Flags of Our Fathers

Another movie by Clint Eastwood, another successful exploration of what happens to ordinary people when they are faced with challenging circumstances.

Flags of Our Fathers tells the story of the small group of soldiers who raised the US flag at Iwo Jima in one of the bloodiest, and yet little glamorized battles of World War II. That simple action, forever immortalized in newspapers all over the country, set off an effort that was both noble and deceiving and that forever changed the country and the three soldiers who got trotted wherever a contribution to the war effort could be elicited.

Given the fact that the US was uniquely engaged on both fronts of the war, in the East against Italy and Germany and in the West against the Japanese, it is laudable that Eastwood decided to shine a light on the latter, since many more movies have been made about the D-Day battle and the European victories than those fought in the Pacific.

Like many war movies, this too is an ensemble piece, and the whole cast does a very good job. The three actors who got top billing, Ryan Phillippe, Jesse Bradford and Adam Beach worked well together but their performances felt, at times, uneven. Beach effectively gets across his character’s pain for what happened to his war buddies and the falsity that now surrounds him and that he himself must stoke, but at times he seems too theatrical. Phillippe does an all right job as the war doctor who has become somewhat numb as a consequence of all the pain and death he has witnessed, but he still needs to convince me he’s more than a (gorgeously) pretty face. Bradford’s performance actually is the weakest, since all you see is a (very) pretty boy.

Technically, the movie is impeccable. The cinematography, washed out like in an old postcard from the middle of the twentieth century, adds a patina of sadness, immediacy and danger to the proceedings. Both visual and sound effects are very well done, and the main assault, more intercut and drawn out than Spielberg’s famous opening scene for Saving Private Ryan, is just as masterful.

The editing is the only aspect of the movie that put me a bit off. Because of all the different characters and the numerous flashbacks involving a large number of them, I often found myself having to hit the rewind button just to be able to put all the pieces together. Maybe this jaggedness was intended, but I found it a bit frustrating.

Finally, the brilliance and courage of Eastwood’s craft is that he looked at the events occurring in Flags of Our Fathers in another movie as well, a movie that he released the same year, Letters from Iwo Jima. The difference between the two is that the second one recounts the events of that point in time from the Japanese perspective. I haven’t seen Letters from Iwo Jima yet, but I plan to, since the reviews were even more stellar than for Flags of Our Fathers.

A good war movie. Watch it.

Grade: 8