Dispatches from the front line

Who would have thought all those years ago that the guy who was monkeying around with Clyde would turn out to be one of Hollywood's great directors. And yet, here we are with yet another terrific film from Clint Eastwood, the latter-day doyen of the “serious Hollywood picture”.

Letters from Iwo Jima is the companion piece to Flags of Our Fathers, but unlike that film, stays pretty much entirely within the confines of the battle for the remote volcanic island during WWII. It also tells the story from the Japanese side; something comparatively rare in modern cinema. If you look at the films that have dealt with Japan's involvement in WWII, few if any portray the Japanese forces in a positive light. Even some earlier attempts to understand the way Japanese soldiers fought the war (Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, for example) didn't really get into their psyche.

Here, Eastwood (working from a script by Iris Yamashita) tries to redress the balance somewhat, in much the same way as his revisionist Western Unforgiven stripped away much of the mythology of the old West. Eastwood wants us to see Japanese soldiers for what they probably were for the most part – scared conscripts forced by tradition and politics into a position where they were given a stark choice of fighting or dying. He also wants to make the point that war is a messy business, and there is good and bad on both sides.

As the title suggests, the story is told in part via letters the soldiers assigned to the defence of the island send home to anxious relatives. The film opens a few months before the battle itself, with the arrival of Gen. Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) on Iwo Jima. Assigned to defend the island to the last, he faces a series of set-backs, including the loss of expected air and sea support, officers stuck in traditional ways of thinking and a desperate lack of food and clean water. The flip side of the story focusses on Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a former baker conscripted into the army. He's largely clueless when it comes to war, and is very concerned about his wife and baby back on the mainland.

It's obvious that there's a lot of heft behind this project – Paul Haggis worked on the story, and Steven Spielberg gets a producing credit. Indeed, the film bears some resemblance to Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan in its intense battle sequences, and in its flitting between locations and times to tell the tale. I guess that's pretty much par for the course with war movies now, but it's certainly effective.

Indeed, if there's a serious criticism of this film, it's that Eastwood plays things pretty safe. While the overall approach to the material may be novel, the actual cinematic treatment of it doesn't stray too far from what we've seen several times before.

Although Ken Watanabe gets top billing, the putative hero of the piece is Kazunari Ninomiya's character, Saigo. As the frightened and rather bewildered young soldier, Ninomiya makes every post a winner, handling both the horror and the comedy of his scenes with aplomb. Watanabe is once more terrific as the pragmatic but humane leader; and is ably assisted by Tsuyoshi Ihara as the like-minded Baron Nishi.

Letters from Iwo Jima perhaps isn't the triumph that Eastwood films like Million Dollar Baby have been; but it's still a fascinating and moving insight into war and psychology. Those expecting non-stop action may be disappointed, but anyone with even the slightest interest in Japanese history and culture or in the way humans react to extreme circumstances will find plenty in this thoughtful and powerful film.

David Edwards

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Letters from Iwo Jima

Our rating:

Director: Clint Eastwood
Cast: Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya and Tsuyoshi Ihara
Release: 22 February 2007
Rated: MA 15+

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