A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: Letters from Iwo Jima

Date Viewed: 2/10/07

Details:

Ken Watanabe (General Tadamichi Kuribayashi)

Kazunari Ninomiya (Saigo)

Tsuyoshi Ihara (Baron Nishi)

Ryo Kase (Shimizu)

Yuki Matsuzaki (Nozaki)

Takashi Yamaguchi (Kashiwara)

Produced & directed by: Clint Eastwood

Producer: Steven Spielberg

Score: +

The Review: Things change; I'm certainly not the first person to make this observation. My father's generation fought in WW-II; indeed my dad served in the Pacific against the Japanese and his brothers served in Europe against the Germans. But interactions between the next generation are entirely different, something not atypical of many in the my generation: I work daily with German & Austrian friends and scientific colleagues, and have developed a fascination with Japanese art and culture. In all these interactions, the last world war has never come up, never been discussed; it may be the ghost peering over both our respective shoulders, but it's seldom glimpsed and never the topic of converse. That's one reason I've never been all that interested in WW-II -- whether history, biography or fiction -- although I grew up in the 50's watching the B&W "Victory at Sea" on Sunday afternoons while visiting family. Today this is all but invisible. There are very few movies that I've chosen to watch that were concerned with this (or any) war. Patton and Saving Private Ryan are the rare exceptions for WW-II, Paths of Glory for WW-I; and as for "my generation's war" (Vietnam), I'm still (by choice) woefully inexperienced. So while I was curious about the approach and attitude taken by Clint Eastwood in Flags of Our Fathers (the trailers seemed somewhat cynical, from the American viewpoint), I was even more interested in his treatment of a very different perspective in Letters from Iwo Jima (the battle for the island from the Japanese viewpoint, narrated via a cache of letters home). This pair of films, ostensibly about the same battle, seemed very different.

Color is the first thing you notice, because it is muted and almost totally absent. The first real flash of color appears in an explosion. Not that the film is shot in B&W, but it is a clearly calculated effect -- in part because of the bleak monochromatic scenery, and in part due to the harsh lighting and loss of dynamic range in the dark tunnels of Suribashi. The landscape looks more like the stark near-wasteland of Iceland or Easter Island than a tropical island of political or strategic value.

The flag-raising on the island's summit -- the central focus of Flags of Our Fathers, and the image most of us have of this entire stretch of the Pacific -- is not mentioned, only that the hill was taken. There is a single distant vision of the hilltop (chilling for all that it is so brief, understated and subtly iconic), and the plot moves rapidly onward.

Kuribayashi (Watanabe) is a fascinating character. He comes into leadership on the island as a veteran of the earlier Manchurian campaign, knowing instinctively that re-supply is unlikely, but he maintains his personal positive attitude and tries to maintain morale in his troops. More frustrating is that he also must deal with a conflict between styles of war and fighting -- not unlike that portrayed in Kurosawa's Kagemusha -- so he is constantly in conflict with the cultural image of an honorable death by suicide (not the best way to fight and conserve soldiers, even in the most impossible of conditions) and consequently in opposition to most of his senior staff. Complexities of character abound. Through flashbacks we see that he competed in the then-recent Los Angeles Olympics as an accomplished equestrian, was quite familiar with the American way of life, and more familiar with the aristocracy of Hollywood than most American soldiers.

Threaded throughout the film is a careful and complex rendering of opposing soldiers both as reasonable human beings and as monsters -- on both sides, viewed from both sides. Some interactions are civil and almost friendly; some are disturbingly not. It's quite clear these differences are individual, not institutional: soldiers from both sides committed to doing their job, but not necessarily committed wholeheartedly to the nationalistic jingoism or pumped-up artificial winds of hatred. (This is reminiscent of the experience of the Christmas truce on the Belgian front during WW-I; check out the lyrics to Frances Tolliver and a recent book about the event.) All of which leads back to why the ghost seldom talks.

Pretty good, and Watanabe does a wonderful job.

(11-Feb-07)

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