LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA

Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
Warner Bros
Grade: A-
Directed by: Clint Eastwood   
Written By: Iris Yamashita, story by Paul Haggis
Cast:   Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Shido Nakamura,
Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase, Yuki Matsuzaki, Hiroshi Watanabe,
Takumi Bando, Nobumasa Sakagami, Takashi Yamaguchi, Nae
Yuuki
Screened at: Warner, NYC, 12/7/06
Opens: December 20, 2006

History is written by the victors, which is why we don't generally
get enough information about what the other side is thinking. 
Further, most people who hold firm beliefs don't want to know
from the other side.  Socialists do not regularly subscribe to the
Wall Street Journal, conservatives don't read Nation, and the
schools that I attended never spent much time analyzing the
pro-slavery viewpoints of folks in the antebellum South.  

When Clint Eastwood turned out "Flags of our Fathers," he did
what any American would expect the great actor-director to
do–direct a vivid pro-American story behind the greatest war
photograph ever taken while at the same time exposing some of
the hoax behind the hurrahs.  Who would have expected him to
be balanced enough to present the other side of the war–the
Japanese position?  

I was a kid while the Second World War was raging.  My friends
and I watched a boatload of war movies, mostly junk, but
highlighted by Mervyn LeRoy's eminent 138-minutes' long
"Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," in which the only actors
mentioned in the credits were Americans: Van Johnson, Robert
Walker, Spencer Tracy and Robert Mitchum, among others.  As
for the Japanese, they were simply not human. They looked
pretty much alike, all seeming to wear perfectly round, black-
framed glasses, yelling "banzai" every five minutes or so.  The
idea that they had families back home in Tokyo or Yokohama,
Nagasaki or beautiful Kyoto, was unimaginable.  Of course they
did not have mothers and sisters and brothers. They were
robots.  Victory for them was out of the question.  Even a movie
shown as recently as 2001, Michael Bay's "Pearl Harbor"–which
depicts a momentous strategic gain by Japan in knocking out a
large segment of the U.S. Navy–tacked on the Doolittle raid on
Tokyo to ensure that the audience would not go home in a glum
mood.

The Japanese did not win at Iwo Jima. They lost 20,000 to
America's 7,000, but director Eastwood wants us to know that
the general in charge of strategy and tactics in the momentous
battle for a piece of land considered by the Japanese to be
sacred was no hater of America.  He had visited the U.S., was
feted at a posh dinner where he was presented with a revolver,
and was even teased by a hostess about what he would do
should the U.S. ever go to war against Japan.  "Would you
shoot my husband?"  (See the picture to get his answer.)  The
men who served under him, however, were for the most part
uneducated and trained to consider the American soldiers to be
barbarians.  Japanese forces were indoctrinated with the idea
that to die for their country was a great honor, and in that
regard, perhaps, they could be compared to Islamic fanatics
today.  Surrender would be considered cowardice, and when
the battle looked all but lost–ammunition, water and food gone--
some of the men committed suicide by falling on their grenades
or shooting themselves.

"Letters from Iwo Jima" stands out in that while American
soldiers are shown storming the island and, later on, a few
speak–particularly one young man from Oklahoma who had the
misfortune to be mortally wounded and brought in by the
Japanese for questioning–the action comes entirely from
Japanese actors.  As the central figure, Kan Watanabe performs
in the role of General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, perhaps the most
educated soldier on the island, one who cannot stand for harsh
punishments that he occasionally sees doled out by officers to
men–in one case a severe whipping given to a soldier who had
said that the hot, bug-infested island should simply be "handed
over to the Americans so that we can go home."  His strategy
was to build tunnels, one which, while it did not give the
Japanese a victory, enabled them to hold out for over one
month while most believed that Japanese could not withstand
the American assault for more than five days.

The most interesting character, one which the audience would
inevitably root for to survive, is Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a
baby-faced fellow whom we get to know back home where he
lives with his pretty young wife tending a bakery store.  He is
drafted into the army by a committee of five or six people who
sternly criticize his wife for resisting, with the plea that "we have
only each other" and pointing out her pregnancy, while for his
part, he states (fingers crossed behind his back, no doubt) that
he is proud to serve his country.  

The film is in part an epistolary one, the letters of the title being
written by the Japanese men to their loved ones back home,
even while they know that the communications will not likely
leave the island. (They do not.  They are strewn about,
hundreds of pages, after the American victory, a Pyrrhic one
that leaves 27,000 corpses behind.)   Through the letters and
through the conversations these ordinary human beings have
with one another, they demonstrate that other than their
fanatical desire to die for their country, they are just like Sam
and Joe and Pete back in Oklahoma, Nebraska and California. 
As director Eastwood states in the press notes, "In most war
pictures I grew up with, there were good guys and bad guys. 
Life is not like that and war is not like that.  These movies
are...about this war's effects on human beings and those who
lose their lives much before their time."

Strange, isn't it, that people have not learned from history. 
Wars rage around the world over ideology, land, ethnic
differences, things about which rational people should be able to
settle with diplomacy.  Looking at Japan today, a country that
has prospered so much despite its horrendous defeat, you
wonder why the rulers like Hirohito and Tojo did not think of
constructing a prosperous society through trade with others
rather than via the route of imperialism.  The history syllabus
that I used to teach high school students uses the arrogant title,
"Japan's defeat in World War 2: A blessing in disguise."  While
this may be true, the millions of war dead would hardly think so. 
Clint Eastwood's picture, artfully done in desaturated tones and
photographed by Tom Stern on location at Iwo Jima, is one of
the great works of this cinema year.  

Rated R.    150 minutes   2006 by Harvey Karten
harveycritic@cs.com  Member: NY Film Critics Online