If irony weren't wasted on Clint Eastwood he might make better movies. His new release, Flags of Our Fathers (adapted from a non-fiction book by James Bradley and Ron Powers), shows the effect of the famous photograph on the soldiers who raised the American flag over Iwo Jima in February 1945. The photo, caught by Joe Rosenthal without looking through his viewfinder, becomes such a patriotic sensation that the three surviving soldiers are brought home for a bond-selling tour with the goal of raising some billions of dollars towards the national war debt.
The three boys are John "Doc" Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), a Navy hospital corpsman; Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), a Marine from the Pima Indian tribe; and Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford), a Marine runner. Doc and Ira find it distasteful to be fêted as "heroes" on a deluxe cross-country junket while their buddies, both the living and the dead, remain on the island.
Only Rene (pronounced "rainy") — whom his officers did not consider up to front-line service — understands that it's just another facet of the war effort, and finally one he has a talent for, as well as a taste. The best sequence focuses on Rene, who steps up to the first microphone put in front of him and, without faltering, figures out what needs to be said. He even incorporates in real time a disparaging remark that Ira makes about him under his breath. (He pays Ira back afterwards.)
The irony of the situation is that the two idealistic, unassuming boys more naturally adjust to the exigencies of battle than to the soft life of promoting the war effort. In other words, it's easy for them to be heroes, just don't call them one. At the same time, of course, this is the American notion of martial heroism — no vaunting for us. And it's pretty much the same as in a World War II-era movie, such as Preston Sturges's Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), which, however, starts with an ironic protagonist pressed into passing himself off as a war hero and expands from there. By contrast, Flags of Our Fathers is as unleavened as Eastwood's Mystic River, in which Sean Penn's character — a neighborhood warlord so emotional and hotheaded that when his daughter is killed he takes injustice into his own hands — is presented as a tragic hero rather than a killer buffoon.
If Eastwood and his screenwriters William Broyles, Jr. and Paul Haggis (the latter wrote the script for Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby [2004] and co-wrote and directed Crash [2005]) were intent on their skeptical view of the war-bond junket, they needed to structure the story better. There is one sequence that suggests what such a movie might have been. The boys are asked to ascend a scale model of Mt. Suribachi and to re-enact the flag-raising in a sports stadium for a cheering crowd. (The recreational fireworks resemble combat flares and rockets.) As they turn to help each other up the tacky stage-set, Doc flashes back to the deaths of the three other men who appeared in the photo. It's the most rhythmic moviemaking Eastwood has ever pulled off, but it would be more powerful as the climax of the movie, which doesn't have one. It's only at the end that we understand that the movie has been the research project of Doc's son. This "understanding," however, is not meaningfully dramatic because the son is not otherwise an important character.
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Article comments
1 - Triniman
Best review of this film that I have read. Well done.
2 - handyguy
I agree that the movie falls short, although I think you are too harsh on Eastwood's direction [he did make the powerful Unforgiven, after all, and parts of Mystic River had some of the same tidal pull]. And Adam Beach as Ira Hayes gives one of the year's most moving performances.
I believe the problems are mostly in the script...confusing structure, blandly lacking in a forceful point of view. It's always hard to tell a 'real life' story without fakey dramaturgy; if a writer does succeed in removing the falseness, what's left can feel middle-of-the-road and listless, which is what I think happens here.
3 - MCH
I thought the movie was a great tribute to the sacrifices our guys made for us there...saw it three times and felt it was better each time...Another good test was the fact that an Iwo vet whom I featured in a past column, thought it was good...So my view is, if it's good enough for someone who was THERE, it's good enough for me...
4 - MCH
"I grew up on my father's traumatized memories of being a teenaged combatant in the South Pacific during World War II and Eastwood's movie still left me cold. For this son of a bewildered ex-marine, the..."
BTW, there's no such thing as an EX-marine...
5 - Alan Dale
Thanks, Triniman.
6 - Alan Dale
Thanks for the comment, handyguy. Disagree with you about Unforgiven, which I commented on here, and to me Mystic River was unbearably self-serious and unenlightening. As for Adam Beach, while Ira may have been one of the year's most potentially moving roles, the performance was undermined by Eastwood's handling.
I agree that the problems arise mostly from the script, but Eastwood's literary culture is so very primitive that he can't help but make the script's problems the movie's problems. And it's not as if he were such a technical magician that there's some compensation in how he shoots even a bad script, as there has been with, say, Brian DePalma.
7 - Alan Dale
Thanks for the comments, MCH. As for being an EX-marine, well, you didn't know my father, who was a rather disenchanted former serviceman. At the same time, as a person who always marks Pearl Harbor Day, I am highly conscious of the sacrifices this country has made to save the world from fascism, in World War II and currently. But Flags of Our Fathers is a movie, not an actual contribution to that noble effort. Thus, if an Iwo vet thinks Eastwood's movie does him honor, I don't even want to argue with his reaction, which must arise from all kinds of individual associations that I couldn't possibly share. But that's scarcely an aesthetic consideration--I'm a critic of movies not hearts.
8 - bonnietruax
whitch one is clints son
9 - shane
Thanks for the good review. I felt too that the movie failed. I also think it deserves a swift kick.
Most families have veterans, and so does mine. But there was condescension and conceit in his theme of there being no heroes, only what we make of them. Any serviceman I've talked to would think that is a little too smart-assed of clint. They all recalled those who couldn't measure up in battle and those who went beyond the call of duty - i guess that'd be heroes, clint - something you've had the luxury of being paid millions of portraying for many years...
10 - Alan Dale
Thanks for your comment, Shane. I especially like the last line, which gets at the weird hypocrisy of this kind of earnest, well-intentioned Hollywood moviemaking. From an artistic point of view, Eastwood's intentions, rather than his skill, mark the only difference b/w his prestige pictures and his conventional output. Since he doesn't have the mind or vision to live up to those intentions, I don't see any reason to give him points for what does me no good.