Movie Review

Directed by Clint Easwood, Written by Iris Yamashita, starring: Ken Watanabe (General Tadamichi Kuribayashi), Kazunari Ninomaya (Saigo, b and w, 141 minutes, 2006.

This is Eastwood's sequel, or more correctly, parallel companion piece, to the earlier film Flags of Our Fathers reviewed previously in these pages. It is a very different film even though it is about the same event. It is shot entirely in blue and grey with English subtitles to the Japanese dialogue. Even the blue and grey is darker than the earlier movie giving credence to the gloom that pervades the Japanese forces. It also helps provide a filter of distance from the gore and horror in battle scenes and in particular the scene in which Japanese soldiers, ordered to defend the island to their death begin to blow themselves up with hand grenades in a tunnel beneath Mount Suribachi.

General Kuribayashi has been given the hopeless assignment to defend the volcanic island of Iwo Jima. There is no re-supply and no reinforcements. He enters it with a grim sense of the inevitable but also with some humour. His generous empathy inspires loyalty in the men who serve under him, except for several officers who have staked their honour on a traditional defense that he decides to change. In the process, the men dig 18 miles of tunnels and 5,000 caves and untold pillbox trenches. A battle that was predicted to last 5 days lasted 40.

The literary conceit of the story is a cache of letters that were written by the Japanese soldiers and uncovered later by the victors. Inspiration for the film came from Eastwood's reading of a book of letters called Letters From Commander in Chief written by General Kuribayashi to his family in Japan when he was an envoy in the US during the '20's and '30's. He knew and admired Americans. The soldiers in their letters home express little of the hatred of the enemy one might expect: mostly they express longing for the lives that they have been conscripted from back home. In contrast to the bravado, and in some cases self-doubt, expressed by American soldiers in Flags of Our Fathers They express loyalty and hope. This is especially conveyed by Saigo's letters to his wife and daughter born after he was sent off to war. It is his innocent vitality and purpose that give us something to identify with in the midst of his frailty and loss. In the end he is summarily executed by "the good guys" (US soldiers) who initially help him and his companion by giving them water and attending to injuries but suddenly shoot them because of the inconvenience of taking prisoners on the battlefield.

These two films masterfully portray the ways in which both the US and Japanese governments cynically treated the same pivotal event. Nearly 7,000 US soldiers and 20,000 Japanese died on Iwo Jima.

Letters From Iwo Jima is a poignant anti war tract. Yes, there are lots of explosions; yes, people die and "the waste of our wraths and sorrows" seem not to have "the light of God's great love shine upon them", as one of the prayers from the Anglican Prayer Book puts it. Nevertheless, Eastwood performs the function of a prophet. It is "to propound an alternate vision to the vision of the dominant culture and to bring to voice the silence of the voiceless". As 'the fog of war' obscures public debate in both the US and Canada, this is a major artistic contribution to the public discourse about war, peace and justice.