I wish that nearly every person he engages with didn't make a tactless or taunting comment about his race. Ira may respond as a Native American of his day would have (it can't be the first time he's been called "Chief," after all), but the 2006 audience doesn't hear it that way. (This is part of the larger problem, that every character is always displaying his personality. The treatment of character is hackneyed in the way it has been in American war movies since the silent era, though it usually includes a healthier dose of comedy than you get in Flags of Our Fathers.) Then the fact that Ira becomes a falling-down drunk on the bond tour changes the subject, although the moviemakers apparently don't realize it. Are they suggesting that the war-bond tour caused his alcoholism? Do they think that alcoholics aren't capable of creating their own problems, even in what from the outside seem like ideal circumstances?
Rene is the character we're meant to like least, and Ira the one we're meant to feel for most; the literal Goldilocks of the trio is Doc — the gorgeous, kissy-lipped blond Phillippe — who represents the moviemakers' "just-right" image of themselves. Doc is disgusted but not destroyed by the experience of turning blood-and-guts battle into homefront P.R. He returns to the family business, refuses all later publicity, and raises the son who writes the book the movie is based on. That son tells his dying father that he's the best father a son could have had, although any basis for this comment is outside the scope of the movie and so we either have to take it on faith or ignore it.
Finally, Flags of Our Fathers seems to be stretching for a summary of the heroism of the servicemen in World War II, as well as a broader application of the difference between fighting the war overseas and winning it at home. The narrative structure, however, does not have the necessary reach. How could it with only three boys at the center? That's like expecting How to Marry a Millionaire to summarize what American women wanted circa 1953.
There's something contradictory about the critical view that Flags of Our Fathers adopts towards the government's appropriation of the reluctant heroes' experiences. Eastwood implicitly counters that they're just boys doing what's required; they're men, not monuments. But then the movie takes Doc and Ira, and even Rene, and presents them as perfect representatives of understated American heroism in the first place and of how non-combatants don't understand, and the government unfeelingly exploits, soldiers in the second. The movie thus debunks the use of the boys as symbols and then turns them back into symbols, though of something else. There's not a fully realized personality in 132 minutes.
![The 317th Platoon [VHS]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31BB48SXBHL._SL120_.gif)
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.