Letters from Iwo Jima

My father-in-law was a Navy corpsman in the Battle of Iwo Jima. Because of that experience and others during his time in the Pacific in WW II, for the rest of his life he never had a good thing to say about anything Japanese. His friend and school classmate Jack Bradley was also a corpsman on Iwo, but Jack was the one who got tapped to help some marines famously raise the flag on Mt. Suribachi. It was Jack's son Jim who wrote Flags of Our Fathers, the basis for Clint Eastwood's first Iwo Jima film.

In a move that must have taken vision, courage and chutzpah, Eastwood turned right around and made a second film about the battle, telling the story from the Japanese side. It's a difficult film to watch, but a brilliant one. Eastwood got a Japanese screenwriter to turn out a superb script, and shot the film in Japanese. Such a move has the potential to confuse and/or anger the movie audiences of both nations. Who does this guy think he is?

The answer is that Eastwood is a human storyteller. The arc of his story here is not geopolitical, not strategic, and at last not even military, but personal. More than 90% of the Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima died, as they knew they would, and this is their story. Strong directing, writing, and ensemble acting (with standouts Ken Watanabe & Shido Nakamura) move the story forward and help the American viewer humanize those who have often been demonized.

This is not an easy movie to watch, with realistic battle scenes and the sad foreknowledge that most of the characters will die. Eastwood does not shrink from often brutal Japanese militarism, but the militarism of a society, at that point in history, does not define nor limit the character of every individual. Maybe Eastwood reflects some zeitgeist as the U.S. is now mired in an increasingly popular war. Maybe you have to remember that your enemies are human and find them in the mirror.

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