Flags Of Our Fathers (Theatrical Film Review)

 

Stars: Ryan Phillippe, Adam Beach, Jesse Bradford

Director: Clint Eastwood

Critic's rating: 8 out of 10

 

Review by Chuck O'Leary

 

So many war films have been made over the years that it's a challenge to come up with any kind of fresh angle on the subject.  However, the Clint Eastwood-directed, Steven Spielberg-produced Flags of Our Fathers does manage to explore a unique aspect of war.  Namely, the selling of war to the public through manufactured, exaggerated or sanitized feel-good stories.

 

While watching this cynical World War II film unfold, I couldn't help but think of the Pentagon's alleged spinning of Jessica Lynch's story during the early days of the Iraq War, possibly making the young woman more heroic than she actually was.  Lynch is indeed a courageous person for even being in that situation, and I don't want to disparage her, but it appears somebody in the U.S. government thought it would be great public relations in the selling of a controversial war to inflate or, at the very least, accentuate Lynch's battlefield heroics in particular.

 

According to Flags of Our Fathers, such spinning of wartime stories goes back to even World War II and the most famous battlefield picture ever taken: Six American soldiers victoriously erecting the American flag 550-feet atop Mt. Suribachi a week into the brutal 40-day Battle of Iwo Jima.  It happened alright, but the famous picture of the six soldiers raising the flag wasn't as spontaneous as the American public was originally led to believe.

 

After being widely published, the flag-raising photo was important in helping inspire the American people and the American troops for the remaining months of an already long, hard war.  But the part of the story not known to many of us before now is that the famous picture was actually a second raising of the flag after an officer (played by Robert Patrick in the movie) ordered the first flag be taken down, saying it belonged to the men who fought for that ground, and not the politicians who would inevitably exploit it.  As a result, the officer ordered the first flag be replaced with a second flag.  It is six other soldiers, five U.S. Marines and one U.S. Navy medic, raising that second flag later in the day on February 23, 1945 that is captured in the famous photograph taken by Joe Rosenthal.

 

Eastwood's fascinating new historical drama details how the U.S. government seized the opportunity of the flag raising on Iwo Jima as a way to raise billions of dollars needed to sustain the war effort.  Because it was the second flag raising captured in the photo, the military chose the three surviving men from that second flag raising to be their "heroes" who would subsequently tour America in an effort to get an admiring public to purchase war bonds.

 

For 15 minutes, these three ordinary soldiers became stars, only to be quickly forgotten when they no longer were of use.

 

The three soldiers chosen were Navy medic John "Doc" Bradley (played by Ryan Phillippe), U.S. Marine Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and U.S. Marine Ira Hayes (Adam Beach).  Gagnon was the most eager of the three to take full advantage of his newfound fame, relishing the limelight and even bringing his attention-hungry fiancée along for the ride.  But on the opposite end of the spectrum was Hayes, an American Indian who truly didn't believe he was a hero and developed an increasingly severe guilt complex, and accompanying drinking problem, as the three men were showered with adulation while being ushered around the country.  The modest, level-headed "Doc" Bailey more often than not had to play referee between his two comrades, whose reactions to the unusual situation they found themselves in were as different as night and day.  Gagnon loved every minute of it, while Hayes increasingly couldn't wait for it to end.

 

Hayes life story is told in a hard-to-find 1961 film called The Outsider, in which Tony Curtis plays him.  Let's hope renewed interest in Hayes from Flags will finally get Universal to release this seldom-seen film on DVD.

 

Based on the book of the same name by James Bradley, son of "Doc" Bradley, and Ron Powers, the film adaptation by screenwriters William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis unfolds in three different time periods.  The 131-minute film alternates between the brutal fighting between American and Japanese forces on Iwo Jima in February and March of 1945, the experiences of Bradley, Gagnon and Hayes during and after the PR tour, and a more-modern setting where a reporter interviews now elderly veterans (George Grizzard, Harve Presnell and Len Cariou) about their WWII remembrances.  All of this is flawlessly interwoven by Eastwood and his longtime editor Joel Cox and culminates with one of the most moving endings of the year.

 

As compelling as the film is overall, it's not without a few drawbacks.  The biggest flaw is the purposely washed-out cinematography during the events on Iwo Jima, a tiny island south of Japan that was crucial for the Americans to take so American bomber planes would have a closer location to land and refuel on their bombing missions of mainland Japan.  The toning down of color, which is especially noticeable during the war sequences, actually diminishes the impact of the battle scenes.

 

This keeps Eastwood's latest from just missing the level of excellence of the two best war films of recent years, We Were Soldiers and Black Hawk Down.  Why do so many contemporary filmmakers and cinematographers have such a need to be different and draw attention to themselves when less-than-ideal projection conditions in many theaters already drain their films of the proper color, sharpness and sound?

 

Flags also fails to document what an incredibly bloody battle Iwo Jima was, and how costly it was in terms of human lives.  Some 6,821 American soldiers were killed on Iwo Jima and another 20,000 wounded during the 40 days of fighting, while an estimated 18,000-21,000 Japanese soldiers perished with only about 1,000 surviving.  The film also only hints at the intricate tunneling system the Japanese built underground on the island.  Maybe Eastwood is waiting to show us these aspects of the battle in his simultaneously-filmed Letters From Iwo Jima, which examines the same battle from the Japanese perspective.  It's now scheduled for a February, 2007 release; just a couple weeks after Flags Of Our Fathers will have likely gotten several Academy Award nominations.

 

Finally, Flags of Our Fathers takes a different approach from the famous John Wayne film, Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), and tries to downplay the stature of heroes, but nevertheless supplies plenty of evidence to the contrary.  Just like all the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy during the June, 1944 D-Day invasion, the men who fought at Iwo Jima are indeed heroes, living or dead, simply by performing their duty and enduring the sheer danger and horror of simply being there.