**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Shido Nakamura, Hiroshi Watanabe, and Ryo Kase
Directed by Clint Eastwood & written by Iris Yamashita and Paul Haggis
2006
142 min R
“Letters from Iwo Jima” is director Clint Eastwood’s second Battle of Iwo Jima movie for 2006, after his mawkish and lumbering Oscar-bait “Flags of Our Fathers.” Told from the perspective of the Japanese soldiers who held out on the island to the bloody end, it’s an improvement over “Flags,” with a tighter focus, no jumbled chronology, and a commanding performance by “Last Samurai’s” Ken Watanabe as the island’s general. It’s still only an “okay” movie though.
Among “Letters’” numerous accolades are Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Director, as well as the National Board of Review’s pick for movie of the year. But, like “Brokeback Mountain,” one suspects it’s the sheer existence of “Letters from Iwo Jima” – an American movie about the Japanese POV in WWII!! – that’s being rewarded, not its actual quality.
Among its writers is a name I’ve come to dread more and more – Paul Haggis of “Flags,” “Crash,” and “Million Dollar Baby,” a screenwriter determined to never make his audience work for anything. Despite a long wind-up promising a visceral tragedy about men in battle, we get little sense of the tactics of the siege or of the steady collapse of defenses. Instead of the desperation of men retreating-retreating-retreating amidst frantic reloads, “Letters” is basically a series of one-on-one conversations beating us about the head with The Poignant Stick – home, wives, how the enemy is human, dying for country, etc. Many of the scenes work, but these are the kind of things of which most war movies only get one or two – “Letters” is almost nothing but them.
Considering it’s about soldiers making a last stand, “Letters from Iwo Jima” is also hit-and-miss as a “closing net” movie, something that even zombie movies usually get right. By “closing net,” I mean you start out with a band of characters in a closed-off space – a house, a cemetery, The Alamo, Planet LB421 – then ratchet the suspense from nail-biting to unbearable as the men are killed off and the survivors run out of ammo and fall back into progressively smaller hidey holes.
The titular homebound epistles are also hit-and-miss. Watanabe’s remorse over not having time to clean the kitchen floor before going off to die is touching. A soldier’s remarks about his cavalry officer’s womanizing is moving when the horseman affectionately talks about his horse. At other times, the letters are like a dumbed-down “Thin Red Line” – instead of the ethereal, poeticized voiceovers of Malick’s film, which probably leaves Eastwood’s decidedly middlebrow audiences scratching its head, the thoughts of the soldiers are just Haggis way to make abso-tively posi-lutely sure Everyone Got the Message.
And I’m so sick of the damn solo trumpet for lone soldiers.
Finished Sunday, January 28, 2007
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