"Every jackass thinks he knows what war is," grumbles a military veteran early in Clint Eastwood's new World War II epic, and most likely us jackasses got our knowhow from motion pictures. With self-consciously realistic portrayals of war like Saving Private Ryan and Jarhead entrenched in moviegoers' minds, Eastwood sets out to demystify war-on-camera even further. Revealing the story behind Joe Rosenthal's famous photo of Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima, Flags of Our Fathers expressly concerns itself with representations of war; ironically enough, its own representation of the Iwo Jima battle and the subsequent publicity tour is a bit of a mess. (Granted, the narrative unfolds under paradoxical logic: the movie about the inability to accurately represent war also struggles to represent war accurately.)
Flags of Our Fathers follows a group of Marines onto the beach at Iwo Jima — haphazardly rendered as a Private Ryan-style bloodbath — without more than a cursory introduction of the lead characters, eventually immortalized as silhouettes in Rosenthal's photo — John (Ryan Phillippe), the principled "Doc"; Rene (Jesse Bradford), the arrogant do-gooder; Ira (Adam Beach), the Native American alcoholic who lacks hero pretensions. As their peers are killed off at random by Japanese soldiers who remain entirely invisible (though Eastwood will depict their side of the battle in next year's Letters from Iwo Jima) the action cuts to their homecoming tour, in which the trio is forced to spin their putative heroism into a pitch for war bond sales. The script (co-written by Crash/Million Dollar Baby hack Paul Haggis) awkwardly hops back and forth, from the horrors of bloodshed to the perils of fame, and loses its characters somewhere in between.
The story admirably assaults the idea of an "easy-to-understand truth," of hell made palatable for mainstream consumption; it also illustrates how military-industrial jingoism could seem doubly noxious to a veteran of war. But Phillippe and Bradford are too vanilla-bland to carry these postulations into high drama; only Beach impresses with his portrait of uncloaked remorse. Clint Eastwood is such a calm, methodical director that I wish I could find more to love in his recent films. But Flags is at once too long and too short, too muted and too explicit, and it lacks the emotional heft it clearly strives for. — Akiva Gottlieb