By this time, longtime readers have probably figured out that I do not get Clint Eastwood as a filmmaker. Some compared Mystic River to Shakespeare, I found it to be a confusing but mostly typical thriller. Many called Million Dollar Baby a devastating masterpiece- I didn't give rat's a** about the clichéd characters and manipulative story and was frankly amazed that anyone did. Richard Roeper (who admittedly usually doesn't know what he's talking about) also called Flags From Our Fathers a masterpiece and compared Eastwood to John Ford, which I thought was an insult to Ford. So it's probably not that surprising that I don't get what is so special about his companion piece to the previous film, Letters from Iwo Jima.
I do want to be fair to the movie- I did like it and was mildly entertained by it. But I walked in expecting a David Lean-like work about the political and cultural situation of Japan at the end of WWII, and I got a moderately successful Grand Illusion imitation. Eastwood is trying to say that people who human first and nationals second, a sentiment that I agree with but one that is not particularly deep.
The movie's intellectual shortcomings would not be that much of a problem, if it had some real characters that I cared about, but with the exception of Lt. General Kuribayshi (Ken Watanabe), the characters are generic and difficult to tell apart from each other (the film's companion piece had a similar problem).
The film is structured like another, and much better war film, Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory. Both films involve apolitical soldiers (Watanabe here, Kirk Douglass in Kubrick's film) who are forced to lead their men on a suicidal assault which they know will have no military value. But Kubrick's film was short and gritty, packing a huge wallup with its brief moment of humanist hope at end. Eastwood's movie is long and meandering, not really boring, but not super interesting either. We get over and over the message that the common Japanese and American soldiers have a lot in common and its their superiors who are the radical ideologues. Jean Renoir gave us this message in a much deeper and more moving way in his aforementioned Grand Illusion.
From a formal standpoint, Eastwood also made a mistake in shooting the film with desaturated color tone, leading me to wonder why just didn't make the movie in black and white to begin with. Aside from the photography, the movie is not particularly stylized and I wish that a more distinctive director had made the film, one who could have installed its scenes of violence with real danger in not shock value (maybe someone like Peter Jackson).
But I suppose that I am coming down to hard on the film. It is an ordinary movie from and ordinary talent, and the only reason I am judging it so harshly is because so many have overrated it. It's worth seeing, if you are interested in this subject, but far better films have been made about WWII.
Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)