Lacking an integral narrative structure, Eastwood uses a non-chronological sequencing that cuts among the troops before the landing on Iwo Jima, the landing and month-long battle, the bond tour, the "present" when the veterans are old men, and some scattered, baldly informational fill-ins. This technique at least keeps his overladen wagon rolling on its groaning axles. The emphasis shifts, however, from narrative to the moviemakers' attitudes toward the war, heroism, the photo, and the junket, and those attitudes are simplistic when not incoherent.
Toward the beginning, for instance, one elderly veteran says that the Iwo Jima photo won the war just as Eddie Adams's 1968 photo "General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon" lost that later war for the U.S. Isn't it at least as plausible to say that Adams's photo would not have had the impact it had if the Viet Nam war hadn't already been lost in some sense? And Adams himself later wrote in Time magazine, "People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths.... What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?' How do you know you wouldn't have pulled the trigger yourself?" Flags of Our Fathers shows none of the thoughtfulness of this comment.
The movie, like all of Eastwood's so-called masterpieces, is literal-minded without being grounded in naturalism, and so the characters, like failed attempts at optical illusions, never attain full dimensionality. Thus, although Rene is potentially the most complex character (and Bradford gives the best performance), Eastwood presents him as a fake and a creep, just the kind of guy who would make a good tout. Rene then gets his comeuppance when, after the war, none of the big-shots who handed him cards during the tour gives him a job, or even returns his calls (as the illustrated narration tells us). He finished his days as a janitor, which is supposed to make us pity his smallness but is also imparted as a definitive judgment on him — i.e., he believed his own publicity! (The movie's hypocrisy about publicity tours is matched by its snobbery: especially in a small institution, such as a grade school or a church, a good janitor is a godsend.)
Ira is the one who's destroyed — he can't get over his survivor's guilt that better marines than he died on the island. He drinks so heavily he's kicked off the tour and sent back to fight. Later, we learn, he becomes a farm laborer (whom tourists drive out of their way to be photographed with in the fields) and dies of drink. Ira is the heart of the picture, but his story is simultaneously overdone and underdeveloped.
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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.