Letters From Iwo Jima (Screen Daily Review)

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Letters From Iwo Jima

Brent Simon in Los Angeles 11 December 2006

Dir: Clint Eastwood. US. 2006. 141mins.

Clint Eastwood’s twilight career renaissance continues and only further deepens with Letters From Iwo Jima, his second film in two months about the best known Pacific battle during World War Two. Shot back-to-back with its companion piece Flags Of Our Fathers, it focuses more explicitly on the conflict and its human toll, telling events leading up to the central siege from the Japanese perspective. Whereas its predecessor was very much about the machinations of government image-making and the media’s complicity in wartime, this is more straightforwardly ruminative and plaintive.

Comparisons to Flags Of Our Fathers are the natural benchmark, both artistically and in terms of box-office appeal. While Flags is ostensibly the more naturally alluring picture, it has thus far stalled at under $35m domestically. Told from a foreign perspective, and with Japanese dialogue throughout, Letters From Iwo Jima lacks a narrative bent that suggests much better Stateside returns (it opens there on Dec 20), making it a tough sell for mainstream audiences. Early critical plaudits — the film has been named best picture by both the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and National Board of Review — will help it with upscale arthouse patrons; parlaying that elite audience into significant box office, however, will seem an uphill climb.

Overseas may well see Letters From Iwo Jima give a better account of itself, especially in Japan, where it opened on Dec 9.

Though the films do not fit together seamlessly - nor are they necessarily meant to – they do stand next to one another in interesting fashion. But it is this second half of Eastwood’s thematic double bill that is the more striking and memorable work and should push each project on to almost certain Oscar and Golden Globe nods. Certainly the relative novelty and pluck of the endeavor should be enough to garner Eastwood, a beloved figure amongst AMPAS voters, strong consideration for yet another Best Director Oscar nod. Letters’ lack of commercial traction, however, will dent its chances at some top-shelf prizes, moreso after last season’s Crash Oscar victory, which came amid the lowest-grossing, least populist Best Picture nominees in recent years.

The film opens in early 1945. With an American beachhead assault on Iwo Jima looming, Japanese Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Watanabe) is assigned to marshal forces and formulate a defensive strategy for the rocky Pacific island.

More than 20,000 Japanese soldiers have been sent to the atoll, knowing that they are unlikely to survive. Among them are Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a baker who only wants only to live to see the face of his newborn daughter; Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), an Olympic equestrian champion known around the world for his skill and his honour; Shimizu (Ryo Kase), a young former military policeman whose idealism has not yet been tested by war; and Lieutenant Ito (Shidou Nakamura), an unyielding and devoted military man who would rather commit suicide than surrender.

Kuribayashi’s past travels across America, glimpsed in flashback, have shown him the hopeless nature of war, but also given him a strategic insight into how to take on American forces that vastly outnumber his own. Against the vehement protests of his advisers, he orders his men to abandon their shoreline defence structures and instead concentrate on the construction of a honeycomb of more than 18 miles of tunnels, caves and pillboxes, from which the much smaller Japanese forces can shrewdly target American troops.

The first hour-plus of the film details in, if not languid, then certainly relaxed rhythms, the several weeks leading up to the battle, and it’s here that most of the interesting characterisation can be found.

But when conflict comes the situation changes, as the massive arrival of American forces provokes Japanese discord within the ranks, erupting in ritualistic suicide and mutinous disobedience.

Several of the combat scenes within Letters fit neatly into the chronology of Flags, but the lack of crossover cameos by significant Flags cast members or even many US soldiers — indeed, the films are almost wholly discrete experiences — render these sequences somewhat hazy. Furthermore, Eastwood doesn’t do a particularly keen job of establishing the spatial relationships necessary to make full, working sense of Kuribayashi’s underground network.

There are some other intriguing parallels between the two movies, though, particularly with regards to the disparity between actuality and the public face that governments put on matters. Letters, though, doesn’t plumb any representation of a spin machine; Kuribayashi merely receives dispassionate word via courier of his abandonment by various superiors, and the fact that his forces will be bereft of air defence.

Whereas Flags sometimes struggled in juggling of different timelines, Eastwood’s characteristically unembellished style is better naturally suited to Letters’ story, which is more traditionally linear and character-driven.

Kazunari Ninomiya makes a nice impression as Saigo; although his arc isn’t wildly cathartic, we see his cynical nature transform movingly into resolve. As in The Last Samurai, Ken Watanabe projects a preternatural calm and confidence, while also letting us see Kuribayashi’s tender side. He and Tsuyoshi Ihara, who plays erstwhile equestrian Nishi, provide the film with its moral gravity.

Technical category awards nominations seem certain, with longtime Eastwood collaborator and cinematographer Tom Stern’s washed-out work delivering an apocalyptic vision so desolate it makes one almost taste the sand.

Production companies/backers
DreamWorks Pictures
Warner Bros. Pictures
Malpaso
Amblin Entertainment

US distribution
Warner Bros

International distribution
Warner Bros

Executive producer
Paul Haggis

Producers
Clint Eastwood
Steven Spielberg
Robert Lorenz

Screenplay
Iris Yamashita, from a story by Yamashita & Paul Haggis

Cinematography
Tom Stern

Production design
Henry Bumstead
James J Murakami

Editor
Joel Cox
Gary D Roach

Music
Kyle Eastwood
Michael Stevens

Main cast
Ken Watanabe
Kazunari Ninomiya
Tsuyoshi Ihara
Ryo Kase
Shidou Nakamura