By Bentley FordPLAY Columnist
Too often we forget why we fight, and sometimes we never know. Too often we ignore whom we fight, and sometimes we never notice. The president, despite his country’s every effort, has sacrificed even more men and women to Iraq – troops whose goals, from day to day, from death to death, become increasingly unclear. Our professors explain in lectures and the experts confess on television that we know only a modicum about our enemy – not just strategically, but also culturally. Nobody, anywhere, here or there, can fathom how victory looks or how defeat feels. Will they love us when we win? Will they cheer when we are gone? Will they thank us for the safety of a flag? Will it always hang at half-mast? Leaders of all kinds, of politics and of thought, of culture and of art, scrounge for answers to these questions.
Clint Eastwood has no answers, but he does want to complicate the questions – an inconvenient but integral part of the process. His most recent film about World War II, Letters from Iwo Jima, explores, among other things, why anyone would ever want to fight, and what responsibilities enemies have to one another.
Young Saigo, a timid baker, struggles to find meaning in this war. He thinks only of his wife, his child and his bakery, not of the enemy, the island or the Rising Sun. Lacking the patriotism and purpose of his comrades, Eastwood positions him, for most of the film, as the innocent youth that wars waste. He wrestles with the machinations of his rifle and of this war simply for one reason: Recruitment officers knocked on his door.
“Congratulations. Your husband is going off to war,” they say, smiling to his wife. As a soldier, all that inspires him is his adoration of one general and his promise to come home.
Only in the film’s final moments does he, starving and stranded, reveal an unflagging sense of honor. But he never settles into the barbarism he questioned and feared. Eastwood places all of his hope for peace in Saigo, and he does so without stripping the young soldier of his nobility and patriotism.
On the other hand, Ken Watanabe’s stoic General Kuribayashi, the decorated warrior enchanted by American culture, fights for a simple reason: “We do what is right, because it is right.” The clarity of his convictions, despite the complexity of his character, betrays how he became this revered god of war. Add to this his martial cunning and abundant honor, and you have the ideal soldier to set at the center of a war movie. His knowledge of and experience with Americans – a Colt .45 given to him by the U.S. Cavalry constantly reminds his men and the audience of his affinity for the enemy – perfectly complicate such a strong character.
Like Saigo, however, he frequently brushes up against the overwhelming futility of war, no matter how noble the fight, until this daunting sense of hopelessness consumes him. He vests as much pride in his appreciation of his enemy – in that silver .45 – as he does in his noble efforts to defend his country.
Eastwood decorates the film with other notable characters – such as the Olympic equestrian who sacrifices his vision, and thus his life, for an American soldier, or the disgraced officer relocated to the hopeless yet hallowed sands of Iwo Jima – but the young soldier and weathered general bear the weight of Eastwood’s ambitions. And, much like these two characters, the complexity of Eastwood’s beliefs – and that of his writers – only further complicates this intricate, forlorn film. While Eastwood has much to ask about war, we have as much to ask about Eastwood. Why did he make this film? Why now? (That is, other than to squeak his film into the Academy’s calendar year.)
Maybe because night has fallen in America, but he refuses to sleep. Because the last time Eastwood grew tired of the politics about him, he took action by running for mayor and winning by a landslide. Because the politics that dog him now are those of giants, Eastwood had to go where he, too, is a giant. So he’s created one of the most artful, forceful and respectful indictments of war that cinema’s seen in years. Flags of Our Fathers has similar ambitions, but it fails to reach the artistic heights of Letters, but by framing these two films within present day searches – one for the story of a famous photograph, another for the letters of fallen soldiers – Eastwood refuses to let us reduce these films to simple elegies.
So let’s not. Let’s consider this his second landslide.
Communication sophomore Bentley Ford is the PLAY film columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].
