I was swayed to go see Letters from Iwo Jima by a NYTimes review that called it “true to the durable tenets of the war-movie tradition, but it is also utterly original, even radical in its methods and insights.” My delicate constitution can’t cope with bloody schlock that typifies the war-movie genre, but Clint Eastwood is offering something akin to art that considers a timely yet age-old question: When the cause is futile, how do soldiers face the prospect of dying for it?
I didn’t see Flags of our Fathers, which is the battle of Iwo Jima from the American perspective. It was released last fall to tepid reviews and lousy box office. That Letters is embraced by movie-goers while Flags was ignored might indicate a war-weary public not keen on glamourized, patriotic, flag-waving movies. We don’t want triumphant cinematic allegory when a real-life war in the newspaper haunts us daily with tales of unwinnable skirmish. We want catharsis.
The central figure of Letters is a humble Japanese baker-turned-foot soldier named Saigo, who wants to survive the war to see his family rather than kill Americans for the Imperial Homeland. All of the Japanese soldiers know they will be killed (or kill themselves) in the battle, but Saigo is hopeful. He shares the audience’s horror over the fanatical self-sacrifice of Japanese soldiers. Our empathy for Saigo underscores the brutal machoism of the Japanese military code, and ultimately of war in general.
This is an intense movie. The battle scenes are not expansive, but intimate, dimly light in black and white, and often gruesome. But it’s not the grenade hara-kiri or the suicide missions that haunt me most. As Eastwood intends (laying it on a bit thick), it’s the letters, feverishly written by Saigo and several other characters, including the sympathetic Japanese commander General Kuribayashi (played by Ken Watanabe). The letters are the soldiers’ only means of comfort as they sit in their dark caves, caught in the grind of Imperial Japan’s war machine, awaiting their fate. The letters are the soldier’s only way to remain human. Yes, they were the enemy, but they were human, and perhaps the greatest tragedy of war is how easy it is to forget this.
