Letters from Iwo Jima

Starring: Ken Watanabe, Shido Nakamura, Tsuyoshi Ihara Directed by: Clint Eastwood Runtime: 141 min. Rated: R Release date: December 20, 2006 - More Info
READER RATINGS:
6.7 OVERALL	Smart . . . . . . . . 7.8 Sexy . . . . . . . . . 5.5 Funny . . . . . . . . 4

The Nerve Review

Flags of Our Fathers, the first half of Clint Eastwood's ambitious Iwo Jima diptych, garnered respectful but faintly reserved praise upon its release two months ago, in part because many felt that it deviated very little from the standard WWII-movie template. Nobody could possibly lodge that complaint against Letters From Iwo Jima, however, which by any reckoning must qualify as one of the most radical pictures ever produced by a Hollywood studio. It's not merely that the dialogue is entirely in subtitled Japanese, or that Eastwood has leached virtually all of the color from his palette in post-production, rendering every non-flashback scene a forbidding steel-gray. What astonishes is the sheer empathic chutzpah of his attempt to tunnel, so to speak, into the mind of the enemy — observing the island battle so strictly from the Japanese perspective that it's our own boys, the Greatest Generation, who come across as faceless, abstract killing machines. As an antidote to the relentless jingoism emanating from the current administration, it's bracing; as a belated memorial to a former enemy, it occasionally moved me to unexpected tears.

Trouble is, though, pure empathy is almost impossible to come by. Letters From Iwo Jima was written by Iris Yamashita, a Japanese-American, with story assistance from Paul Haggis; try as they might to divorce themselves from their cultural biases — and obviously Yamashita must straddle the fence to some degree — a subtle but unmistakable rah-rah element gradually creeps in. And so, in addition to its potent examination of the "honorable death," as Japanese soldiers struggle with their country's insistence that they willingly sacrifice their lives in a futile cause, Letters From Iwo Jima ultimately becomes a sort of funhouse self-image, with the enemy slowly coming to understand that we (the Americans) are not inhuman monsters. In the film's worst scene, which smacks of the hamfisted racial grandstanding that Haggis brought to Crash, two Japanese grunts who've read a letter found on a dead G.I. wistfully remark that American moms sound exactly like their own moms, at which point Eastwood's once-radical effort evinces all the rhetorical force of that Sting song in which he hopes the Russians love their children too. — Mike D'Angelo

Other Reviews

Variety
Todd McCarthy
"Piercing, astutely judged..."
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The New York Times
A.O. Scott
"Adheres to some of the conventions of the genre even as it quietly dismantles them. It is, unapologetically and even humbly, true to the durable tenets of the war-movie tradition, but it is also utterly original, even radical in its methods and insights."
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L.A. Times
Kenneth Turan
"Daring and significant."
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The Onion AV Club
Noel Murray
"Those looking for contemporary relevance in Letters From Iwo Jima could find it all over the sociopolitical map."
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Salon
Stephanie Zacharek
"The impulse is commendable; the movie isn't."
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