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Letters from Iwo Jima February 13, 2007 |
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Clint Eastwood’s 28th film as director, and possibly the first major American production ever produced entirely in the Japanese language, “Letters from Iwo Jima” tells the wrenching story of the famous WWII battle from the Japanese side, where beaten, yet proud Imperial soldiers await an American barrage with little ammunition, little cover but inescapable caves, and virtually no support from a confused and rapidly deflated homeland. Through the epistolary devise of flashbacks using the uncensored letters from the soldiers in the field to their family back home, we get to see the human side of war, where the enemy (to the U.S. anyway) is as real, and as familiar, as your fellow countryman, further suggesting that war, in the great tradition of “All Quiet on the Western Front”, “Paths of Glory”, and “Grand Illusion”, is an unnecessary mess of egotistical generals, world leaders, and the innocent everyman stuck in the middle. This is a film of tremendous humanist strength and emotion, one of Eastwood’s very best films as a director, and with strong performances from Ken Watanabe as the proud Captain, and Kazunari Ninomiya (a pop star in his native Japan) representing the doubting proletariat faction, “Letters from Iwo Jima” is not to be missed, and taken as a double-bill with the more melodramatic “Flags of our Fathers”, represents the greatest pacifist war double bill since “The Thin Red Line” and “Saving Private Ryan” eight years ago. by Adam Suraf
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