Letters from Iwo Jima

[selenak]

Very busy and very exhausted these recent days. Apologies to anyone I owe tags at theatrical_muse!

I did have the chance to see Letters from Iwo Jima, which impressed me. Not having watched its counterpart Flags of Our Fathers yet, I can't say anything about how Eastwood did the American pov pic, but this one, which deals with several Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima, is splendid. Very unusual here in Germany, where usually all films are dubbed and you can see the original versions only in the big cities that have original language specialized cinemas, the film started here in Japanese with subtitles, i.e. the same way it did in the US. The cinema was packed anyway, which is another unusual thing (like I said, audiences are used to dubbing here, they don't really go for subtitles).

In the New York Review of Books, Ian Buruma when writing about this movie states, early on in his review: Most war movies have been about heroes, our heroes, and invidual differences among the enemies were irrelevant, since their villainy could be taken for granted. In fact, showing individual character, or indeed any recognizable human qualities, would be a hindrance, since it would inject the murderousness of our heroes with a moral ambiguity that we would not wish to see. the whole point of feel-good propaganda is that the enemy has no personality: he is monololithic and thus inhuman. (I've found this to be true not just of war movies in the sense of movies dealing with historical wars but a good deal of fantasy and sci fi as well, but that was another post, and I wrote it a couple of years ago.) He goes on to declare that Clint Eastwood, while of course not the first director to show "the enemy" as human beings, is the first to make two films of the same battle, showing both sides from the perspective of individual soldiers with fully developed characters. What struck me about Letters of Iwo Jima was that those fully developed characters couldn't be summed up the way characters in most war movies can; they aren't archetypes the audience is familiar with - no wisecracking jokester, newbie panicking under fire at first and then coming around, seasoned warrior who is a bluff cynic etc. The closest to war movie archetypes this film has is The Brutal Seargeant (though if I recall correctly, he's actually a Lieutenant) and The Wise Commander, and they don't come across as stereotypes, either.

Atmosphere-wise, this film, which is almost entirely drained of colours, with just the skin of soldiers, the occasional fire or glimpse of the sky or sea as colourful touches within a shades-of-ash world, reminds me very much of not WWII, but WWI poetry and letters. I am the enemy you killed, my friend. Our main characters through the ranks are Saigo, a baker who got drafted, Shimizu who lasted all of five days with the Kempeitai (military police, and Eastwood uses his flashback and the ongoing fear of the ordinary soldies they'll be reported on to render the oppressive atmosphere of WWII Japan - though is it just Japan? - with a few terse strokes) before being deemed not tough enough and sent to die in Iwo Jima, Baron Takeichi Nishi, an equestrian who won the Olympic medal in Los Angeles in 1932 and is, to borrow a Obi-Wan Kenobi quote, a reminder of a more civilized age (as well as a more carefree one, with his Hollywood memories), and General Kuribayashi, the commander who got settled with the thankless task of fighting a suicidal battle on Iwo Jima. The later two are obviously historical characters, and presumably their characterisation draws on what is known about them, but their stories mingle perfectly and form a tapestry with those of the others that is intensely moving, yet never sentimental. The scene where Saigo remembers a meal with his pregnant wife in which he promises her he'll stay alive, whispering the words as they go against the heroic code, has the beauty of a Japanese ink drawing: just a few words and a gesture, and yet it tells us so much.

There are only a few flashbacks; another, this one of General Kuribayashi, has him remembering a farewell dinner among his American friends many years earlier, in which a woman, joking, asked him what he would do if America and Japan were ever at war, and he replies he would regret if that was the case, but he would follow the dictates of his conscience. "Your conscience, or your country's conscience?" she asks, and he says: "Are they not the same?" To which an American next to her says approvingly: "Spoken like a true soldier". Indeed, Kuribayashi in the present, while knowing very well the situation is hopeless, is still a "right or wrong, my country" man. Eastwood, making this film in 2006, does present this attitude without judgement, but he doesn't show it without alternatives, either. Shimizu and Saigo, who both as opposed to Nishi and Kuribayashi never saw a world outside of Japan and got taught to think of the Americans as devils and of suicide as the highest honor, still come to doubt both in the course of the relentless hell they're going through, as well as the sense of the lost war they're fighting. No dulce et decorum est for them, indeed.

What lingers with you, image-wise, is the way Eastwood shoots the faces of these soldiers. War movies sometimes make it tough on the audience to tell who is is who among the characters, but not this one. All of them, amost sculpted or painted in half light the way Rembrandt would have done it, if he had been Japanese; so distinct and individual, longing, full of fear and/or courage, regret, and a half forgotten hope.

Comments

[crossoverman.livejournal.com]

In some ways I did think the characters emulated war movie archetypes we are familiar with, but put in a layer to the characterisation that changed them slightly - thrust those American cliches against the tradition and culture of the Japanese at war. So in a sense, we both empathise with the characters because of their similarity - but are still kept at a distance because of their perceived brutality.

Certainly the scene where some of the soldiers chose to blow themselves up at their post - because they had been ordered to fight there until death - was confronting and unlike anything I'd seen in a war film before. In any film before. Eastwood's worst mistake would have been making them too familiar - as if American cliches merely dressed in Japanese costume, played by Japanese actors.

But the concept of the film is clearly to show the other side and for us to have empathy with these soldiers who are following orders just like the men they are killing and who, in turn, are killing them. Eastwood strikes the perfect balance.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

This is a great review and I've sent it to several friends. However, I would also direct you to a thoughtful op-ed in the New York Sun.

...Most people today do not realize that there were really two Holocausts of World War II. There was the one perpetrated by the Germans against the Jews. The lesser known one was committed by the Japanese against 17 million Chinese, Filipinos, Koreans, and Vietnamese... (http://www.nysun.com/article/49165)

I'm sure it doesn't detract from the beauty of the film, and in fact the writer here says at much.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

You know, I don't understand how this particular film negates the Japanese atrocities in Asia any more than Downfall negates the Holocaust. In both cases, we, due to the limited point in time and space (two weeks in Berlin, 30 days in Iwo Jima), don't see concentration camps or, say, the mass executions in Shanhai. But in neither case does showing the people depicted as human deny these happened elsewhere. In Downfall, we hear Hitler gloat about having at least succeeded in "wiping out the Jewish infection in Europe", and we see deserters getting executed brutally which says something about the army they're in; and boy, does Eastwood ever emphasize the death cult of the Japanese army. Both in the "committing suicide" sense (including one character who loads himself with explosives, intending to commit sucide by taking out American tanks that way), and in the way these soldiers are instructed to treat their enemies; early on, we see a Seargeant barking about how the enemy is not human, cowardly, weak, deserving to wiped out, etc, and they should start with the red cross people. Also, like I pointed out in my review, the flashback scene with Shimizu where he fails at being a thug because he can't bring himself to shoot a dog is as chilling an illustration of life in a dicatatorship and brutality against Civilians as I've ever seen in a movie.

So what more does this reviewer want? A "meanwhile, in China..." scene? (Or, in Downfall, a "meanwhile, in Auschwitz" scene.) I think he's underestimating the audience and, as I said, ignoring that Eastwood does get that side across with the same filmic means he uses to make the Japanese human.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

All good points, but I suspect you're right when you say the reviewer underestimates the audience.

Haven't seen the movie yet, but it sounds definitely interesting.