A Winning Loss: Letters From Iwo Jima

[In light of the still-unfolding discussion of Gran Torino, The Cooler offers the following review, written upon the film’s release in the author’s pre-blog era.]

With his companion pictures about the Battle of Iwo Jima, Clint Eastwood has earned yet another bullet in the book of cinema history. What he hasn’t done is make a pair of great films. Flags Of Our Fathers, released earlier this year, is an erratic, sentimental mess. Letters From Iwo Jima, filmed successively and released just before the end of 2006, is considerably better but also unfortunately flawed. And yet if suffering through the first film is the price of getting to the second, it’s worth it. Because though Letters is far from perfect, its mere existence is a triumph.

Telling the story of Iwo Jima through the eyes of Japanese soldiers, Letters is a notably atypical war movie in at least three respects: it follows battle through the eyes of the (1) invaded and (2) eventually defeated, with (3) America standing in as the enemy. Thus the picture is an intriguing blend of The Alamo and (parts of) Tora! Tora! Tora! But in a picture sure to be hyper-analyzed in this country for any hint of anti-patriotism, the universal ugliness of warfare remains forever in the crosshairs.

All war film projects needn’t be as balanced as Eastwood’s Iwo Jima duo, but they should at least be this conscientious. The sad truth though is that without Flags there probably wouldn’t have been a Letters – not from an American studio at least. But while the making of a (literally) flag-waving American chapter is frustrating and offensive as a prerequisite for a Japanese edition, Eastwood’s separate-but-equal treatment is a wise way to go. By giving each side of the conflict its own unique film, Eastwood ensures that we don’t let the end sum of the battle (American victory in the face of more than 18,000 Japanese casualties) obscure our selection of heroes.

Earning top-billing in the film is Ken Watanabe (familiar to you from The Last Samurai) as General Kuribayashi, whose ingenious defense tactics allowed an out-manned and out-gunned Japanese force to turn what was expected to be a five-day American sweep into a 40-day epic. Watanabe fits the part well, his broad shoulders and tall frame exuding confidence while his soothing voice and winning smile express compassion. Kuribayashi, who toured America before the war, is a fascinating figure, whose actual letters home help to shape his character here. Alas, his genius, along with the resolve of his soldiers, is never properly portrayed.

The irony is that Eastwood undercuts the spirit of those he is trying to exalt by refusing to spend more time on the Xs and Os of battle. Though Eastwood does well in the set-up – showing Kuribayashi surveying the island to predict the Americans’ angle of attack, ordering the construction of crossfire zones and establishing an 11-mile tunnel structure connecting the Japanese gun ports – once the Americans hit the beach, time and place get lost. Over the last hour of this 140-minute picture we get a tedious parade of Japanese soldiers lurking through tunnels, falling back to who knows where, committing suicide when death seems immanent and arguing over whether retreat or suicide is the proper course of action. Meanwhile, Kuribayashi paces in his bunker and wonders why his messengers disappear.

The Japanese story of Iwo Jima is one of grit and sacrifice in the face of impossible odds. Most of the 22,000 soldiers suspected that they wouldn’t return from the tiny volcanic island. They battled dysentery, lived in reinforced caves that withstood the American aerial bombardment and generally waited to die. Their only mission was to kill at least 10 American soldiers each before they themselves fell. But unlike Americans at the Alamo there wasn’t a San Jacinto to avenge such suffering. All Iwo Jima did was help convince the U.S. military that the Japanese would fight to the very end, and that big bombs for Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be an easier means of victory.

It’s a pity then, given all that Japan’s troops endured, that the full of extent of the soldiers’ resilience gets lost in the timeless darkness of the caves. Eastwood’s film might feel like it takes 40 days unfold, but since we’re never given a feel for the geography of Iwo Jima, it’s nearly impossible to follow the battle. One moment the Americans arrive, the next they take Mount Suribachi and the next the battle is over. Just like that. Or so it feels. Equally frustrating, the action seems to peak-and-valley according to the dramatic needs of the screenplay (written by Iris Yamashita with collaboration from Paul Haggis). In one sequence, Americans take out a gun at one of the tunnel mouths, and yet the Japanese have time to dramatically (and brutally) sacrifice themselves with grenades before the enemy shows any sign of penetrating the breach.

Partly responsible for such missteps are Eastwood’s best intentions to keep this a solely Japanese story. Letters borrows some footage from Flags – mostly in the initial beach raid – but the films overlap only in time, location and visual theme. Once again, as in Flags, Eastwood has chosen to tint his film with a greenish monochrome haze – all the rage since Saving Private Ryan – even though it has the unfortunate effect of flattening the landscapes while making saturated fire-red explosions pop off the screen like Pleasantville anomalies. By the end of the movie I was dying to get outdoors to ensure that the sky was still blue.

But if Eastwood has a fault as a filmmaker, beyond his penchant for sentimentality, fussiness isn’t it. It’s being too casual. Though Letters has the possible excuse of being rushed through editing (it was initially slated for a February 2007 release), the movie is overlong and under-polished. Transitions are rough, close-ups are the rule even when inappropriate and flashbacks are halting and unnecessary. Somewhere in the midst of this shadowy maze there’s a touching story about a baker who never wanted to become a soldier (a powerful Kazunar Ninomiya) and a riveting though underdeveloped subplot about a former military policeman whose death on Iwo Jima punctuates a cruel fall from grace (Ryo Kase). But you’ll need a headlamp to keep track of them. Eastwood’s second Iwo Jima film has arresting sparks, but it never quite finds the light of greatness.

A Losing Win: Flags Of Our Fathers

[In light of the still-unfolding discussion of Gran Torino, The Cooler offers the following review, written upon the film’s release in the author’s pre-blog era.]

History is written by the victors, they say, but that isn’t keeping Clint Eastwood from directing two movies about the Battle of Iwo Jima. Flags Of Our Fathers, based on a book by James Bradley, recounts the battle best known for a misleadingly triumphant flag-raising from the American perspective. Letters From Iwo Jima, due in theaters in February 2007, will adopt the viewpoint of the Japanese. The exercise itself, making two films from opposing angles, hints at Eastwood’s message that heroism is subjective. But in case we might miss it, the painfully redundant Flags pounds the point home with a sledgehammer.

Working off one of the year’s most atrocious screenplays, a muddled and mindless mess by Oscar-winning scribe Paul Haggis, Flags follows three characters: Ryan Phillippe’s “Doc” Bradley, Jesse Bradford’s Rene Gagnon and Adam Beach’s Drunken Injun. Actually, the man Beach portrays is Ira Hayes, a Native American soldier who never got comfortable with the American Hero label thrust upon him after his return to the States. But in the entire film I counted only two scenes featuring Beach in which Hayes isn’t drinking, drunk or having his American Indian heritage referenced, usually with some sort of colorful slur. So I’m just going to call things as they are.

Of course, one could fairly argue that Haggis has the same aim, and that his multiple “chief” and “red” references are an effort to keep it real. Flags takes place in the less-enlightened mid-1940s, after all, with Brown v Board of Education a decade away. Still, it’s one thing to illustrate how someone like Hayes was marginalized by his minority status, and it’s something else entirely to actually reduce a man to that marginalized identity in the process. And that’s what happens here, over and over again. The film’s obsession with Hayes’ heritage is so unrelenting that as the movie rolled past the two-hour mark I felt certain we’d get a shot of Hayes selling fireworks or opening a casino. But those scenes must have been left on the cutting room floor.

Thank goodness something was. With a running time of 132 minutes, Flags takes forever to get almost nowhere. Haggis’ screenplay jumps back and forth from the events of Iwo Jima to its immediate aftermath and to the present day, as Doc’s son interviews veterans to get their memories of battle. In the meantime the screenplay also swaps points of view. And yet instead of detail and depth, all this method provides is more and more of the same. By the halfway point, we’ve been everywhere Flags is going to take us. And in most cases we’ve been there twice.

In fairness, some of Flags’ leftover flavor stems from its unfortunate position in the cinematic assembly line. Just like John Ford’s The Searchers made it impossible for a director to ever again frame someone in a doorway without seeming derivative, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan ruined the World War II-era beach-storming. While in SPR it was the coast of Normandy, and here it’s Iwo Jima, with Mount Suribachi looming in the background, the sequences feel so familiar that you could mix shots from the two films without detecting a difference.

That’s a compliment in some respects, but Eastwood could have done us all a favor by not shooting in the unsaturated greens and grays that are starting to feel like standard issue – the WWII Collection by Dutch Boy. In black and white, Flags might have possessed a whiff of novelty – and it’s surprising that Eastwood didn’t leap at the chance to go colorless, because his favored scene composition is to have his actors huddled in the one available corner of light in otherwise shadow-filled rooms.

Flags doesn’t bend to every war movie cliché – for example, I don’t think there’s a single case of a soldier being catapulted into the air by an explosion – but too much feels too familiar. And too something else as well: small. In depicting portions of a 40-day engagement that claimed nearly 26,000 lives on an island about a third the size of Manhattan, Eastwood’s Iwo Jima often comes off like a mild skirmish fought out between 50 per side.

There’s something kind of fitting about that, however, because Flags is all about the deceptiveness of historical snapshots, or in this case one historic snapshot. If the most iconic image of American warfare isn’t George Washington crossing the Delaware, memorialized with great inaccuracy by painter Emanuel Leutze, then it’s got to be Joe Rosenthal’s equally deceptive photograph of six troops struggling to raise the Stars and Stripes on Mount Suribachi. The flag in the photo was actually the second to be raised that day, on what was just the fifth day of fighting, with conquest far from assured. Nevertheless, the image instantly became a symbol of victory at a time when the nation desperately needed good news and, not coincidentally, the military desperately needed cash.

Feeding on the public’s love of the photo, the U.S. government asked the surviving participants of the flag-raising (three of the men died soon after) to return to the States to have their heroism celebrated in an effort to sell war bonds. Flags suggests that Gagnon enjoyed the spotlight, that Hayes was repulsed by it and that Doc Bradley had almost no emotion whatsoever (Phillippe’s performance is as pasty and lifeless as wallpaper). But here’s what’s strange: By foisting villainy on the government for its exploitation, Flags doesn’t demystify the contributions of the Greatest Generation, it sweetens the romance.

These days, in the aftermath of both the “Mission Accomplished” photo-op and the Abu Ghraib snapshots, two memorable but contradictory visual messages about the so-called War on Terror, one wonders how we might remember WWII today if our soldiers had hit the beaches with digital cameras in their pockets. A character in Flags says that one photo can win or lose a war. And that’s probably true. But one photo cannot capture a war, and maybe not even a battle. In Flags, Eastwood has a number of opportunities to define the heroes of Iwo Jima, but his characters leave the film as faceless and obscure as they are in Rosenthal’s photo. Letters will give Eastwood a second chance. And he needs it.

[Tomorrow: Letters From Iwo Jima]

Utterly Offensive: Gran Torino

Gook. Zipperhead. Dragon lady. These are among the many – and I mean many – slurs that pop up in Gran Torino with the frequency that Asians eat dogs (another Gran Torino slur). They are delivered almost exclusively by Clint Eastwood’s Walt Kowalski, who is one of the last Caucasians still living in a modest Michigan neighborhood that, as Walt might say it, has become overrun by the Hmong. A war veteran with a silver star locked away in his basement, Walt is a proud American with a not so proud past. He’s haunted by his memories of fighting in Korea, and in the faces of his neighbors he sees the dead Korean soldiers that he and his compatriots “stacked like sandbags.” Safe to say, Walt hates his neighbors for not being white. Then again, with his wife now dead, Walt hates just about everyone, including his kids and grandkids.

As Gran Torino begins, Walt is prepared to live out his final years in his perfectly tidy house, behind his perfectly swept front porch and his perfectly manicured lawn, with nothing but his hatred of others and his adeptness with racial slurs to entertain him. Over the course of the film, through an accidental bond with the Hmong kids next door, Walt’s xenophobia will subside, but his penchant for slurs will not. And so when I tell you that Gran Torino is one of the most offensive films this year, I’m of course referring to the saltiness of its dialogue. But only in part. Because as odious and indefensible as Walt’s vernacular is on its own, the most repulsive thing about Gran Torino is its structure, which is thin, repetitive, amateurish and, oh yeah, entirely hypocritical.

Let’s start with the last part first. Gran Torino, based on a screenplay by Nick Schenk, would have you believe that it preaches against racism and treats its minority subjects honorably, but that’s only half right. Yes, through Walt, xenophobia is portrayed as a dead-end existence. Yes, Walt learns, after spending about 30 minutes at his neighbors’ home, that “I have more in common with these gooks than with my own family.” But in the meantime Gran Torino teaches us some other things. It teaches us that slurs are okay, even if you mean them, so long as you’re charming. It teaches us that the Hmong might be good people, but that if they want to get anything done (fix appliances, clean up a yard, end a gang war) they need whitey to help. And it teaches us that Clint Eastwood can get away with bloody well anything.

The honorability of Eastwood the man is hard at work in Gran Torino. We want to like Walt because it’s impossible to dislike Clint. And so when Walt goes into one of his slur-filled rants, which is pretty much the entire film, it’s frighteningly tempting to give him a pass. Because the truth is that before we see Walt, we see Clint – the gentle sparkle in his eyes shining through that trademark squint. We know that Eastwood – whose Letters From Iwo Jima is one of the most respectful depictions of Asians, or of any wartime enemy, to ever come out of Hollywood – isn’t racist, and that takes some of the bite out of Walt’s bark. So does the fact that Walt’s bark is almost never the same. “Gook” and “zipperhead” are favorite terms, but Walt uses at least two dozen slurs in all. At one point, he pops off about five different Asian slurs in 10 seconds. After a while, it starts to feel as if Walt isn’t hateful so much as clever.

Or maybe he’s just colorful. Perhaps Walt uses “gook” the way a Martin Scorsese character would use the word “fuck.” Because “this is the way guys talk.” That’s what Walt says. And to make sure we don’t think Walt is one sick anti-Asian bigot, Gran Torino gives him a few scenes at the barbershop where the “Polack” Walt trades white-guy jabs with his son of a bitch “Wop” barber, played by John Carroll Lynch. The free-flowing exchange of racial epithets creates such a festival of good cheer that eventually Walt brings the impressionable Thao (Bee Vang) along for an education. Because Walt isn’t racist, understand. He’s just old-school. That’s why it’s a shame that Walt is a widower, because otherwise Thao’s next lesson could have been in wife-beating – that’s what guys do, right? Please. The real joke here is any suggestion whatsoever that Walt’s behavior is acceptable because his Hmong neighbors don’t take him seriously, or because he and his barber engage in name-calling as sport.

If this reading of Gran Torino seems too uptight for you, do me a favor: Imagine the same movie, except replace the Hmong neighbors with African-Americans. Now, instead of Walt chuckling while telling his Asian neighbors not to eat his dog, imagine him telling his black neighbors to take a break from eating fried chicken to bojangle for him. Or maybe Walt could refer to them as slave-ship cargo. Or maybe he could just call them “niggers” over and over. Would that be charming? How about this: Instead of being of Polish descent, let’s make Walt a German. His neighbors don’t have to be people of color, they can be Jews. And now Walt can grin while inviting his neighbors over to his place to take a shower. Are you laughing yet? I’m not.

See, the fact that there’s no long ugly history of unrest between whites and Hmong in this country doesn’t make Walt’s behavior good comedy. It makes it good comedy for now – until someone learns from it, emulates it and eventually creates the uncomfortable context that should already be obvious. Gran Torino doesn’t mean to be offensive, nor do the people who laugh at it. When I saw the movie in downtown Washington, DC, in a theater with a racially diverse audience, many howled at the film. But none of them, far as I could tell, was Hmong. It’s always easier to laugh when someone else takes the brunt. And the truth is that with a different cast of racial minorities, or with a different star at its center, Gran Torino would likely inspire picket lines.

But moral and sociological issues aside, Gran Torino is still a film to protest. Because movie fans should be appalled at dialogue that’s more on-the-nose than anything M Night Shyamalan or Paul Haggis has written. We should be annoyed that Sue (Ahney Her) is forced to explain her Hmong culture like she’s reading from Wikipedia. We should be outraged with the way the racially-charged climate of the neighborhood looks as if it was modeled off an episode of Beverly Hills, 90210. We should be upset that an experienced filmmaker like Eastwood couldn’t give better direction to Vang, who spends the whole film slump-shouldered, working so hard to be pathetic. We should be disappointed with the triteness of it all, with the way so many scenes feel like a 1980s “Just Say No” commercial. And then we should be honest enough to admit that if this movie were directed by and starring Mel Gibson, it would play a whole lot differently.

More Of The Same: Changeling

In 1928, a single mother returns from work to find that her 9-year-old son is gone from their California home. Vanished without a trace. The mother, Christine Collins, contacts the Los Angeles Police Department, which uncovers no clues related to the boy’s disappearance for months, until incredibly the boy is reported found in Illinois. As quickly as this news spreads, the L.A. press assembles at the train station to witness the mother and child reunion. The LAPD shows up too, eager for some positive publicity. But when the boy steps off the train, Christine takes one look at him and says disappointedly but confidently, “That’s not my son.” And it isn’t. Of course it isn’t. A mother would know.

I have just described for you the first 30 or so minutes of Changeling, directed by Clint Eastwood, and so in theory I have given nothing significant away. Per J Michael Straczynski’s screenplay, inspired by real-life events, the above summary isn’t a story itself but the launching point of one – the seed of something larger. Only that seed never blooms. Of course it doesn’t. Because in its opening act, Changeling is as dramatic and as heart-wrenching as it ever will be. A mother loses her child. He is never found again. And next to this, the rest is just distraction, obstacles between us and the obvious. Sure, Christine will be put through a physical and emotional hell. And clues explaining why and how her son disappeared will be unearthed. And there will be a few surprises. But in the end we will end up in the exact same place. And we’ll know this. But how about the people behind the movie?

Changeling is a quasi-mystery that makes the mistake of supposing that “can” and “when” are equally dramatic concepts. They aren’t. Compelling films work with “can.” Can the boxer win the fight? Can the astronauts make it home? Can the man make it off the island? Even if convention (Rocky), history (Apollo 13) or a film’s trailers (Cast Away) hint at the answers to such questions, a successful screenplay creates doubt. Changeling eliminates it. After the mystery boy arrives on the train, an image-conscious LAPD captain attempts to convince a flustered Christine that the child is in fact her son. But she doesn’t believe it. And we don’t believe it. And we don’t believe that the police captain believes it. And even if we tried to believe as much, that mystery is quashed only minutes later when Christine discovers that the boy posing as her son is 3 inches too short. Case closed. From here Changeling isn’t about “can” (Can Christine prove the stranger isn’t her son?), and so it becomes a film about “when,” as in: “When will everyone else realize what is overwhelmingly obvious?”

Watching it unfold is excruciating. Christine is played by Angelina Jolie, who mutes any Lara Croft sexuality behind blank, pained or confused expressions while Straczynski’s screenplay gives her character the Green Eggs and Ham treatment: Christine’s denials are the same, only her location changes. She insists that the boy isn’t Walter as soon as he steps off the train and she does so again later from the hospital for the criminally insane. She says he isn’t Walter when she talks to a preacher, and she says he isn’t Walter when she talks to her son’s teacher. She says he isn’t Walter when she’s in a courtroom witness chair. She says he isn’t Walter when she’s sitting anywhere! Meantime, an LAPD police captain played by Jeffrey Donovan responds with longwinded versions of “Is too!” so many times that I began to suspect that eventually he’d plug his ears, close his eyes and shout, “La-la-la-la-la…” whenever Christine arrived with new evidence.

Put together, these make for two one-dimensional performances in a film that plays the same note over and over again until the string snaps. About halfway through, Changeling tries to shift its dramatic tension onto the shoulders of another little boy, Sanford (Eddie Alderson), a runaway who has knowledge about poor Walter’s fate. Yet while Alderson’s performance connects, thanks in large part to a tremendous example of good listening by Michael Kelly as Detective Ybarra, this side plot does little more than fascinate us with its horrific historical factoids. Forgotten in the process, as if to underline its monotony, is Christine’s going-nowhere emotional journey. Eventually, after Changeling has gone a good 45 minutes longer than is necessary, Straczynski attempts to tie these threads together in dramatic harmony, but the link seems forced and historically dubious. And by then it’s too late anyway.

Even as it’s unfolding it’s clear that Changeling’s last hour is made up of stuff that in a better film would be left to the textual epilogue. For example: Why did we need to see the courtroom scene in which the already established was repeated one time more? And why did we need to see the arrest of Gordon Northcott, or his conviction, or his execution? Even if the latter was essential, did we really need to watch a shackled Northcutt shuffle down one staircase before shuffling up another to the gallows? The execution scenes of In Cold Blood and Capote move with greater haste, and in those pictures the emotions of the convicted are at the heart of the matter. Here? Not so much. As Northcott, Jason Butler Harner gives a performance so large that it suggests significance, but in truth the role is noting more than filler. Northcott sticks around long enough that Christine can visit him at San Quentin, allowing Straczynski to check off one more detail from the Wikipedia entry. It’s that kind of movie.

In its final act, Changeling goes out of its way to present Christine as a champion of motherhood and women’s rights in an era where women could be sent to a mental institution if the LAPD deemed them an inconvenience. But by making the LAPD into the villain, Stracyznski’s screenplay misses the point. Equally at fault was the general culture of the times, wherein Christine would ever feel pressured to take the imposter child home in the first place. Try as the film might to suggest otherwise, in actuality Christine is rescued by men as often as she is wronged by them. In the end, her acts of supposed heroism are refusing to pretend that a stranger is her son and refusing to plead insanity. It’s a pretty low bar. And for each scene in which Jolie screams, cries or snarls, there’s another in which Christine is allowed to do no more than sit there and look pretty like a good woman of the early 1930s.

And that she does. Christine is character we see a lot of without ever seeing into. This much is proven near the end of Changeling, when we find Christine listening to a radio broadcast of the Academy Awards, prancing about with glee over the thought of It Happened One Night upsetting Cleopatra for Best Picture. True enough, in the film’s opening scene Christine promises to take Walter to the movies, thus establishing her cinema-going habit. But glee isn’t something Christine had revealed to this point, and the final few minutes of the film isn’t the time to introduce a new facet to her limited personality. As Changeling ends with Eastwood’s own piano score and the clang of a streetcar in the distance, Christine walks off in classic movie-star fashion, with her head held high. It’s a triumphant conclusion, to be sure. And it renders Christine as foreign to us as that strange little boy who got off the train from Illinois.