Entertainment, Movies - Air Force Times

‘Letters from Iwo Jima’: Through their eyes

It’s been a maxim of warfare through the ages that the history of any given conflict is written largely by the winning team — which is why virtually no American movies about World War II have bothered with the other side’s perspective.

Following last year’s great “Flags of Our Fathers,” director Clint Eastwood bucks that trend with the graceful “Letters From Iwo Jima,” which takes a mirror-image approach to “Flags” in telling the five-week battle from the Japanese defenders’ view.

Drawing upon recently unearthed “death letters” — missives written by Japanese commander Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi to his family that were recently found on Iwo — Eastwood draws a meticulous, vivid, heart-rending portrait of ordinary men trapped in utterly fatalistic circumstances.

The early part of the film (with dialogue in Japanese with English subtitles), takes its time introducing us to the principals — divided between true-believer zealots and more realistic pragmatists — as they prepare defenses for the coming American attack amid a daily routine of bugs, tainted water, dysentery and weed soup.

The typical GI role is handled by baby-faced Kazunari Ninomiya as Saigo, a simple baker with a wife and baby who has been pressed into military service but has no desire to throw his life away for the emperor or his doomed cause. “Give the damn rock to the Americans,” he grumbles while digging a trench. “Then we can all go home.”

The atmosphere becomes more highly charged with the arrival on Iwo of the unorthodox Kuribayashi (the great Ken Watanabe, anchoring the story without overwhelming it), who spent time in the U.S. before the war and thus knows firsthand of America’s technological and economic might.

Kuribayashi quickly recognizes the lousy hand he’s been dealt. Tossing out the plan of his new subordinate commanders — some of whom become quite miffed — he stalks the island like Ahab pursuing the white whale, obsessively rearranging his defenses and ordering the digging of the famous caves.

But when news comes that the Japanese fleet has been sunk in the Marianas and any remaining air support is being pulled back to defend Tokyo, the paralyzing realization that they have no chance soon becomes clear, and all the doomed troops can do is wait to die and try to die well — whatever that means.

Eastwood uses the same stark, bleached-out color palette that was so well suited to “Flags,” with the only real color to be found in the explosion of bombs and shells and, more chilling, in the use of the flamethrowers that were a ubiquitous and infamous tool of World War II island campaigns in the Pacific.

One of the film’s most bracing moments comes when Eastwood positions his camera inside a Japanese pillbox looking out at advancing U.S. Marines. One flamethrower-equipped jarhead lets fly, and a wave of billowing reds and yellows jets directly toward the audience with a roar so loud you almost feel singed.

Later, a Japanese soldier stands in a cave looking up an air shaft when a huge gout of flame shoots directly down on his head, instantly turning him into a human torch.

Although both “Flags” and “Letters” have their fair share of combat scenes, neither is about the carnage of war. Rather, they are about the way human beings deal with the carnage of war.

In “Flags,” Eastwood turned the traditional American war movie’s notion of heroism on its head, exploring the mythmaking of some combat heroes. In “Letters,” he explores the hearts and minds of the Japanese troops to rework another wartime stereotype: that of the dehumanized enemy.

The Japanese here are, for the most part, not kamikaze savages, but uncomplicated men who long for home and their loved ones (even as they know their odds of seeing either again are slim to none).

The idea that nothing in war is as black and white as military propaganda often makes it out to be is driven home in a pair of scenes that riff on the traditional good guy/bad guy template.

In one, a wounded American Marine is captured and pulled into a cave, where Lt. Col. Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), an equestrian who won a medal in the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, tends to his wounds and, when the Marine dies, gently and respectfully covers the body. Then in a later scene, a Marine murders two Japanese prisoners in cold blood.

Eastwood and scriptwriters Iris Yamashita and Paul Haggis take a big chance with this tack; after all, historians have well documented the barbaric tactics of Japanese forces elsewhere in the Pacific during the war.

But the daring and radical move pays off in the message driven home by “Letters”: For the grunts who do the fighting and dying, war is a brutal, hellish business — no matter what side you’re on.

4 stars. Rated R for violence. Got a rant or rave about the movies? E-mail cvinch@atpco.com.