War’s Empty Promises
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

It’s easy to understate what Clint Eastwood has achieved during the past decade, to thumb one’s nose at the likes of “Unforgiven,” “Million Dollar Baby,” and even this year’s one-two punch of “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters from Iwo Jima,” as skillful, but safe bets.
But that would be to ignore the way Mr. Eastwood has come to defy expectations. To embrace every opportunity, the 76-year-old director has had to break down conventional genres and steer his conversations in unexpected and unpredictable directions. “Unforgiven” was not a salute to the violence at the heart of the Western — a violence that, to many, he had come to embody — but a criticism of it. “Million Dollar Baby”was not about fighting in the ring, but fighting with one’s own conscience and morality.
Taken together,”Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters From Iwo Jima” cohere as a fascinating discussion that dismantles many of the tried-and-true themes of war films. If much of the genre focuses on acts of heroism, the pain of sacrifice, and the horrors of the battlefield, here Mr. Eastwood examines how the depiction of war and the reality of war are contradictory. Almost antithetical to the mission of cinema, he suggests that we can never understand them, and no matter how many movies try to help us run a mile in the soldiers’ shoes, we will never be able to connect.
Judged on its own,”Letters From Iwo Jima” is an anti-war movie that almost entirely turns its back on war, a scathing indictment of the way most people regard such concepts as heroism, bravery, and patriotism. War isn’t about sheer violence, Mr. Eastwood implies, it isn’t about freedom or liberty — it is only death and sacrifice.
That’s been said before, yes, but rarely with such assuredness or in such an appropriate environment. Common among most of Hollywood’s most enduring anti-war visions, regardless of which particular conflict is being discussed — from “All Quiet on the Western Front” to “Paths of Glory” and even “Apocalypse Now” — is a sense of fatalism, randomness, and absurdity. And “Letters From Iwo Jima,” told from the Japanese point of view as the Allies land on the remote Pacific island to wage war on the last remaining enemy, is an equally compelling forum in which to engage these ideas.
Upon landing on Iwo Jima, General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe),who once lived in America — those days are recreated in flashbacks — and is an expert in Western military strategy, has been ordered to abandon the trenches being dug on the beach in favor of fortifications on higher ground. Kuribayashi understands his men are outnumbered and their only hope is to dig caverns further up the shore and attack from above once the beach is filled.
Early on, Kuribayashi knows the numbers aren’t in his favor, but what he doesn’t anticipate is the news to come — that the Japanese fleet has suffered major losses, meaning no naval support, and that Tokyo will not be dispatching any fighters, meaning no air support. Outnumbered, under-armed, and without a place to retreat and regroup, Kuribayashi is nevertheless a fiercely determined warrior who ignores, until the last possible second, the obvious truth of his situation: Hope is lost, the battle is over before it has begun, and the fate of his men has already been sealed. All that remains is the Japanese concept of heroism, which emphasizes dying with honor before considering the cowardly notion of capture or surrender.
Like “Western Front,” the story does not focus its attention on life under fire, but rather on the agony of waiting and wondering when death will arrive. Deep within the caves, Mr. Eastwood’s camera moves among the soldiers, from the once famous aristocrat (Tsuyoshi Ihara), who volunteered to aid his country, to the baker (Kazunari Ninomiya), who will never get the chance to meet his unborn daughter, and even the former MP (Ryo Kase), whose punishment for offending a superior was being reassigned to this last stand.
As in “Paths of Glory,” which followed a World War I officer as he directed his soldiers into certain death, everything about the battle for Iwo Jima seems hopeless and illogical. For starters, Japan has not adequately staffed the island’s posts, nor given Kuribayashi the military support he needs. With hope fading, officers must simply shoot comrades who refuse to kill themselves.
Many of the film’s most powerful scenes — shot in such faded color that Mr. Eastwood essentially transforms it into a black-and-white vehicle — are closest in meaning to “Apocalypse Now.” In that film, soldiers floated aimlessly down a river in a nightmarish quest that eventually consumed them. In “Iwo Jima,” as two soldiers sit together in a dark cave, the only survivors of their platoon, they listen to the relentless pounding of bombs outside and wait for the end as if it were a scheduled execution.
The stunning visuals don’t stop there. At one point, as a Japanese officer lies down in a sea of corpses to launch a oneman ambush against the Americans, Mr. Eastwood pulls his camera back to show he’s just as useless as the dead.
On the few occasions we actually see fighting in the film — particularly the first air raid, which drops from the sky arbitrarily and brutally as if by the hand of God — it is a stunning spectacle. Meanwhile, violence in the caves does not involve guns so much as grenades, not used against the enemy but in the service of suicide.
Between “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters From Iwo Jima,” the latter is more sparse, solemn, jagged, and affecting. But taken together, they provide a remarkable thesis on war, from multiple perspectives, both before the battle is waged and long after it’s been forgotten by subsequent generations. If viewed in synch with a historical timeline, “Iwo Jima” first and “Flags” second, they tell the story of how one nation sent its people to their deaths while another brought back boat after boat of scarred souls that would never heal.
But watched in the order of their release, a slightly different theme emerges. “Flags” relentlessly cuts back to the past, suggesting how the horrors of the battlefield will forever haunt the American soldiers back home.”Iwo Jima,”by contrast, is told in linear fashion, in recognition of the fact that the Japanese soldiers will forever remain on the island where, as one remarks, they dug their own graves. Different stories, different outcomes, same fate — 26,000 souls trapped on a four-mile stretch of black sand.
Meanwhile, Mr. Eastwood asserts that those back home, whether cheering returned patriots in an American football stadium or broadcasting Japanese songs of honor to fathers stationed overseas, have no idea what they’re talking about.
Both are films about propaganda — the first disguised as a patriotic photo, the second disguised as religious honor — and the way words like “honor” and “victory” contrast with the realities on the ground. If war films typically try to integrate a viewer into the experience, Mr. Eastwood — yet again — has pushed back against that notion. He wants us to be removed from the battle, aware of the cloud of hypocrisy and misunderstanding lingering above it, ever mindful of the way words and symbols are converted into fear and blood. It’s a brave thing to do.