Eastwood On 'Flags Of Our Fathers'

[thedrifter]

Eastwood On 'Flags Of Our Fathers'
Director Discusses New Film About Iwo Jima In Exclusive Interview With Bill Whitaker

(CBS) One of the most famous images captured during World War II is a photo of a group of five Marines and one Navy corpsman planting the United States flag on Iwo Jima's Mt. Suribachi.

"It was the biggest battle in Marine Corps history, the most loss of life of any Marine campaign," director Clint Eastwood tells CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker in an exclusive interview.

Eastwood's new movie, "Flags of our Fathers," based on the book of the same title, is the true story of how one image electrified the nation.

It turned the flag raisers into instant heroes. The government used the heroic pose to raise money at a critical point in the war, never publicizing that this wasn't exactly what it seemed.

The Iwo Jima battle was a bloody, inch-by-inch battle to take the volcanic island, which had airstrips that were crucial to the planned U.S. invasion of Japan. With the Japanese hiding in miles of underground tunnels, Marines said Iwo Jima was like hell.

John Huffhines was with the 5th Marine division at the time.

"You never get over it. It’s always with you," Huffhines says.

It was on the fifth day of the invasion that the Marines took the high ground and planted a flag on Mt. Suribachi. The first flag is the one the Marines remember, they said at a recent reunion.

"The fighting stopped when the flag went up... It was quiet. Everybody stood up and cheered," Bob Day says.

Raymond Jacobs helped raise the first flag. He said an officer wanted it as a souvenir and ordered a bigger one to replace it. The raising of the second flag happened so quickly, the Marines thought it was nothing special. But it was.

"We often said that the first flag raising was for the Marines on the island on combat, whereas the second flag raising was for the American people back home," Jacobs says.

The battle for Iwo Jima raged for another month. Three of the men in the famous picture lost their lives there. One of them, Sgt. Mike Strank, was fighting next to Ralph Griffiths.

"A shell dropped in front of him. It took Sgt. Strank’s heart and chest right out. Killed him, wounded me," Griffiths says.

As for the three flag raisers who survived the island, the pain of war would follow them until the end of their lives.

"I think they were all heroes," Eastwood says.

Eastwood says he's finishing a second movie on Iwo Jima, this one from the Japanese perspective. He wants the American audience to walk away from that movie thinking that "they are the good guys."

But by the same token, Eastwood wants Americans to know "that the price is pretty heavy and that the price is something the military people are always ready to stand by and pay ... and (the) American people should be appreciative of that."

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Clint Eastwood's ‘Flags of Our Fathers’: A Win-Lose Situation
Thursday , October 12, 2006

By Roger Friedman

Clint’s ‘Flags’: A Win-Lose Situation | Lennon’s Exes Meet in Iceland | Barbra’s Gang; Lorne Wins Round 1

Clint’s ‘Flags’: A Win-Lose Situation

Clint Eastwood is 76 years old, and in less than four years he’s made three remarkably good films: "Mystic River," which was nominated for an Oscar; "Million Dollar Baby," which won Best Picture; and most recently, "Flags of Our Fathers," which opens a week from tomorrow. This is a film with much merit, and it will get a lot of kudos, "Thumbs up" and the all the rest. The question is, is it as good as the other two? I’m not sure.

“Flags of Our Fathers” tells the story of what happened to the soldiers who were photographed in the famous picture of an American flag being planted on Iwo Jima during World War II. The story is based on a book written by James Bradley, the son of one of those soldiers, with Ron Powers, one of the great dramatic non-fiction prose writers of our time. I’d love to see his “White Town Drowsing” made into an HBO film. It’s wonderful.

The screenplay for “Flags” was written by William Broyles Jr. and then tweaked by Paul Haggis, who wrote the screenplays for “Mystic River” and “Million Dollar Baby.” It’s too bad he didn’t just overhaul “Flags” from top to bottom.

Broyles — who started out at Newsweek years ago — can be pretty stodgy in his delivery. Witness such lumps of exposition as "Jarhead," "The Polar Express," "Planet of the Apes" and — ugggh! — "Cast Away," in which the most memorable character was a volleyball.

Broyles also co-created “China Beach” for TV, and that’s what “Flags” reminds me of the most. It has a big ensemble cast and one self-destructive main character. In “China Beach,” it was Dana Delany’s alcoholic McMurphy, the nurse. In “Flags,” it’s Ira Hayes, actor Adam Beach’s Native American soldier whose lack of self esteem sends him into a downward spiral. Luckily Beach like Delany, finds the vulnerability. Delany won Emmys; Beach will at least be nominated for Oscars.

“Flags of Our Fathers” soars in many regards. Grisly and realistic, Eastwood’s battle scenes are incredibly exciting. He’s shot most of the movie in dull blues and grays, and black and white. In fact, the only real colors you ever see are bright blue (in a dress, in the ocean) and red (in the stripes on the American flag). Otherwise, as just about everything blows up and limbs are shorn, the picture is muted of life.

At the same time, though, Eastwood has to balance the story of the soldiers from that picture. They’re sent home to become public-relations icons; heroes who must sell war bonds to a weary, financially-drained populace. In the process, they see the act they performed diminished, and the heroism that’s projected on them becomes uncomfortable.

Ryan Phillippe and Jesse Bradford, playing Hayes’ buddies, do a good job as likeable guys caught in a tricky spot. Eastwood does everything he can for them, but the screenplay is their enemy. The pair gets no showy scenes, nothing that might illuminate their plight separate from Hayes’. And there are so many pointed digs at Hayes’ heritage (everyone, annoyingly, calls him “Chief” as in “Indian Chief”) that it almost seems that being Indian is more central to the story than having planted the flag at Iwo Jima.

There are some caveats about “Flags of our Fathers” that can’t be overlooked, and again I think they have more to do with Broyles’ script than anything else. First, there don’t seem to be any black soldiers at Iwo Jima. Outside of Beach’s character, it’s an all-white American army. This is historically inaccurate.

Writer Christopher Paul Moore talks about the Army’s 471st, 473rd and 476th amphibious truck companies in his excellent book, “Fighting for America: Black Soldiers — The Unsung Heroes of World War II” and includes many pictures of black Marines and soldiers from the month-long battle of Iwo Jima. Certainly, at least one of them could have been represented. (To be fair, black soldiers were also omitted from Steven Spielberg’s "Saving Private Ryan," as Moore notes.)

No black characters, but more than 30 actors from Iceland, where a big chunk of the movie was filmed, are credited as soldiers.

And there’s almost no mention of Joe Rosenthal, the Pulitzer prize-winning photographer who took the picture of the flag raising. An actor who resembles Sean Penn snaps the photo in the movie, but he’s uncredited and never again discussed. (There are about 40 references in the book upon which the movie is based, however.) Rosenthal died this past August at age 95.

But these are mere quibbles: “Flags of Our Fathers” remains undiminished. “Flags” also has a cast that’s a who’s who of solid actors, including John Slattery, Jon Polito, Robert Patrick, Neal McDonough, Barry Pepper, John Benjamin Hickey and Judith Ivey.

There’s also a topnotch selection of younger actors in key soldiers’ roles with Jamie Bell, Joseph Cross and Paul Walker (in a cameo) as the standouts. And the older actors who play the WWII soldiers in the present — Harve Presnell, Len Cariou, George Grizzard and George Hearn — make the whole thing that much more believable. All the actors are, as Eastwood once told me, “get up and go” kind of actors, the sort who are already so talented he says he doesn’t have to tell them much.

“Flags of Our Fathers” comes out at an interesting time. Like “Bobby,” which doesn’t hit until Nov. 20, “Flags” is a historical picture with a lot of contemporary resonance. Setting aside the tremendously grand nature of the battles, the central issue of “Flags” — how a war is sold to a country that may no longer want it — is far too important to dismiss without discussion. That the discussion comes from Clint Eastwood, an American icon (and a noted Republican), means the director earns even more respect this time around.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Clint Eastwood on Flags of Our Fathers
Source: Heather Newgen
October 13, 2006

Legendary actor and director Clint Eastwood was greeted by a packed room of journalists applauding him as he entered the ball room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles to talk about his latest film, Flags of our Fathers. Wearing a pressed powered blue suit, Eastwood: stood at the front of the room and allowed reporters to take pictures. After a few photos he laughed and said, "Okay, that's enough of that. Well, thank you for coming here at this ridiculous hour. At least it was for me. (surveys mikes and recorders). I keep feeling I'm at Sharper Image and they have a little display."

Eastwood's new film is based on the bestselling book by James Bradley with Ron Powers of the same name. The island of Iwo Jima was one of the most crucial and bloodiest battles of World War II. It culminated with what would become one of the most iconic images in history: five Marines and a Navy corpsman raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi. The novel chronicles the battle of Iwo Jima and the fates of the flag raisers and some of their brothers in Easy Company.

Eastwood talked to ComingSoon.net about adapting the book and making a companion film, Letters From Iwo Jima.

ComingSoon.net: You've often said that you pick your films based on subjects that interest you on a personal level. So why this?
Clint Eastwood:: One, there's never been a story on Iwo Jima, even though there have been pictures that have been using it in the title , but the actual invasion, it was the biggest marine corps invasion in history, the most fierce battle in marine corps history, but what intrigued me about it was the book itself and the fact that it wasn't really a war story. I wasn't setting out to do a war movie. I'd been involved with a few as an actor, but I liked this because it was just a study of these people, and I've always been curious about families who find out things about their relatives much after the fact and the ones who seemed to be the most in the front lines and have been through the most seem to be the ones who have been the quietest about their activity. It's a sure thing that if you hear somebody being very braggadocio about all their experiences in combat, sure thing that he was probably a clerk typist somewhere in the rear echelon (laughs). But there seems to be a commonality with these kind of people like James Bradley was, that they came back and it was a time in history when you didn't have a lot of psychiatric evaluation and coddling. When they came back they were just told to go home and get over it. And if they didn't have wives or loved ones to help them, they had to adjust on their own, or else they didn't adjust on their own. So it's just those experiences of being a young man thrown into the ultimate celebrity and the picture I hope makes a comment on celebrity, of being treated like a president. Maybe not always a president, but being treated like a celebrity, and they didn't feel that. They felt very complex about being that, especially when so many of their companions were killed in this ferocious battle. And this was the only famous photograph, the Joe Rosenthal photograph, was taken four or five days into the battle. It was not even a fourth of the way there yet, but it signified a unity that I've always been curious about. So that's it.


CS: Could you describe briefly the discussions you had with Paul Haggis early on... to montage it rather than go linearly.
Eastwood:: We talked very much about that, but it's a difficult book to translate into a screenplay. Paul likes to joke. After our first meeting, he said, I have about an 11 per cent chance of being successful with this. And I said, "well, it's going to work out. Don't worry. Just keep things straight ahead" and we would talk every day or so over the phone and talk about philosophy. It was a way to get started. He had a trouble getting into it and we talked about doing it like you were suggesting - doing it in various acts - but the trouble is, to show the impact that it has on the three soldiers and their recollection is that it's very difficult to work with, because you'd go from present day, which would be 1994 in this case, and back to one period of time and up to another period of time and back, and then up to the present day, and the only other time I've done that - I did it with a picture called "Bird" years ago and I had difficulty in going into flashback, then a flashback within a flashback, and then having to unwind and come back and keep the audience only moderately confused. To get back to the present day of that particular picture [which] present day was in the '40s as well. But, we finally decided this was the way to do it - through a journalistic - and because James Bradley wrote his book as he was researching - doing literally a detective story - going around and talking to people - it laid out that way. It just seemed like a logical way to do it. Otherwise it's a very big sprawling book, and it covers a lot of chapters on a lot of various items. You have to sit there and figure out, well what story do we want to do? Just the bond drive or the battle? But you have to have the impact of the battle to show the complexities of the bond drive, of the emotions of the guys, and I guess Adam Beach's character sort of sums it up when he's on the train, and says, "We shouldn't be here." There's a lot of little key places that guide you back - that is one of them.

CS: Talk about decision to cast lesser known actors and what do you think of Adam Beach's performance?
Eastwood:: We're using lesser-known actors because the average age of people sent to Iwo Jima was 19 years old. Except for some of the officers. I talked to one of the officers who was there the day before yesterday, he retired as a general but he was a captain then and he was 24. So the oldest in our group who was Mike Strank, 26 years old, and the other Marines called him "The Old Man." It's hard to be called an old man at 26, but because of his leadership qualities, he was sort of viewed that way. I think because of the age and we had to use young people it lent itself to using lesser-known actors. And also if you have big name actors coming on the screen in a situation, sometimes it takes a while to adjust and see someone who's well-known and then adjust to them as a character and it's up to that actor to romance you over into thinking that he is that character. I remember years ago seeing "Rio Bravo," in a theater and they made the decision to cast Ward Bond as a wagon master and have him ride into town and go "Wagon's ho!" and this was during the time that "Wagon Train" was on television and a very popular show, and when he did that the whole audience all came apart and it took another 15 minutes to get back into the movie. But just the presence of somebody that's well known, and also people are going to the movies to see their favorite actor, in this case, that may be the case in this movie or any other movie, but this time you can kind of accept in a faster fashion the fact that these people are the characters. Adam Beach, the story of Ira Hayes has been told before. But Adam Beach is a North American Indian, so we don't have a Caucasian playing it or somebody of occidental background. I had seen him do some other smaller roles but he came and he did a reading on tape and it was very good. You could see a lot of possibilities there. I hired him. He turned out to be even better than I expected because Ira Hayes was a complex person, a person who did sharecropping, a kid from Arizona who went to the Marine Corps, suddenly he's in the Marine Corps and he's got a uniform and he meets a lot of friends. He found sort of a family in the Marine Corps. He liked it to the point where he wanted to stay there. Everything in this picture is true. Sometimes that's an advantage and sometimes it's a disadvantage. But everything happened. He did threaten Gagnon that he'd kill him if he told them he was on the flag. He didn't want to come back to the states after combat and do what they're doing. He had a problem with alcoholism and everywhere they went, they were serving him drinks. That could be not conducive to a good situation for a person with his feelings, attraction to
alcohol. The Keyes Beach character also had attraction to alcohol and he was assigned to Ira Hayes, which made it worse because he was the liaison for the three boys. The other boys seemed to be able to handle it. But Rene Gagnon had problems on his own.


CS: What was it like filming in Iceland?
Eastwood:: I loved filming in Iceland. When it was first suggested that we work in Iceland, I could not understand how it [would] work, but really there's a lot of similarities between Iceland in the summer and Iwo Jima in the winter time. Iwo is a geo-thermal island, a lot of volcanic activity, a lot of sulphur minerals coming out of fissures in the mountains and what have you. Iceland is not necessarily that way, but it does have some of that and it has tremendous black beaches, black sand beaches, which are very hard to duplicate. We looked at black sand beaches all over the world - next to the Four Seasons in Hawaii (laughter) - comfortable places. Certain parts of it on Iwo Jima that were not too sensitive because it is considered a shrine, and the Japanese don't have tourism there. Nobody can go there without the Japanese government's approval and the Japanese government feels it's a sacred place because there are still almost 12,000 of their men unaccounted for on that island. So we couldn't do the pyrotechnics that we would have to do to actually recreate the invasion, so we went to Iceland, and Iceland was very cooperative, and then we came back and did the various cities here in the States.

CS: Would like to know your thoughts on the difference of being a marine in a war where the purpose is clear, like the Second World War and the whole country is behind you and being a soldier today where many people don't seem to know the purpose of the war in Iraq.
Eastwood:: All wars have their problems. It was a different time in history, of course. We had been fighting in the European theatre, we were at war, but when it was brought to us in Pearl Harbor, it became a reality that if we weren't careful, that if we didn't fight this one out, we might be speaking another language today. So it was sort of simple. A lot of the women went to work in factories and had to give up their life. Most of the men gave up their lives or gave up their everyday life to go, but most of them were skinny kids out of the depression. Most of the kids, the average age was 19 years old. You figured they were probably all born in 1928 or 27 or in the late 20s early 30s, and they were over there, but they all had the spirit. And it was important to tell this story for that reason. It told of a time in our history when there was a lot of spirit. I think the icon itself of the flag-raising - a candid shot which was sort of a manufactured shot at the time . . . it didn't have any significance at the moment because it was a separate flag-raising but it was just a shot that was very rare. It's a work of art. It's a work of art because it's people not looking into the camera and smiling at their aunt in Des Moines. It shows the unity of people working towards a common cause. The hands reach out, sometimes just hands just being seen, and that itself showed a time when people felt they had to - we had to be victorious in this war.

How it compares to today - I suppose war is war whenever you're in there. If you're in the front lines, there are always various problems you have to deal with that are hard for us to understand who are in a non-combat situation unfortunately. As this picture shows, the politicians are still running a certain amount of things. The men obviously were almost as much affected by the bond drive as they were by the combat. But the bond drive was a very strenuous thing for young men to be sent out and treated like kings and then to have to all of a sudden, the rug's out from under them and they go back to civilian life and there's nowhere to go. Except for James Bradley who had a profession in mind. They just drifted off into the sunset so to speak. It was time of great effort in the country. I am probably one of the few people in the room here who were around at that time. And I remember the feeling, I remember the Seventh Bond Drive, I didn't know too much about it because I was only 15 years old. You read newspapers and saw a lot of the activity on it. Everything was bonds, bonds, bonds. People would give you bonds. Your parents would give you a bond for your birthday or something. Younger kids were disappointed because they didn't get a toy, but they would get a bond that would be worth something later on. So it was a great moment in history as far as American unity. The country seems much more - I'm sure it wasn't - but it seems in hindsight certainly much more unified than it is today, because the war we're in today excluding the Iraq War in the front lines is a different kind of war. Ideology, religion - there's a lot of factors coming in to it that may make the next war much more difficult. But this one was much more cut and dried.


CS: How challenging was it making "Flags of our Fathers" and "Letters From Iwo Jima" at the same time?
Eastwood:: It goes in waves. Sometimes you think I'll take some time off, and it goes in waves. I did "Mystic River," and I was going to take some time off after that project, then I read "Million Dollar Baby," and said, boy, I gotta do that. So I went right into that. I had tried to buy this book sometime earlier and DreamWorks bought it and I ran into Steven Spielberg and he said why don't you come over and direct this film. I [told him] I liked [the book] very much. We shook hands and I said, "yes, I'll do that." He didn't have a screenplay he was happy with so we had to kind of start from scratch. I was working with Paul so I brought Paul in, and the rest is where we are. Part way into the research for the book and how to do it, I started getting interested in Lt. General Kuribayashi and I was kind of wondering what kind of person he was to defend this island in a ferocious way but also in a very clever way by tunneling the island and putting everything underground. Doing it differently than most of the Japanese defenses were at that time. Most of them were beachhead defenses and using a lot of artillery from the sea. You couldn't do that effectively with this particular battle. This particular battle by the way, had its intelligence problems as we've seen in recent times. They estimated far fewer troops than was on the island so they sent the Navy off figuring they could take it fairly easily. They thought they could take it in maybe four or five days, and it didn't quite turn out that way. I sent to Japan and got a book about General Kuribayashi. It was a book of letters, and the letters were to his wife, his daughter and his son, and a lot of them were mailed from the U.S. when he was here as an envoy in the late '20s and early '30s. He was a very sensitive man, very family-oriented, missing his family very much. In those [letters] you got a feeling for what he was like. Later on, we found out some stories, some fact and some up to a point, and then the island gets lost, because there were no survivors that we could find that knew exactly what happened at the end. But Gen. Kuribayashi was a unique guy, he liked America, he thought it was a mistake to go to war with America. He thought America was too big an industrial complex, from a practical point of view. He had a lot of resistance among his own troops about his defense of the island. A lot of his fellow officers thought he was crazy doing this whole tunneling thing. But he turns out to be an interesting person. And in our research, we found out there were many other interesting people that were there, and the young Japanese conscriptees that were on the island were very much like the Americans. They didn't necessarily want to be in the war. They were sent there being told, don't plan on coming back; something you could not tell an American with a straight face. That would be a tough sell. Most people go into combat thinking, yes, it could be dangerous and I could get killed, but I could also make it back and go back to normal.

CS: Can you talk about the recurring theme of deconstructing the hero myth?
Eastwood:: Yeah, that's very important in this movie because we, in the era we live in now, everybody's being considered a hero. In that particular era, the '40s, heroes were people of extraordinary fetes. They're people, human beings, that Americans do heroic deeds every day. You probably all read and saw that news last night where that fireman jumped out of the car and he saved these two people who were burning in the car. He was on his way back from work. People do deeds like that all the time. People also, some people say, "Well, it's not my problem." There are exceptions, but growing up, I'm trying to think of who's heroic? Joe Lewis, maybe in the war, there was General Patton of course. Maybe Eisenhower, the head of the allied forces. Gary Cooper. There were a few people, there was a handful. Movie actors that were celebrities were a handful, a handful of men and a handful of women that were names. Now you have to decipher everything because everybody's a star so you have to have superstars. But people are stars who are just heiresses or something now. [Laughs] I don't have an example of that. [Laughs]. But it's a much different era. They didn't have that sort of thing then.

CS: What was your message about propaganda in the film?
Eastwood:: I think what we tried to tell is that the propaganda, we tried to show the propaganda machine as it actually appeared. Yeah, growing up, we watched all the war movies. War movies always were very propaganda-istic. There's always the bad guys and the good guys. Most of the servicemen were portrayed by actors who were at least in their 30s, sometimes in their 40s and on up. That is inaccurate because the majority of them were in their teens and early 20s. I think the oldest person in the campaign, the oldest guy was Howling Smith who was 60 years old. He was the oldest officer, but most of the officers were probably in their 20s and most of the infantry people were in their teens.

Flags of our Fathers opens October 20th and Letters From Iwo Jima on February 9th.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Eastwood stares down war
Updated 10/13/2006 6:59 AM ET
By Anthony Breznican, USA TODAY
Clint Eastwood says he has lost interest in the fantasy of war. Now, he is consumed by the tragedy of it.

The director's new film, Flags of Our Fathers, opens Oct. 20 and tells the stories of the Marines who were famously photographed raising the American flag during the battle of Iwo Jima. That iconic photo came to represent the unflagging nature of the American spirit, but Eastwood's film raises questions about how the men and their heroic actions were co-opted by the U.S. government to raise money for the last stage of World War II.

The movie and its message are unlikely to be ignored because it comes from Eastwood, a superstar action hero whose turn to directing has produced two best-picture Oscar winners (Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby) and a nomination for Mystic River.

Eastwood once starred in such war-themed romps as Kelly's Heroes, Where Eagles Dare and Heartbreak Ridge. But these days, Dirty Harry sounds like a dove. And a tough one, at that.

"World War I was there, and that was going to be the one to end all wars," says Eastwood, 76. "And then World War II came along and that was going to be the war to end all wars. Then, five years later, Korea. Not too many years after that, Vietnam. And all the little skirmishes, Yugoslavia, Gulf War I, Gulf War II ...

"It doesn't speak well for mankind. It seems like it's just inevitable that they'll go on forever. Is that the way it's supposed to be? Is man most creative when he's at war? I don't know. We're always hoping every one is the last one."

Flags celebrates the sacrifices of the thousands who died capturing the island of Iwo Jima, while simultaneously scorning what Eastwood calls "the futility of war."

He was in his teens during World War II and remembers people along the California coast painting their windows black out of fear that a Japanese destroyer might be lurking in the distance, searching for a nighttime target. He was in the Army during the Korean War, though he didn't see combat. He voted for Dwight Eisenhower for president because he thought a military man familiar with the horrors of battle would be able to settle the conflict.

That's how he became a Republican. "I guess if he'd been running as a Democrat, I'd have been a Democrat," Eastwood says and smiles — a crack in that iconic face which, even in real life, seems to be permanently marked with contempt for punks.

Not to be pigeonholed

Flags is based on the best-selling book by James Bradley, the son of the late John Bradley, a Navy corpsman who helped raise the flag.

Five Marines and a sailor raised the flag in the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo shot by the Associated Press's Joe Rosenthal, but only three of them survived the battle.

The film flashes back and forth between the Pacific island conflict and the homeland tour of the flag-raising survivors, who face being drafted to a new kind of battle: public relations. They are the face men for a bond drive to finance the final phase of the war.

After the war they were generally forgotten, though the emotional scars remained.

"This thing isn't anti-war in terms of 'We shouldn't have done it,' " Eastwood says. "(World War II) is one of the wars we should have done, and we did the best we could with the knowledge we had at the time. Even today, we're doing the best we can with the knowledge we have, but obviously we don't have enough knowledge."

A lot of people think they know where he stands. Eastwood says they don't.

In 2004, Million Dollar Baby explored a patient's right to die — a year before the Terry Schiavo case made national headlines and divided the nation. Some critics denounced the film and tried to spoil the ending for audiences.

Eastwood never publicly revealed his thoughts on assisted suicide, saying at the time that his movie was "supposed to make you think about the precariousness of life and how we handle it." He says it's not bad to be provocative.

"I'm sure I'll have the same thing" with Flags of Our Fathers, he says. "One side or the other or both will put whatever they want into it. And that's OK. That's what they should do. If they want to have the take that it's a righteous war and we're doing the right thing, and they can have the take where the Marines came back and were used a little bit by a government to make the ends justify the means."

During his brief political career (he was mayor of Carmel, Calif., for two years in the 1980s), Eastwood served as a Republican. He laughs and says: "It was a non-partisan run. I think the other candidates were Republican."

Where does he stand?

"I'm not right or left. Maybe on some things I sympathize with the right, and some things I sympathize with on the left. I'm not predictable. And still, there's no harm in changing. There's no harm in updating your philosophies as you go along. As you get older, you see more and you learn more and maybe take different attitudes."

As the director of a movie about the scars of war, he knows it's impossible, though he comes across as private about such things. People as well-known as Eastwood who express their opinions can attract scorn from people with different beliefs. Eastwood acknowledges the need to fight terrorism, but says of Iraq: "I'm happy to not be of the school that thinks we should be democratizing another country that obviously doesn't care that much about it and doesn't seem to be suited for it."

He speaks with a quiet resolve, the voice of someone who, after almost eight decades, no longer takes such things lightly. In real life, he shares the intensity of his famous screen characters but not the stubbornness. He says open-mindedness and a willingness to grow are responsible for his successes.

"If I get to the point where I'm repeating myself or not progressing or taking new challenges, then I should see if I can play golf or something," he says, breaking into that disarming grin again. "Listen to different points of view and you learn something about yourself."

It's that open-mindedness that, after working on Flags, led him to make Letters from Iwo Jima, the Japanese perspective on the battle. It will be released in Japan in December and in the USA in early 2007.

"I started philosophizing on what the Japanese young guys were like. I started reading letters from young conscripts and they had the same problems: I miss my mother. I don't want to die. How's my dog?"

That's another tragedy of war, he says: "You start realizing when you look at the other side that these are people you could be great friends with."

Contemporary parallels?

A viewer could come away from Flags of Our Fathers thinking of comparisons to today, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the way the conflict has been portrayed in the media and by the military.

Tom Brokaw, the former NBC news anchor and author of The Greatest Generation books about the World War II era, says: "I don't think he was making a statement about the war today as much as he was about the idea of war. ... It will be interesting to me to see whether there'll be any contemporary political fallout as a result of this film, whether people will think about the fog of war, the decisions that were made and the use of propaganda."

The U.S. Treasury secretary depicted in the film romanticizes the story of the Iwo Jima flag for his bond campaign, and does not correct the report that one of the deceased flag-raisers was misidentified. He also doesn't want them to reveal that the photo was of the second flag-raising on the island.

"There were some lies to it or slight distortions of the truth to keep (the story) going. He didn't want it to lose the impact," Eastwood says.

For some, those elements may recall Jessica Lynch, the wounded Iraq War Army private who later said the military overdramatized her capture and rescue.

There is also Army Ranger Pat Tillman, who turned down a multimillion-dollar NFL contract to enlist after 9/11 but was later accidentally killed by U.S. forces.

"He was an All-American-looking kid and representative of the great American youth," Eastwood says. "He was idealistic about going (to war) and had a tragic end, and those stories are throughout history."

Though sometimes the powers-that-be manipulate these stories, Eastwood says that does not diminish the sacrifice.

"The big, big message," Brokaw says, is: "Who are heroes? How do you define a hero?"

The characters in the movie chafe under that title, and Brokaw says those men had an inherent modesty. "I've talked to a lot of veterans and not one of them has said, 'You know, I was a real hero that day.' They're uniformly uncomfortable with that."

Bradley, author of the book, says that was the point of the story. "These were just ordinary guys doing their duty. I wanted to demythologize the flag raising. The beauty of the photo is not that they're different from us, but they are us. They are just doing their duty."

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Posted on Sat, Oct. 14, 2006

`FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS' MOVIE TELLS STORY

Iwo Jima flag moves to Marine museum
Standard shown in famed WWII photo in storage for decades
BOB DART
Cox News Service

QUANTICO, Va. - Five Marines in camouflage fatigues formally put the flag of the book "Flags of Our Fathers" on display Friday, a week before the opening of the movie that tells the story behind this tattered, storied banner of red, white and blue wool.

"This flag symbolizes the Marine Corps' past, present and future," said Bob Sullivan, curator of the new National Museum of the Marine Corps. "The design of this building was based on the raising of this flag."

The gleaming architecture that juts abruptly above the tree line next to Interstate 95 evokes the famous photograph of six Americans raising this flag atop Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II.

The picture taken by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal is the most famous and most reproduced battle photo in history, said Sullivan. It also inspired the Marines' Iwo Jima Memorial just across the Potomac River from the nation's capital.

The movie "Flags of Our Fathers," directed by Clint Eastwood and produced by Steven Spielberg, is based on the 2000 book of the same name co-authored by James Bradley and Ron Powers. James Bradley is the son of John Bradley, a Navy corpsman who was one of the men pictured raising the flag on Iwo Jima.

At Friday's ceremony, the museum's uniform curator, Neil Abelsma, described the flag's journey from a makeshift pole made from a drainage pipe on a bloody atoll in the Pacific to a carefully guarded and climate-controlled display case in a museum scheduled to open Nov. 11.

The popularity of Rosenthal's picture prompted President Franklin Roosevelt to bring back the flag and send it to 33 cities on a war bond drive, said Abelsma. It flew over the U.S. Capitol and in other cities before becoming part of the Marine Corps' historic collection.

John Wayne held the flag in publicity photos for the 1949 movie, "The Sands of Iwo Jima," but the flag itself did not fly in the film. For most of the decades since, it has been kept in a sealed display case in Building 58 at the Washington Navy Yard.

Also part of the new display is an autographed enlargement of Rosenthal's photo on an adjoining wall, facing a printed quotation from the photographer. Rosenthal died in August.

Abelsma said producers of "Flags of Our Fathers" talked with him to get the details and dimensions of the famous flag-raising scene right.

The wool flag was made at a military installation on Mare Island, Calif., he said. It originally measured 56 1/2 inches by 106 inches. But the widest stripe on the tattered side is now only 102 inches, he said.

The flag was tied with cotton cord to a metal drainage pipe about 2 inches in diameter before being raised during the battle, said Abelsma.

Staff Sgt. Steve Sullivan, one of the Marines who ceremoniously lifted the flag into its new display case Friday, served as a technical adviser on the movie.

In the scene depicting the dedication of the Iwo Jima Memorial, he recalled, he made sure the actual Marines who marched had the uniforms and steps from the early era exactly right. In California, he helped coordinate the scenes in which actors and actual Marines climbed down the nets used to get from the battleships to amphibious landing crafts.

An exhibit in the new museum seeks to help visitors understand part of this experience.

From the recreated belly of a World War II troop transport ship, visitors will board a landing craft on rollers to provide the sensation of surf. Then, they'll jump onto black sand amid the sounds of battle and film footage from the actual Marine landing on Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945.

The six flag raisers in the famous photo were Bradley, Ira Hayes, Franklin Sousley, Harlon Block, Michael Strank and Rene Gagnon.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Posted on Sat, Oct. 14, 2006
Iwo Jima flag gets a new home

Cox News Service

QUANTICO, Va. | Five Marines on Friday formally put the flag of “Flags of Our Fathers” on display.

“This flag symbolizes the Marine Corps’ past, present and future,” said Bob Sullivan, curator of the new National Museum of the Marine Corps. “The design of this building was based on the raising of this flag.”

The picture of the flag-raising in 1945 on the island of Iwo Jima is the most famous and most reproduced battle photo in history, Sullivan said.

An upcoming movie, “Flags of Our Fathers,” directed by Clint Eastwood, is based on the 2000 book of the same name by James Bradley and Ron Powers.

At Friday’s ceremony, the museum’s uniform curator, Neil Abelsma, described the flag’s journey from a makeshift pole made from a drainage pipe to a carefully guarded and climate-controlled display case in the Marine Corps museum, which is slated to open Nov. 10.

The popularity of Joe Rosenthal’s photograph prompted President Franklin D. Roosevelt to bring back the flag and send it on a 33-city tour to sell war bonds. The flag flew over the U.S. Capitol and in other cities before becoming part of the Marine Corps’ collection.

Before Friday it had been kept in a sealed display case at the Washington Navy Yard.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Star of Eastwood film salutes heroes of World War II
Sunday, October 15, 2006
Clint O'Connor
Plain Dealer Film Critic

Iwo Jima was a scorched scrap heap when the Marines invaded in Febru ary 1945. The strategically important island was considered Japanese soil, and for the soldiers defending it, that meant no surrender.

After 31 days, 6,821 Americans were dead, and about 21,000 Japanese. Another 20,000 Americans were wounded. The most lasting symbol of that horror was not the charred, dismembered, lifeless bodies, but a photo of five Marines and a Navy corpsman rais ing a heavy piece of pipe with an American flag attached and sho ving it in the ground atop Mount Suribachi. That stirring symbol, the co-opting of its message and the truth of how it came about were at the heart of the best seller "Flags of Our Fathers," by James Bradley and Ron Powers. The movie version, directed by Clint East wood and starring Ryan Phillippe as Bradley's father, Navy corpsman John "Doc" Bradley, hits theaters Friday.

The film is a tribute to the brave, selfless souls who fought on Iwo Jima and a study of the fallout from powerful propaganda. Coming out during the Iraq War, it also spurs questions about a united war versus a divided war.

Phillippe is tuned in to both eras. His grandfathers served in World War II. His father and uncles served in Vietnam. He also benefited from input from military consultants and a Marine historian on "Flags of Our Fathers."

"World War II is something I would have given my life to fight for," Phillippe said on the phone from Los Angeles. "I don't feel the same way about this war."

But he won't bite when asked to elaborate on American involvement in Iraq.

"I don't like to hear actors talk about politics, religion, medicine," he said. "I'm 32, and I have no new light to shed. I shouldn't talk about things in public I have no business talking about. We all have conflicted and complex feelings about this war."

Phillippe, who played the young cop in last year's best-picture winner, "Crash," is best known for being Reese Witherspoon's husband. (They have two children, Ava, 7, and Deacon, 2.) Phillippe was away for three months shooting "Flags" in Iwo Jima and Iceland, among other locales.

The actor, who also starred in "Cruel Intentions" and "I Know What You Did Last Summer," is currently shooting another war- related drama: an untitled Kimberly Peirce film about an Army sergeant who refuses to return to Iraq after two tours.

If nothing else, Phillippe has learned to surround himself with first-rate filmmakers and multiple Oscar winners.

In addition to Eastwood, "Flags" was produced by Steven Spielberg, with a screenplay co-written by William Broyles Jr. and "Crash" writer-director Paul Haggis.

"Paul is fascinating to me, because he manages to tap into and understand such a diverse palette of characters and does it authentically," said Phillippe. "I had read the book first, and the script is just a masterful adaptation.

"Working with Clint Eastwood is a dream. He treats people with such respect. You adjust after a week or so that you're working with an icon, a legend. Then you get into the thing of the one take. Clint loves one take. That's a real adjustment, but then it becomes a point of pride. There's some kind of macho thing that takes over on his set, that if you have to do a second take you feel like you've failed, which is not the typical actor response, you know, 'I need more takes!' "

The real Doc Bradley was one of three surviving flag-raisers the War Department brought home in 1945 for an elaborate tour to sell war bonds. Along with Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), Bradley became a reluctant symbol of heroism.

"Being called heroes, knowing that their friends, their brothers, died alongside them fighting for their country, it was very difficult for these young men," said Phillippe. "But the money they raised helped win the war. Sometimes that persuasion, that propaganda is necessary. It was also such a different time. We weren't as cynical a society. We hadn't been as overtly manipulated by the media as we are now. People weren't as skeptical."

Because his family tree is already peppered with war veterans, Phillippe had an appreciation for what soldiers do. But working on "Flags" shed new light on what links fathers and sons and those who stormed Iwo Jima 61 years ago.

"Tom Brokaw wrote that book, 'The Greatest Generation,' and I believe that. These are children of the Depression. They went through so much as youths, and then to go into war, a world war. The stakes were so incredibly high, and the way they handled it, the humility, all those things our society loses sight of. There's a lot of value to this film. They should show it in high schools."

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:

coconnor@plaind.com, 216-999-4456

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Eastwood's
Iwo Jima
By Carrie Rickey
Inquirer Movie Critic

For Clint Eastwood, there is a distinction between raising the flag and waving the flag. And he's made an astute movie exploring that difference.

Flags of Our Fathers is the saga of the five Marines and one Navy corpsman who hoisted the Stars and Stripes on Mount Suribachi during the battle of Iwo Jima in 1945. Joe Rosenthal's photograph of the men who raised the flag as a symbol of hope in battle was instantly embraced by the public as an image of victory.

An intimate epic spanning continents and generations, the film opens Friday, and will be followed early next year by Eastwood's companion movie seeing the battle from the Japanese perspective.

Flags is about the distance between a mythic image and its mundane reality. Rosenthal's photograph may have changed the course of a war and decisively rallied public support for it. But the men in the photo thought they were fighting a losing battle.

Shouldering the flag was comparatively easy for those men (played by Adam Beach, Jesse Bradford and Ryan Phillippe). Shouldering the burden of public adulation was not.

The film "is about the interpretation of heroism, the interpretation of stardom, so to speak," Eastwood, 76, reflects by phone from Los Angeles. These are subjects about which the actor - famous for playing gunmen and gunnery sergeants - has first-hand knowledge.

Eastwood is also an Oscar-winning director enjoying a spectacular twilight (Unforgiven, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby). The attraction of this story of the stories behind that World War II image was potent enough for him to pry it from Steven Spielberg, who had optioned the screen rights to James Bradley's nonfiction bestseller.

Rosenthal's picture, said to be the most reproduced photograph in history, had an enormous impact on Eastwood, who was 15 when he first saw it.

"There were many war shots at the time because it was 1945. But in Rosenthal's picture there's no one shooting... . It signified the all-for-one, one-for-all unity of the country," he recalls.

It was an image exalting brotherhood and solidarity. Conspicuously absent were the blood, sweat and fear, which is where the director comes in.

Going into Flags, Eastwood said, "I don't want to make another bull- John Wayne film."

"That's kind of cruel to say about John Wayne," Eastwood acknowledges, admitting that, yes, Flags is meant as a corrective to the gung-ho heroics of the classic Hollywood combat film.

Wayne, the screen's man of action whose Sands of Iwo Jima dramatized the flag-raising, famously said, "If everything isn't black and white, I say why the hell not?" Eastwood, the screen's man of action who is pricked by conscience, long has been drawn to shades of gray.

According to Eastwood, if he said that about Wayne (and he did - it's on Flags' Web site), it was because he didn't want to do a film with a lot of fictionalizing. The Sands of Iwo Jima is a product of "the days when movies were more propagandistic... . " But Flags is "exposing the propaganda-selling."

Back from the war, and armed with balsa-wood rifles, the men who narrowly escaped Iwo with their lives were asked to reenact the flag-raising on a papier-mache mountain in stadiums around the United States, where they were hailed as war heroes and helped to sell billions in war bonds.

"That, to me, was a kind of Hollywoodizing of the boys," Eastwood says. The soldiers believed the real heroes of Iwo Jima were those who lost their lives there.

Some will read Flags as a critique of America's campaign in Iraq - which is far-fetched to anyone familiar with Eastwood's filmography. The book's theme - that of the professional who becomes overwhelmed by public adoration for just doing his job - more obviously drew the filmmaker to the material.

Eastwood read Bradley's book when it was published in 2000, well before American forces were dispatched to Iraq. But when the filmmaker went to option the rights, he found that Spielberg had gotten there first.

While the legendarily circumspect Eastwood typically refrains from commenting on current events, he does say, "There are lessons from Iwo Jima that are applicable to any war... .

"Every person that lost a life on Iwo Jima... sent a ripple through the whole family structure. It's a sad commentary on mankind that here we are still [waging war] in modern times when we're supposed to have evolved as far as we have."

In preparing Flags, Eastwood visited Iwo Jima, a volcanic island about a third the size of Manhattan. To secure a foothold in the campaign to invade Japan, 70,000 Americans attacked the isle, which was defended by 22,000 Japanese who hid in tunnels and caves carved from lava beds.

A Marine described the monthlong attack in which 26,000 Americans (and most of the Japanese) lost their lives as throwing human flesh against reinforced concrete. Running through the hail of Japanese bullets without getting hit, Rosenthal remarked, was like running through a rainstorm without getting wet.

"Visiting Iwo Jima... was an amazing experience," says Eastwood, who shot most of the battle sequences on the black-sand beaches of Iceland.

"All the underground tunnels we went down and through, and into the cave which was the headquarters of Gen. Kuribayashi... . You get a very interesting feeling about the spirit there."

So powerful was the spirit that Eastwood was moved to learn more about Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the Harvard-educated Japanese commander, and had his correspondence translated into English. This begot Letters From Iwo Jima, Eastwood's companion film to Flags showing the conflict from the Japanese perspective. Shot in Japanese and starring Ken Watanabe (The Last Samurai), it will be released next year.

There have been rumblings on some blogs that to make a movie from the perspective of a onetime U.S. enemy amounts to moral relativism, a charge Eastwood shrugs off. (Haven't they ever seen The Bridge on the River Kwai?)

"They haven't seen Flags and haven't seen what we've done with Letters," which the filmmaker is finishing for a December release in Japan. "I don't think any American will find it offensive and I think the Japanese will find it interesting from the standpoint that there has been no history taught about the battle of Iwo Jima in Japan."

The intended target of bloggers' spleen may be Flags screenwriter Paul Haggis, who wrote two consecutive Oscar-winning best pictures, Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby and his own Crash. Haggis is an outspoken liberal, Eastwood a quiet libertarian. It is tempting to imagine how their politics clashed, but Eastwood says it just didn't roll that way. "We never discussed the political implications. We just discussed the historical implications."

Except in the movies, Eastwood has not seen combat. He served his country during Korea teaching swimming for the Sixth Army at Fort Ord, in California. "Ninety percent of the inductees - this was during a draft period - could not swim at all," he says.

"The one thing I tried to show in Flags is that much of the combat action is not heroic - most was just saving your rear end. Adam Beach has a line... 'All I did is try to not get shot, there are a lot of things I've seen [at Iwo Jima] that I'm not particularly proud of.' "

"That could be interpreted in many ways," Eastwood says. "But most people aren't proud of killing people."

Hear Carrie Rickey's interview with Clint Eastwood at go.philly.com/eastwood
Contact movie critic Carrie Rickey at 215-854-5402 or crickey@phillynews. com. Read her recent work at go.philly.com/carrierickey.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

A new generation takes up heroes' flag
Actors try to follow in the bootsteps of the Marines on Iwo Jima

Roger Moore | Sentinel Movie Critic
Posted October 16, 2006

There was a time when a young man hoping to become a movie star had to tick off items on a Hollywood list.

He had to do his gangster picture. He had to manage romances and romantic comedies. He had to look at home on a horse.

And he had to do his combat movie.

That time is very much the era of Flags of Our Fathers, Clint Eastwood's new World War II drama. It's a history lesson, an eye-opener for a generation far removed from World War II or any notion of what Iwo Jima was. And it's a test for a generation of young actors, from Ryan Phillipe and Adam Beach to Jamie Bell and Jesse Bradford.

We've been watching Bell, 20, since 2000's Billy Elliot, the British comedy about a boy who only wanted to dance ballet, no matter what the other kids think. And Bradford, 27, has been around since the '80s, first earning notice as a cheerleader's lovesick brother with the hots for Kirsten Dunst in 2000's Bring It On.

Bradford plays Rene "Rainy" Gagnon, a Marine Corps "runner" who brought the replacement flag to the top of Mount Suribachi and helped raise it, a moment captured by Joe Rosenthal's famous Iwo Jima photograph. After Iwo Jima, Gagnon tried to "cash in" on the fame and died a bitter man when that didn't work out.

And Bell portrays Ralph Ignatowski, another member of the Marine Corps fighting on Iwo Jima, not a flag-raiser but part of their unit.

"The men who fought for 30-something days, we really can't know how bad that really was," Bell says. "But we shot this on Iceland, a volcanic island, like Iwo Jima, and experienced the ground conditions, to some degree. Sand and ash in everything. You can't dig foxholes, because the sand falls in on itself. There's no stability to it. It's like walking through 3 feet of water. It gets into everything.

"We got one one-hundredth of a percent of a taste of what they went through, shooting this on volcanic sand," Bradford says. "But the more we worked on this, the more I could see how that 'Greatest Generation' label really fits. These were people who sacrificed. I wonder if anybody my age or younger can appreciate that. We don't sacrifice today."

Flags, which arrives in theaters Friday, is already earning Oscar buzz, with Variety's Todd McCarthy praising this "pointed take on heroism" and director Eastwood's exploration of why members of "The Greatest Generation" "are, or were, reticent to speak much about what they did in the war, to boast or consider themselves heroes."

The actors confess that their big break, an Eastwood movie, came largely because they look like the men they portray on the screen. To that end, they learned as much as they could about these real-life Marines and the battle that was the defining moment in their lives.

"Clint wanted us to be fresh-faced and wide-eyed," Bell says. And there's a line in [James Bradley's] book about these guys, 'Iggy was just a regular bicycle kid.' "

The "regular bicycle kid" was friends with one of the flag-raisers, something of a unit mascot. Bradford had the trickier role to play. History hasn't been kind to the way Gagnon responded to the war-bonds tour he and the other surviving flag-raisers went on in 1945. The other men, Ira Hayes and John "Doc" Bradley (played by Beach, 34, and Phillippe, 32) suffered "survivor's guilt." But not Gagnon. Bradford thinks he knows why.

"Say you or I are fighting in Iraq right now, and a sergeant comes up and says, 'You and you are going home,' " Bradford says. "Who wouldn't take him up on that? So who can blame him for being relieved to be plucked out of one of the bloodiest battles of the war to go see his mom, his girlfriend, people he didn't think he'd ever get to see again?

"Rene's defining moment in the movie comes in Times Square, when he's giving a speech," Bradford adds. "He knows he was just a runner. He was straightforward about what his role was, and he makes it clear that it's not about him or the other two. It's about the guys still fighting, the guys who would never make it off that island."

Bradford thinks the story and movie's muted colors mirror the theme Eastwood and company sought, "a movie about Morality with a capital 'M,' and morality that's a little more relative. A lot of people try to make every story black and white, the selling of this war or that one, this man is a hero, that one isn't. This is a war movie that finds the gray in that."

Roger Moore can be reached at 407-420-5369 or rmoore@orlandosentinel.com.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Flag of Our Fathers
Starring: Ryan Phillippe, Adam Beach, Jesse Bradford

Directed by: Clint Eastwood

Rolling Stone: 3.5 of 4 Stars

If you like movies that spew clichés, Clint Eastwood will not make your day. Since winning his first directing Oscar, for 1992’s Unforgiven, Eastwood has been on a creative roll with the unsparing Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby (Oscar number two). At seventy-six, he’s doing risky work while his contemporaries retire or, worse, conform. Even when the plot of his new Flags of Our Fathers steers him toward Saving Private Ryan rah-rah and “Greatest Generation” sentiment, Eastwood holds the line.

Flags of Our Fathers is a film of awesome power and blistering provocation. An amazing feat, since Eastwood is tied to the nonfiction best seller that James Bradley wrote about his father, John “Doc” Bradley, the last survivor among the six soldiers who raised the flag on Iwo Jima.

The bloody 1945 battle on Japan’s volcanic island left 6,800 Americans dead, but the public was rallied by a photo, taken by Joe Rosenthal, that became an iconic emblem of World War II: five Marines and one Navy corpsman (Bradley) planting Old Glory on top of Mount Suribachi in the midst of the carnage. It was the second flag-raising that day, but the only one caught on camera. Eastwood hits you hard with that image. As the soldiers struggle to get the flag aloft, you can almost hear cheering.

Actually, you do hear cheering. The scene, a shocker, is a re-creation of the photo staged for an enthusiastic crowd at Chicago’s Soldier Field in the spring of 1945 as part of a fund-raising drive. As the camera pulls back, we see that the mountain is fake. The only reality is the men in the uniform: Doc Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach). Since the other flag-raisers (Franklin Sousley, Harlon Block and Michael Strank) died in battle, the government exploits the surviving trio to drum up money and bolster flagging support for the war in its final months. No longer asked to be heroes in battle but to play heroes Hollywood-style, the men embark on a nationwide tour. It’s pure showbiz. Hide the truth, pump the myth.

It nearly destroys them. Gagnon, 19, adjusts better to fame than the others, mistakenly believing that being a good propagandist will win him jobs after the war. Bradford (Happy Endings) deftly uncovers the doubt lurking under Gagnon’s surface charm. As Bradley, Phillippe (building on strong supporting turns in Crash, Gosford Park and Igby Goes Down) provides the quiet emotional center the story needs. Eastwood wants the reticent Bradley to be our eyes into the film. Phillippe draws us in with a nuanced portrait of a man who bravely administers first aid to soldiers under fire but can’t find words for the horror he’s seen, including the death of his friend Iggy (Jamie Bell). Phillippe’s hauntingly implosive performance makes it clear why Bradley hardly spoke of the war to his family in later years, prompting his son to write the book.

As Hayes, Beach (Windtalkers) burns up the screen, finding the soul of his tormented character. He’s a lock for a supporting-Oscar nomination. Hayes, a Pima Indian bruised by racism in and out of battle, numbed his pain with booze. He died in 1955, at thirty-two. Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan both covered a song about him: “He died drunk one mornin'/Alone in the land he fought to save/Two inches of water in a lonely ditch/Was a grave for Ira Hayes.” Flags of Our Fathers needed to be a sprawling epic to take in all these stories. The ambitious script by William Broyles Jr. (Jarhead) and Crash Oscar winner Paul Haggis jumps back and forth in time in ways that could have been a jumble if Eastwood wasn’t so adept at cutting a path to what counts. That would be the ferocity of battle, edited by Joel Cox and shot in desaturated hues by Tom Stern to show what Eastwood sees as the brutal darkness of it. That would be the parallels to the Iraq War and the lies being perpetrated in the name of blind patriotism. That would be the honor due the soldiers who fight in the face of death on foreign shores and then face disdain at home.

Right at the start, before the first image, we hear a few bars of a 1940s song, “I’ll Walk Alone.” The voice is a whisper, but the lyrics (“If you call, I'll hear you/No matter how far”) resonate. Eastwood’s film, a fierce attack on wartime hypocrisy and profiteering, is also an indelibly moving salute to the soldiers who don’t deserve to walk alone for following their own sense of duty.

After Flags, Eastwood directed Letters From Iwo Jima, a feature that tells the story from the Japanese side. The film won’t be out till February, but one thing is for damn sure: Eastwood will do it his way. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the gold standard.

PETER TRAVERS

(Posted: Oct 16, 2006)

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Iwo Jima flag-raiser's widow to see film

By ROBERT IMRIE, Associated Press Writer

Elizabeth Bradley's husband was among the servicemen who helped hoist the American flag at Iwo Jima, but the couple rarely talked about the moment captured in one of the most famous of all military photographs.

"Our life did not revolve around the flag-raising after we were married," she said.

On Wednesday, the 82-year-old Bradley plans to join about 200 invited guests for a screening of "Flags of Our Fathers," the Clint Eastwood film based on the book of the same name co-authored by Bradley's son, Jim.

"From what I have heard from other authorities, it is going to turn out to be a wonderful movie," Elizabeth Bradley said in a telephone interview from her Wausau home. "I am not nervous. We did see Ryan Phillippe play in some scenes. I think he is doing a marvelous job."

Phillippe portrays John Bradley, a Navy Corpsman. The film documents the lives of Bradley and the five Marines who raised the flag atop Iwo Jima's highest peak on Feb. 23, 1945 — an historic moment captured by Joe Rosenthal, an Associated Press photographer, in a Pulitzer Prize-winning picture.

Bradley said her husband shared very little about the event after the war. Her son's book likely would never have been written had the family not discovered boxes of memorabilia after her husband's death, she said.

"That is what started my son's writing," she said. "If my husband was still living, we never would have found those boxes."

"Flags of Our Fathers" opens nationwide at theaters Friday. Its premiere was Oct. 9 in Los Angeles, and some reviewers are predicting another Oscar nomination for Eastwood. Wednesday's screening will be held in Antigo — 40 miles northeast of Wausau.

The film examines both the ghastly chaos of battle to life on the homefront in a story about both heroism and propaganda.

Bradley said she went to Chicago with some of her children for a day last October to watch some of the scenes being shot. She also met Eastwood.

"I have a lot of respect for him," she said.

Although her husband didn't want attention for being one of the flag-raisers, she would like people to see the film.

"I am very happy that the movie has been made," she said. "And I would like it if every young fella and girl could see it because when they think of joining up any branch of the service, they think of the uniform and of how smart they will look. And they think of the excitement of going to battle.

"But they don't really know what's ahead of them. But if they see movies like this, it might help them make a better decision. And maybe if nobody would go, we wouldn't have wars. That would be nice."

On the Net:

"Flags of Our Fathers": www.flagsofourfathers.com

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Movie Review: 'Flags of our Fathers'

By CHRISTY LEMIRE, AP Movie Critic

The battle scenes are harrowing in "Flags of Our Fathers," the black-sand beaches exploding again and again with artillery fire, filling the gray sky and forming an even darker vision of hell.

But it's what happens to the men after they've come home from Iwo Jima — and been hailed as heroes, whether they deserve it or not — that can be just as devastating in a more intimate, internal way.

With its awesome scope, "Flags" is by far the most ambitious picture Clint Eastwood has made in his 35 years as a director. Yet in following up his Oscar-winning "Mystic River" and "Million Dollar Baby," he balances the quiet intensity of those films with sequences that are breathtaking in their epic proportions.

Comparisons to the virtuoso storming of Normandy at the opening of "Saving Private Ryan" are inevitable: same World War II, different theater, with "Ryan" director Steven Spielberg serving here as a producer. "Flags" is just as brutal and gritty, just as technically impressive, immersing you just as deeply into the action. But by jumping back and forth in time, and in and out of the battle itself, "Flags" features its own unique brand of chaos and confusion.

Working from a script by William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis, based on the book by James Bradley and Ron Powers, Eastwood follows the men featured in the iconic Associated Press flag-raising photograph and those who grapple with the guilt of being linked to that shot, even though they might not have been there.

This is a visceral war movie and a moving drama, raising themes that resonate today as Americans are fighting an unpopular war in Iraq. But it's also a complex mystery as the government, the worried mothers at homes across America, even the servicemen themselves try to figure out who planted the flag on that mountaintop and who didn't.

In the haze of battle, it's hard to tell. And that's the point. Broyles ("Jarhead") and Haggis (who also wrote "Million Dollar Baby" before directing and co-writing this year's best-picture winner, "Crash") keep us wondering the whole time. They alternate between the Japanese island and the handful of surviving Marines and a Navy corpsman, who go on tour once they return to the United States.

Superficially, the tour is intended as a celebration of courage, of national pride. In reality, it's also an effort to drum up support for the war, an extended infomercial for government bonds. Either way the tour events are pure propaganda, and they function as a crucible for the shaken, reluctant heroes.

Ryan Phillippe, Adam Beach and Jesse Bradford lead the excellent ensemble cast of military men, with John Slattery among the standouts back home as the cynical Treasury Department official urging them to milk the inspirational worth of that photo for as long as they can.

Phillippe stars as John "Doc" Bradley, an earnest, steadfast Navy medic trying to maintain a grasp on who he is amid the hoopla. (Turns out it's Bradley's son, Jim, conducting the present-day interviews which are interspersed throughout the film, trying to solve the puzzle of who really appears in that picture.)

Beach plays Ira Hayes, a Native American and Marine who's managed to keep his alcoholism at bay during the war, but falls completely and irreparably off the wagon as he lurches from one city to the next, still rattled by what he's seen and done in Japan. Beach gets arguably the showiest role of all, and his anguish is palpable.

Then there's Bradford as pretty boy Marine Rene Gagnon, who not only doesn't mind the attention he's receiving back in the States, he thrives upon it — as does his girlfriend (Melanie Lynskey) who shamelessly inserts herself into the campaign. Bradford makes you want to dislike his character and root for his redemption at the same time, a difficult task.

Broyles and Haggis keep us off guard for much of the film, right alongside the characters, which does make "Flags" slightly difficult to get into at first, until you realize what they're doing with this structure. And the film drags on a bit at the end, the epilogues that trace the main characters' final paths winding on more than they should.

But consistently the film is, while not exactly patriotic, at least respectful. And even though it focuses on a battle and a war that took place some 60 years ago, it remains all too resonant and relevant today.

"Flags of Our Fathers," a Paramount Pictures release, is rated R for sequences of graphic war violence and carnage, and for language. Running time: 131 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.


Ellie

[thedrifter]

Print the Legend
Clint Eastwood's WWII drama strips away the myths surrounding the Greatest Generation

by Scott Foundas
October 17th, 2006 1:33 PM

A single photograph, we're told early on in Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers, can win or lose a war. But sometimes that photo shows us only part of the story, whether it's the part we don't want to see—slaughtered villagers at My Lai, tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib—or the part we do, with heroes front and center and the carnage out of view.

In Flags, the image under scrutiny is one of the most iconic in American photojournalism: five U.S. Marines and one Navy corpsman planting Old Glory atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima during the fifth day of the 35-day battle. That picture, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, helped rally American support for the war, won a Pulitzer for its photographer (Joe Rosenthal), and made overnight celebrities out of its subjects. But the soldiers didn't feel like heroes, and with good reason.

Based on the bestselling book by James Bradley, whose father, John "Doc" Bradley, was the Navy corpsman in Rosenthal's photo, Flags of Our Fathers is about the three flag raisers who survived Iwo Jima—Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), the dashing and mildly pompous Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford), and the proud Pima Indian Ira Hayes (Adam Beach)—and how their moment in the spotlight irrevocably altered their lives. For these men were not the first to fly the Stars and Stripes, but rather a secondary team, assembled after the smaller flag erected earlier by a different group was claimed as a souvenir by a naval officer. It was this second flag, though, that was seen around the world, its raisers plucked from duty and ferried hither and yon by wily politicians who saw the makings of an inspired PR campaign. It was not the first—or last—time that perception trumped reality in the selling of wars to the American public.

According to the press notes, in his later years John Bradley was plagued by hallucinations and night terrors, and Eastwood's movie unfolds as if it were one of them, flashing back and forth between the charcoal sands of Iwo Jima and the clinking banquet rooms where the flag raisers shill for the war bond effort before patriotic well-wishers. Executed in stark widescreen compositions all but drained of color, the battle scenes are as visceral as anything in
Saving Private Ryan—no small feat given that Eastwood is 76 this year and has never before directed a film of this physical scale. The landing on Iwo Jima is a master class in controlled chaos, as bullets stream out of camouflaged pillboxes and mortar fire turns bodies into sizzling piles of flesh and bone. But the most surreal, unsettling images come later, when the three heroes are pressed into re-enacting their storied feat as a vaudeville spectacle before a cheering crowd, and when, at a celebratory dinner, they see their huddled likenesses transformed into an ice cream sculpture.

To an extent, Flags of Our Fathers is to the WWII movie what Eastwood's Unforgiven was to the western—a stripping-away of mythology until only a harsher, uncomfortable reality remains. But what Eastwood really does is call into question an entire way of reading history, by which the vast and incomprehensible are reduced to digestible symbols and meanings. In war—Eastwood offers us a timely reminder—who is just and unjust depends on where you're watching from. And to further the point, his next movie, Letters From Iwo Jima, tells the story from the perspective of the Japanese.

With Flags, Eastwood has made one of his best films—a searching, morally complex deconstruction of the Greatest Generation that is nevertheless rich in the sensitivity to human frailty that has become his signature as a filmmaker. You feel this most in the characterization of Hayes, whose postwar descent into alcoholism and near madness has been told before, in song ("The Ballad of Ira Hayes") and on-screen (1961's The Outsider), but never with such haunted intensity. Beach's agonizing portrait is made all the more poignant by the film's revelation that Hayes, like the other men who raised the second flag, did show extraordinary bravery on the battlefield, just not in the way for which he was remembered. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but for men like John Bradley, Rene Gagnon, and Ira Hayes, there were thousands more that went unspoken.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Obsessed with the battle
At 15, Eastwood was riveted by the photo of Marines raising the U.S. flag
- John Stanley, Special to The Chronicle
Wednesday, October 18, 2006

In order to co-produce and direct the epic war movie "Flags of Our Fathers," which opens Friday, Clint Eastwood first had to be nominated for an Academy Award. The actor-filmmaker had contacted DreamWorks when he learned that the company had bought the movie rights to James Bradley's 2000 best-seller about the Marines who raised the U.S. flag during the battle of Iwo Jima. "It was a book I couldn't put down," recalls Eastwood, "and I knew from the first page it was something I wanted to make." But "I never heard a single word back, so I went about my business."

"Business" was directing "Mystic River," the 2003 crime drama for which Eastwood was nominated for an Oscar. Although he didn't win (his stars Sean Penn and Tim Robbins did), Eastwood came out a victor that night because backstage he bumped into DreamWorks' Steven Spielberg, who invited him to direct "Flags of Our Fathers." "We'll produce together," he told Eastwood, "but it'll be your baby. You'll run with it." Eastwood remembers "we shook hands and had a deal."

At the time Eastwood was working with screenwriter Paul Haggis on "Million Dollar Baby," a film that would bring him an Oscar in 2005 for best direction (and win three others).

"I liked Paul's writing very much, and although he felt he had only an 11 percent chance of turning such a complex book into a movie, we both became fascinated with it." There was the epic military scope of "the bloodiest battle in Marine Corps history," but they also were engrossed in the personal story "of the men who raised a flag -- even though you couldn't even see their faces -- and were turned into celebrities and heroes."

The three survivors of the six "became symbols of America's determination to win the war in the Pacific. They were sent out on the 7th War Bond drive in mid-1945 but didn't consider themselves heroes, or wanted to be looked on as heroes. To them the real heroes were the Marines who never left the island alive. They just wanted to be back with their units."

The price that survivors of war pay was just as relevant: "What happened to those men after the war, their personal problems, how they were haunted by the deaths of their buddies" also consumed Eastwood and Haggis.

What came to obsess Eastwood the director was the "look" of the battle, fought in February and March 1945. Taking that small volcanic island in the Pacific had cost the United States almost 7,000 lives. His main concern was re-creating the ferocity and chaos of the invasion on Feb. 19, 1945, when the Marines hit the beaches and were suddenly caught in a deadly crossfire, much of it coming from the heights of an extinct volcano, Mount Suribachi.

He studied movie footage and photographs and tried to bring these visual elements into his own depictions. Eastwood also talked to veterans, including Maj. Gen. Fred E. Haynes, who had landed on Green Beach at the foot of Suribachi. He found four vets in Monterey County as well as a medic named Danny Thomas, who told him of a recurring nightmare that became dramatically incorporated into the film. "We couldn't stage the major battle on Iwo itself," Eastwood explained, "because the island is sacred to the Japanese. Of the original garrison of 22,000 Japanese soldiers, 12,000 are still unaccounted for, buried away in the tunnel systems beneath the island. So we filmed in Iceland. It's a geothermal island like Iwo and has long stretches of terraced beaches made up of black sand. We built an army of about 900 men -- Americans, British, Icelanders. It took about five weeks to get all the combat sequences."

Although some of it might look like documentary footage, Eastwood insists that everything was re-created. "It was impossible to put together an armada of 880 ships," he admitted, so computer-generated imagery was needed. He also needed CGI to create a burning B-29 as it makes an emergency landing on Iwo, a jarring reminder that an estimated 10,000 of our airmen were saved once Iwo was in American hands.

The flag raising, during which Joe Rosenthal snapped a picture atop Suribachi that a few days later would grip the nation with its symbolism of victory and win the Associated Press photographer a Pulitzer Prize, also had to be a key sequence in the film.

"I wanted to tell the whole historic incident in detail. About how a special unit worked its way up to the volcano crater to place a small flag, and how that flag inspired the Marines down below. And then, step by step, how a larger flag was ordered to be raised. That famous picture was taken spontaneously, in the middle of a battle. No one knew what it would lead to or what it would mean to America."

Eastwood's obsession with Iwo Jima became so great, he decided to shoot footage for another film simultaneously with "Flags." Originally called "Red Sun, Black Sand," but now retitled "Letters From Iwo Jima," it portrays the Japanese point of view and how a determined army under the command of Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) defended the island from within a concealed system of caves and tunnels that forced the Marines to root them out a position at a time. It opens in Japan in December and in America in February.

Eastwood insists that while "Flags" is a statement against war and its lasting effects on those who fight it, and "I have in no way glamorized war," he realizes it's difficult to watch his film without thinking about America's current place in the world and the war in Iraq.

"We've become a softer country, a different society from the America of 1945, when we were solidly united. Those were hardworking kids who came out of the Depression to fight for their country without question. I have to ask: Would we have the resolve to fight a major war like that today? This current war on terror is about religious differences, and those have never been resolved at the bargaining table. Now we've been attacked from within and we're going to have to learn how to deal with the threat."

Eastwood did film on Iwo Jima and found it profoundly moving. "I hiked up and down the initial beachhead. I thought about what it had to be like to carry a hundred-pound pack and rifle. And run through the sand dunes with that volcano looming over you. Everyone shooting at you. There is a humbling sense that comes over you."

Eastwood, who prefers not to do many interviews these days, did accept this one as a way of honoring the memory of Joe Rosenthal and his 35 years as a staff photographer for The Chronicle. "I was 15, living in Oakland, when I first saw Joe's picture in the paper. My parents gave me a book for stamps and I filled it and then turned it in for a war bond. To this day I've never forgotten how that experience, and the photo, made me feel."

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Curiously Timely Flags Is
Ego-Lite, Except for Eastwood

By: Andrew Sarris
Date: 10/23/2006
Page: 16

Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers, from the screenplay by William Broyles Jr. with Paul Haggis, seems to have captured the spirit of our time with its mixture of cynicism and idealism, irony and conviction, satiric skepticism and red-blooded patriotism. In the end, it leaves newspaper reporters—the media mavens of their time—unsure and suspicious about what really happened at the top of Mount Suribachi on the blood-drenched island of Iwo Jima on Feb. 23, 1945, when Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal took the picture of five Marines and one Navy Corpsman raising the U.S. flag after one of the fiercest engagements of World War II.

At the time, I was in high school, just below draft age at 16. It was around then (or later) I heard that the official footage of the battle, which had raged for over a month, had been kept from the nation’s movie-newsreel outlets because of the depressing effect it would’ve had on the civilian population’s morale. (Censorship was tighter then than it is now, even under President George W. Bush—and no one complained.) The battle scenes reproduced in Flags of Our Fathers were shot in Iceland, and I have no way of comparing them to the real thing, since, to my knowledge, the official footage has never been released. Over the course of that single battle, 6,821 Americans were killed and 20,000 were wounded. The island’s Japanese garrison suffered even heavier losses: Out of 22,000 defenders, there were only 1,083 survivors. And the nuclear horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still to come.

Of the six heroes of the world-famous, endlessly recycled photograph entitled “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima,” three died in subsequent combat on the island. The three survivors were paraded before huge crowds for a short time as war-bond-selling patriots, after which they returned to obscurity and varying degrees of disenchantment.

This is essentially the curiously timely story of Flags of Our Fathers. Enough of the film, of course, concerns itself with the warfare on Iwo Jima to qualify it as a contemporary “war is hell” statement. And Mr. Eastwood and his many collaborators have told it with enough crisp authority to make it a strong candidate for this year’s Oscars, though not for the acting from an ego-lite ensemble—except possibly for Adam Beach’s strikingly aggrieved incarnation of the ill-fated Native American soldier, Ira Hayes, already the subject of a creditable Tony Curtis vehicle, Delbert Mann’s The Outsider (1961).

As it happens, the scenes in which Hayes is the victim of racial prejudice in the midst of his bond drive are doubly ironic in view of the rigid segregation of the U.S. Armed Forces during the war (which may explain the total absence of African-American faces among the U.S. Marines in the film, though there were black Marine units that fought at Iwo Jima). Ultimately, it was Harry Truman, not F.D.R., who desegregated the U.S. Armed Forces, during the Korean War. Truman is presented warmly and sympathetically here at an audience with Hayes and his fellow flag-raisers.

The production notes trace the genesis of the project through its high-powered sponsors: “Eastwood was initially attracted to the project after reading the best-selling book, Flags of Our Fathers, by James Bradley with Ron Powers. Bradley is the son of John Bradley, the Navy Corpsman in the photograph.

“Bradley was inspired to write the book after his father’s death; realizing that he knew only that his father had been a flag-raiser and nothing else, he began interviewing the families of the other flag-raisers. ‘I never set out to write a book—I set out to find out why my dad was silent,’ says Bradley. ‘I decided to write a book when I realized that everyone knows the photo but nobody knows the story.’ His goal was to break down the hero myths about the men in the picture: According to Bradley, because of the way the photo is shot, with every man’s face obscured, it is easy to think of the subjects of the picture as supermen; instead, of course, they’re everyday people. ‘To me, the beauty of the photo is that they are us—six ordinary Americans doing their duty.’”

I’m sorry, but what the photo and the film tell me is that the six initially anonymous fighting men have been frozen, by an artist’s accidental improvisation, into a timeless tableau of heroism, patriotism and self-sacrifice. It is not “us” up there in the photo; it is, as always, a select few who are chosen to transcend their own “us-ness” so that the rest of us can live in peace and comfort. This is truer today than it was back in 1945, when a larger percentage of us were physically and emotionally involved in a major war on five continents. The memory of Pearl Harbor may have been a greater inspiration than the memory of 9/11, but if Flags of Our Fathers has any contemporary kick at all, it is because Mr. Eastwood, Mr. Broyles Jr. and Mr. Haggis, as well as the late production designer Henry Bumstead, the late casting director, Phyllis Huffman and many others, have managed to make most of us see ourselves not in the six men who raised the flag, but in the throngs of cheering noncombatants and well-heeled well-wishers—all with very short memories.

The film has been dedicated to the memory of Huffman, Bumstead and Rosenthal, the man who took the famous picture. Unfortunately, there is no Mount Suribachi in Iraq to inspire us anew. For the record, the six flag-raisers are played by Ryan Phillippe as Navy Corpsman Bradley, Jesse Bradford as Rene Gagnon, Adam Beach as the aforementioned Ira Hayes, Barry Pepper as Michael Strank, Benjamin Walker as Harlon Block, and Joseph Cross as Franklin Sousley. (I have much more to say about Mr. Cross in my review of Ryan Murphy’s Running with Scissors, below.)

All in all, Mr. Eastwood’s skillful direction of Flags of Our Fathers makes it such a model of grace and lucidity that the only mystery arising from it is why the film has been slapped with an R rating.

Cut to the Quick

Ryan Murphy’s Running with Scissors, from his own screenplay, based on the personal memoir of Augusten Burroughs, struck me as one of the funniest movies I have seen this year—though that may just be me. I have a weakness for crazy people just this side of homicide and suicide, but I have also encountered otherwise reasonable people who fervently hate this movie. So the reader is duly forewarned.

I hadn’t read Mr. Burroughs’ memoir (or even the film’s production notes) when I saw Running with Scissors at the critics’ screening. Afterward, I looked everywhere to find the name of the child actor who played the 6-year-old Augusten, who seems to hang on every word spoken by his delusional mother, Deirdre (Annette Bening), an unpublished confessional poet with fantasies of selling out Carnegie Hall with her readings. The production notes asked me to believe that Joseph Cross—the same actor who played one of the six soldiers in Flags of Our Fathers, and who plays Augusten through his teenage years in Running with Scissors—also played the 6-year-old Augusten. Then I started thinking that I never saw the child Augusten in the same frame as his mother whenever they had a scene together, and that he was always sitting down. Moreover, I doubt there is a child actor alive with features identical to Mr. Cross’ (who is reportedly a student in real life at Trinity College).

In any event, the movie starts in 1971, when people were recovering from the let-it-all-hang-out 60’s with all sorts of primal-scream therapies to repair the psychic damage. Deirdre, a terminal case of psychic damage, is perpetually arguing with her heavy-drinking husband Norman (Alec Baldwin), a math professor. For his part, Norman never even pretends to understand Augusten because he is so much like his loony mother.

Before giving up on her marriage completely, Deirdre insists that Norman accompany her to a joint consultation with her new shrink, Dr. Finch (Brian Cox), a wildly unconventional and peculiarly passive-aggressive therapist. The two men take an immediate dislike to each other, which makes the session a madhouse, like something out of the comic strip The Lockhorns. This effectively terminates the marriage—which doesn’t bother Augusten very much, since he never communicates with his father. What does bother him enormously, however, is Deirdre’s growing dependence on Dr. Finch, whom he distrusts. Matters come to a head when Dr. Finch persuades Deirdre to leave Augusten in his care while she moves to a motel where she can recuperate from her attacks of paranoia with a steady dosage of Valium.

Augusten quickly realizes that Dr. Finch’s home—to which Deirdre has thoughtlessly consigned him—is a veritable shambles of damaged psyches belonging to the rest of the Finch family: badgered, dog-food-eating Mrs. Finch (Jill Clayburgh); her “Bible-dipping,” humorless daughter, Hope (Gwyneth Paltrow); her “disco-rebel” daughter, Natalie (Evan Rachel Wood); and Neil Bookman (Joseph Fiennes), Dr. Finch’s manic-depressive 35-year-old “adopted” son, who lives out his tortured existence in a shed in back of the house.

Augusten immediately bonds with Natalie, in whom he confides with teen-age bravado that he is gay, without understanding the implications of what he says. When he repeats the same casual boast as if it were a mantra to the all-too-understanding Neil, Augusten is immediately seduced in a shockingly carnal fashion. Along the way, Dr. Finch is repeatedly exposed as a cheat, a fraud and a swindler without ever losing any of his aplomb.

I know already that many viewers and reviewers will be disturbed by the film’s lack of moral accountability on any level; yet the glorious multiple charismas of a dream cast have completely won me over to the skewed vision projected by Mr. Murphy. For starters, the magical versatility of Ms. Bening in the role of one of the worst mothers imaginable stirred me immensely, even though her character never knows a moment of moral indignation except as it concerns her egocentric delusions. She is brilliantly supported (though that may not be the right word for it) by the rest of the cast: Mr. Cross, Mr. Cox, Mr. Fiennes, Mr. Baldwin, Ms. Clayburgh, Ms. Paltrow and Ms. Wood.

One of the funniest lines in the film takes as its premise Dr. Finch’s casual reference to his “masturbatorium,” the room next to his office to which he repairs for relaxation after—or even during—a tedious session with a patient. One can say, after Running with Scissors, that now one has heard almost everything.

Ellie