is every bit as bleak as was in Flags, released last October. Tom Stern's camera is once again nearly drained of colour, as it strains to find any signs of life among the most forbidding of terrain.

Letters began almost as an afterthought, when Eastwood realized that his adaptation of the bestseller Flags of our Fathers couldn't comfortably accommodate the telling of both the American and Japanese sides of the story.

Yet it is by far the greater achievement in every regard, because it gets to the heart of what Eastwood was really trying to say all along: War is what people engage in when they refuse to accept their common values.

Ellie