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Film Critique
Eastwood Deconstructs Heroism
Iwo Jima becomes talking point for reality
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October 19, 2006
Clint Eastwood distills a wartime story of epic proportions and
personal truths from the worst single engagement of World War II on the
island of Iwo Jima. From the brutal reality of the bloody 40-day battle
to the way a group of its soldiers were made famous and taken advantage
of by their government before being discarded, the movie gives context
and personality to the soldiers whose faces were hidden in the war's
most famous image.
Based on James Bradley's best-selling book about his personal
journey into his father John Bradley's wartime achievements,
screenwriters William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis (Crash)
craft a carefully organized script that breathes with poignancy,
emotion, and relevance without ever succumbing to sentimentality.
Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal took the iconic "Raising
the Flag on Iwo Jima" picture on Mount Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945, just
five days after hundreds of warships delivered 30,000 soldiers to the
shores of the small but heavily fortified Japanese island covered in
black sand and volcanic ash. Far from the photo's perceived
significance of triumph, it privately revealed a more prosaic reality
beneath the surface.
For the picture, the photographer actually recorded a second flag
raising, performed in order to insure that the original banner did not
end up "tacked on some politician's wall" after a covetous troop leader
demanded it for his own. Of the six men in the photo, only three
survived long enough to be returned to America for the government's
Seventh War Loan Drive fund-raising tour to sell war bonds to the
American public.
The battle for Iwo Jima came at a time when the U.S. military was
broke, and only the sale of war bonds could keep the combat effort
afloat. The news media's widespread embrace of Rosenthal's picture
enabled an unprecedented phenomenon of hero/celebrity culture around
the country that overshadowed the many sufferings and deaths still
taking place on Iwo Jima and elsewhere.
The three surviving flag-raisers Marines Rene Gagnon (Jesse
Bradford), Native American Ira Hares (Adam Beach), and Navy Corpsman
John "Doc" Bradley (Ryan Phillippe) resist personal issues of guilt as
they appear before ardent fans to explain that the real heroes of the
battle are the men killed in action or still fighting the war. Doc
Bradley is the group's spokesperson who ends his humble statement with
a plea for the public to purchase war bonds. James Bradley said that
the goal for his book was to break down the hero myths about the men in
the picture.
Just as the film follows the somber fate of the three soldiers
propped up as war bond hawkers, it also chronicles the fates of the
other three soldiers in the photo who died on the battlefield. The
deaths of Sergeant Michael Strank (Barry Pepper), Pfc. Harlan Block
(Benjamin Walker), and Franklin Sousley (Joseph Cross) give poignant
context to the fireworks spectacle at home where Bradley, Gagnon and
Hares reenact their flag-raising effort atop a giant paper mache hill
in the middle of Chicago's Soldier Field.
Flags of Our Fathers is a
tremendous film about the very beginning of celebrity worship, and our
need to invent and memorialize brave men. It is a deeply heartfelt and
highly original war movie that takes time to get your head around-days,
weeks, or months. MTW
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