Letters From Iwo Jima, 2006. Directed by Clint Eastwood, written by Iris Yamashita. Starring Kazunari Ninomiya, Ken Watanabe, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase, Shido Nakamura, and Hiroshi Watanabe.
Now showing at the Uptown Theater.
During World War II, the Marines used to tell their recruits that they were being trained so hard so that they might be able to survive the worst that the enemy would throw at them. “You live for your country,” they preached. “Let the other guy die for his.”
The Japanese soldiers in Letters From Iwo Jima were undoubtedly trained to be tough as well, but were they told to live for their country? According to my shallow understanding of history, and this film, they pretty much knew they were going to die. They dug trenches and then tunnels in Iwo Jima, scraping and clawing past the loose black volcanic dirt and into the hard rock, burrowing deep down into the island whose tactical promise seemed dubious at best. Like the Americans, many of these were citizen soldiers, bakers and horsemen, destined, we know, to die in this rotten battle.
There is one moment of crazy brilliance in Letters From Iwo Jima, when an officer abandons a unit he considers to be cowardly. The man wants to have an honorable death, so he straps some mines on his body, storms away from a group of baffled and terrified soldiers, and lays down amongst some American corpses in the hopes that a tank will plow over him, detonating the mines. Amongst the dead, in the wicked heat and stench, he waits and waits and waits, staring up at the bleak sky as buzzards circle overhead. Unbelievably, he will survive. Is he unlucky? Or, in his survival, has he found redemption?
Letters From Iwo Jima is the second of Clint Eastwood’s Iwo Jima saga, and, unfortunately, it is by far the weakest of the two. Letters is a profoundly noble effort, and the saga is notable if only for the fact that, just a few years ago, it probably couldn’t even have been made. Who would think that one of America’s premiere directors would make a motion picture celebrating a former–and, in many cases, still loathed–enemy? Unfortunately, Letters is a rather dull film, and worst of all, it lacks insight into its characters. The Japanese in this film are a purely American invention, a people who do not, in any way, seem to embrace their country’s philosophy. The hero doesn’t want to be there, the soldiers are not brutal, and if you go by this movie, Americans and Japanese would all just get along if only there weren’t this damn war. And its final revelation–that surviving, and finding redemption as a POW–doesn’t give us any glimpse at the still mysterious (to me, and I imagine many Americans) belief that it was more noble to die.
There is virtually no plot in Letters From Iwo Jima. What story there is concerns the arrival of General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (played by the great Ken Watanabe) who is trying to instill some intelligence to the defense of this island. Contrasting this is the struggle of Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a young private, a former baker whose wife and child wait for him to return from the war–a war that we know very few returned from.
Saigo is a young man who truly does not want to be there. This kid has a fresh and friendly face, a young fellow who could be described as happy-go-lucky. Ninomiya is an odd choice for a lead actor on which the moral gravity of the film is laid upon. This guy doesn’t care about Japan’s reasons for war, wants to live, but doesn’t even possess the desperate need to survive. Mostly he’s lucky, pulled out of this jam or that by the General. He is also not a noble idiot, in the Candide sense… really, Saigo is a cipher, and Letters becomes more and more frustrating as men who do have strong beliefs–like the colonel who seeks to blow himself up under a tank–are shuffled away for us to focus on Saigo and his memories of home.
What do the Japanese think of this film? Certainly, it’s a great idea for Eastwood to show our former enemy in new light. The problem, as I see it, is that the Japanese are not at all real. Virtually all of our heroes have decent reasons for defending the island to the death–to save children, etc. The Japanese here are altogether too noble, barely getting their dander up in the face of this defeat. When an American soldier is captured, he’s not tortured (as one was in Flags of Our Fathers), but treated with the little medicine the Japanese have even for themselves, and the men come to realize that they’re very similar to this strange American. That’s well and fine, but if you’re going to show these men as being a people who would rather commit suicide than surrender, they remain enigmatic.
Great war films are intense, and in my mind great war films are also insane, and come to grips with that madness. Paths of Glory, Apocalypse Now, even moments of the overrated Saving Private Ryan showed how utterly demented war can be. People went berserk during the Battle of Iwo Jima, they went mad, and when they did it was not pretty. Both Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima don’t spare us blood and guts, but they do spare us the insanity of combat. Which is why Letters falls so short of being great.
Someday, perhaps, someone will make a great film from the Japanese perspective. There are great movies about the Germans–Das Boot is one. Until then, Letters From Iwo Jima serves, perhaps, as a necessary, though clumsy, first step.
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