Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Flags Of Our Fathers / U.S.A. / 2006

Eastwood’s autumnal phase seems to be giving us a series of serious, sombre movies which don’t have much to do with what else is happening in American cinema currently and are leaping decades back to the classic Hollywood cinema of the past. With Flags Of Our Fathers the connection is of course with Ford. (And surely the scene where an officer is displaced from his seat on an outgoing plane is a conscious evocation of a similar scene in They Were Expendable?) The obvious Ford connection some writers are drawing is with The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and its shared theme of the necessary validation of myth over truth, but I think Fort Apache offers a more appropriate parallel. But Eastwood’s film travels in the opposite direction to Ford’s. Fort Apache first makes clear the moral and criminal irresponsibility of Col Thursday and then in the last few minutes of the film proposes the necessity of the myth that the army/the state builds up around him;an ending which, incidentally, I’ve always found rather nauseating. Flags Of Our Fathers centres on the morale-boosting/fundraising role of the Iwo Jima photo myth (whose portrayal is a lot more nuanced and complex than most reviews I’ve read so far have made out — there’s more going on here than a simplistic critique of the hypocrisy involved), then ends the film on an elegaic scene of this group of soldiers taking a break swimming in the sea, ordinary young men, buddies rather than mythologised heroes; after which Eastwood runs his end credits with still photos from the time, and a final black-and-white shot of the empty Iwo Jima beach of today.

The battle scenes (drained of colour) obviously suffer from their resemblance to the Saving Private Ryan model, but Eastwood’s film spends as much time back in the States on the subsequent bond-raising drive undertaken by the three surviving flag-raisers, with a complex flashback structure that keeps shifting between Iwo Jima, the States, and a frame story set in the eighties as the son of the last survivor investigates his father’s story. Things are not always so clear — just like the impressive battle scenes, where I couldn’t always work out (all those young, mostly unknown actors)who exactly was being killed at a given moment. In fact, the eighties frame story could easily have been expended with, particularly as it carries an often over-emphatic spell-out-the-message voiceover. But I have real admiration for Eastwood’s old-fashioned restraint, such as when he resolutely refuses to show us what exactly the Japanese did to the captured Iggy.

by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
07 Nov 2006 12:07 PM | Submit Comment