WORLDVIEW

Milos Stehlik's Commentaries

Letters From Iwo Jima

(Transcript)
Originally broadcast January 5, 2007

	Milos Stehlik

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Over the several next months, you’ll hear a lot about Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima. It is a shoo-in for many of the annual movie awards. It is the second part of Eastwood’s diptych and deals with the bloody defense of the island of Iwo Jima that came at the end of World War II. Letters from Iwo Jima is a daring, courageous, major accomplishment from Eastwood. It is all the more admirable because it was made with Hollywood studio money, even if its $20 million budget was discount-sale-level by today’s bloated production costs. All this says, however, is that Eastwood has enough clout.

Letters from Iwo Jima is shot in black and white. The dialogue is mostly Japanese with subtitles. It stars Ken Watanabe as the Lt. General Tadamichi Kuriyabashi, the commander of Iwo Jima. Though Iwo Jima is being sold to the Japanese soldiers and public as the line drawn in the sand in the protection of Japan from the American invasion, the island lacks both men and resources. When Kuribayashi arrives, it does not take long for him to get the evidence that Iwo Jima is really a suicide mission. The military headquarters are unwilling or unable to provide adequate resources in men, food, ammunition. At that level, the war and the defense are a kind of myth.

Kuribayashi is also thwarted at every turn by the military culture of Japan—one bent on saving honor rather than saving men. Kuribayashi, who has lived in America and so understands something of American adaptability, struggles to drag his commanders from their military tactics which owe more to the Japanese military system’s feudal origins than modern-day reality. They want to defend the island on the beach. Kuribayashi, knowing that they are vastly outnumbered, wants to defend the island from its caves, where the men have some tactical advantage.

Much has been made of how Eastwood has stripped Letters from Iwo Jima of the glorification of heroism, of the pornography of battle. Much of the film takes place at night or inside the caves. It is dark, and Eastwood makes the most of this claustrophobic environment, punctuated by the flashes of gunfire and bombs, by turning it into a chamber drama.

The film’s narrative is propelled and amplified by the letters of the Japanese soldiers to their loved ones back home. These letters help flesh out their emotional depth as characters, give us a sense of their “normalcy”—they are, after all, like us, with wives, children, jobs. This underlying narrative underscores the absurdity of the bloodbath of which the soldiers are both the perpetrators and the victims.

In Eastwood’s view, the old warrior culture of Japan is responsible for Japan’s loss on Iwo Jima. Clinging to their historical codes of honor, they lack the flexibility to understand the American strategy which is pragmatic, efficient, bent on results. An odd scene insert crystallizes this attitude—two Japanese soldiers, captured by the Americans and bound, are executed on the spot for expedience.

The nationalism driving the Japanese reaches a climax in one of the most emotional moments in the film. A small group of Japanese soldiers, trapped in a cave, out of ammunition, commit suicide by blowing themselves up with grenades, one by one. Death with honor—martyrdom—above all.

The film has been enthusiastically embraced in Japan. I think the reason, more than anything, is that Eastwood, together with his co-screenwriters Iris Yashamita and Paul Haggis, write in an economic Hollywood style—a style which is much more direct and therefore immediately emotionally affecting than either Japanese cinema or Japanese audiences are used to. It is a film which both humanizes the Japanese soldiers, rationalizes their actions, and at the same time points to the insanity of war. In this, Eastwood has an advantage. As an American, he can make a film restoring humanity to the Japanese defense of Iwo Jima because he comes from the position of the victors

Then why isn’t Letters from Iwo Jima a great film? It should be. It has all the right ingredients. The script, the narrative flow, certainly the message at its heart is both right-on. It has something to say and so desperately wants to say it. Perhaps it is that saying war is hell in which everyone suffers or that soldiers are left to fight and die for nationalistic ideals far removed from reality or humanity is simply not enough. We know this. We need perspective, a key to self-examination, a way out of the thought that violence is a solution. To this, neither Clint Eastwood nor Letters from Iwo Jima has an answer.

This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview.

“Worldview” film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.

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