TOKYO (Reuters) - Hiromasa Murakami went to see Clint Eastwood’s “Letters from Iwo Jima” to find out if an American could tell the Japanese side of a battle that became a symbol of U.S. patriotism, but for Japan was a bitter memory of defeat.

• Clint Eastwood Cartas Desde Iwo Jima

Nominated for four Academy Awards, including 'Best Picture,' Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima tells the untold story of the Japanese soldiers who defended their homeland against invading American forces during World War II. Letters from Iwo Jima (硫黄島からの手紙, Iōjima Kara no Tegami) is a 2006 Japanese-American war film directed and co-produced by Clint Eastwood, starring Ken Watanabe and Kazunari Ninomiya.

Actor Clint Eastwood is shown on December 6, 2006. REUTERS/Kimberly White

After viewing the film on Saturday when it opened it Tokyo, Murakami thinks Eastwood got it right.

“It was marvelous,” the 50-year-old carpenter said as he emerged from the theater. “How should I express it? It was the same for both sides, for them and us. Everyone was a victim.”

Named best film of 2006 by the National Board of Review last Wednesday, “Letters from Iwo Jima” is the second of two Eastwood films about the 1945 battle, engraved in U.S. memory by a photo of six servicemen raising the flag on the island’s Mount Suribachi.

The first, “Flags of Our Fathers”, is the tale of three of the Americans who raised the flag and later became propaganda tools in a campaign to sell U.S. war bonds.

Starring Ken Watanabe as Lieutenant-General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, commander of the Japanese forces in the epic World War Two battle, “Letters” focuses on the Japanese defenders.

Central to the film are Kuribayashi, who had served as a military attache in the United States and himself had little hope of victory, and Saigo, a young baker who is drafted and forced to leave his pregnant wife but vows to return home alive.

The title refers to letters the two men, both loving husbands and fathers, write to their families as they prepare for battle.

The shared humanity of those who fought on both sides was one message Eastwood wanted to convey.

“I think it’s important that everybody remember that people gave their lives to protect their country,” he told a news conference in Tokyo last month.

For many Japanese, the battle that killed 6,800 U.S. Marines and 21,000 Japanese has long been a tragedy best forgotten.

Clint Eastwood Cartas Desde Iwo Jima

“Iwo Jima was a defeat. It was miserable and no Japanese movie company wanted to try to show it,” said Eichi Tsukada, a 71-year-old retiree whose father died in World War Two.

Six decades after its defeat, Japan is still trying to come to grips with the Pacific War and who was to blame.

“As a person in the Japanese movie industry, I have the slightly embarrassing sensation that we should have turned our attention to the Battle of Iwo Jima and filmed something on the theme earlier,” Watanabe said in an interview published in the Daily Yomiuri newspaper on Saturday.

The first scrap of Japan’s native soil invaded in the war, Iwo Jima — “Sulphur Island” — was coveted by the Americans as a base for fighters escorting B-29 bombers headed for the mainland.

Kuribayashi honeycombed the island with tunnels from which defenders had to be dislodged by demolition charges, grenades and flamethrowers to try to delay an invasion of the mainland.

Few young Japanese these days know much about the battle for the tiny, tear-shaped island 700 miles south of Tokyo.

But after watching the film on Saturday, 17-year-old high school student Satoshi Koyama said he had learned something.

“American and Japanese soldiers were fighting with the same emotion. Both wanted to return to their homelands,” he said.

There are certain assumptions that American audiences, perhaps without realizing it, are likely to bring to a movie about World War II. The combat picture has been a Hollywood staple for so long — since before the actual combat was over — that it can sometimes seem as if every possible story has already been told. Or else as if each individual story, from G.I. Joe to Private Ryan, is at bottom a variation on familiar themes: victory against the odds, brotherhood under fire, sacrifice for a noble cause.

But of course there are other, contrasting stories, a handful of which form the core of ’s harrowing, contemplative new movie and the companion to his which was released this fall. That film, partly about the famous photograph of American servicemen raising the flag on the barren volcanic island of Iwo Jima, complicated the standard Hollywood combat narrative in ways both subtle and overt. It exposed the heavy sediment of individual grief, cynicism and frustration beneath the collective high sentiments of glory and heroism but without entirely debunking the value or necessity of those sentiments.

“Letters,” which observes the lives and deaths of Japanese soldiers in the battle for Iwo Jima, similarly adheres to some of the conventions of the genre even as it quietly dismantles them. It is, unapologetically and even humbly, true to the durable tenets of the war-movie tradition, but it is also utterly original, even radical in its methods and insights.

In December 2004, with Mr. Eastwood almost nonchalantly took a tried and true template — the boxing picture — and struck from it the best American movie of the year. To my amazement, though hardly to my surprise, he has done it again; “Letters From Iwo Jima” might just be the best Japanese movie of the year as well.

This is not only because the Japanese actors, speaking in their own language, give such vivid and varied performances, but also because the film, in its every particular, seems deeply and un-self-consciously embedded in the experiences of the characters they play. “Letters From Iwo Jima” is not a chronicle of victory against the odds, but rather of inevitable defeat. When word comes from Imperial headquarters that there will be no reinforcements, no battleships, no air support in the impending fight with the United States Marines, any illusion of triumph vanishes, and the stark reality of the mission takes shape. The job of these soldiers and their commanders, in keeping with a military ethos they must embrace whether they believe in it or not, is to die with honor, if necessary by their own hands.

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The cruelty of this notion of military discipline, derived from long tradition and maintained by force, is perhaps less startling than the sympathy Mr. Eastwood extends to his characters, whose sacrifices are made in the service of a cause that the American audience knows to be bad as well as doomed. It is hard to think of another war movie that has gone so deeply, so sensitively, into the mind-set of the opposing side.

Since the fighting that Mr. Eastwood depicts is limited to a single, self-contained piece of the Japanese homeland, the bloody roster of Japanese atrocities elsewhere in Asia and the South Pacific remains off screen. But this omission in no way compromises the moral gravity of what takes place before our eyes. Nor does it diminish the power of the film’s moving and meticulous vindication of the humanity of the enemy. (Mr. Eastwood also, not incidentally, exposes some inhumanity on the part of the American good guys, a few of whom are shown committing atrocities of their own.)

Any modern military organization depends, to some extent, on the dehumanization of its own fighters as well as their adversaries. (In “Flags of Our Fathers” the Japanese are all but faceless, firing unseen from bunkers and tunnels dug into the mountainside; in “Letters From Iwo Jima” we see the grueling work and strategic inspiration that led to the digging of those tunnels.)

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An army needs personnel, not personalities, and one of the functions of the art and literature of war — especially on film, which exists to consecrate the human face — is to compensate for this forced anonymity by emphasizing the flesh-and-blood individuality of the combatants. Think of the classic Hollywood platoon picture, with its carefully distributed farm boys and city kids, its quota of blowhards and bookworms, all superintended by a wise, crusty commander. Even as they approach stereotype, those characters give names, faces and identities to men who have gone down in history mainly as statistics.

Historians estimate that 20,000 Japanese infantrymen defended Iwo Jima; 1,083 of them survived. (The Americans sent 77,000 Marines and nearly 100,000 total troops, of whom close to 7,000 died and almost 20,000 were wounded.) The Japanese commander was Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, whose illustrated letters to his wife and children, recently unearthed on the island, were a source for Iris Yamashita’s script. Played by Ken Watanabe, Kuribayashi, who arrives on Iwo Jima with a pearl-handled Colt and fond memories of the years he spent in America before the war, is a dashing, cosmopolitan figure. He arouses a good deal of suspicion among the other officers for his modern ideas and for the kindness he sometimes displays toward the low-ranking soldiers.

The general is a practical man (those tunnels are his idea) in an impossible circumstance, and Mr. Watanabe’s performance is all the more heartbreaking for his crisp, unsentimental dignity. He anchors the film — this is some of the best acting of the year, in any language — but does not dominate it. Much as the Imperial Army may have been rigidly hierarchical, Mr. Eastwood’s sensibility is instinctively democratic. As the battle looms, and even as the bombs, bullets and artillery shells begin to explode, he takes the time to introduce us to Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a guileless baker with no great desire to give his life for the glory of the nation; Lieutenant Ito (Shidou Nakamura), who will settle for nothing else; Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), an Olympic equestrian who once hobnobbed with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks; and Shimizu (Ryo Kase), who Saigo suspects is an agent of the secret police.

It is customary to use the word epic to describe a movie that deals with big battles, momentous historical events and large numbers of dead. But while some of Mr. Eastwood’s set pieces depict warfare on a large scale, the overall mood of “Letters From Iwo Jima,” as the title suggests, is strikingly intimate. Even though the movie has a blunt, emphatic emotional force, Mr. Eastwood also shows an attention to details of speech and gesture that can only be described as delicate.

He is as well acquainted as any American director (or actor) with the language of cinematic violence, but he has no equal when it comes to dramatizing the ethical and emotional consequences of brutality. There is nothing gratuitous in this film, nothing fancy or false. There is the humor and the viciousness of men in danger; there is the cool logic of military planning and the explosive irrationality of behavior in combat; there is life and death.

As in “Flags of Our Fathers,” nearly all the color has been drained from the images, a technique that makes the interiors of the caves and tunnels look like Rembrandt paintings. The anxious faces seem to glow in the shadows, illuminated by their own suffering. At other times, in the hard outdoor light, Tom Stern’s cinematography is as frank and solemn as a Mathew Brady photograph.

A few scenes serve as hinges joining this movie to “Flags of Our Fathers.” While “Letters From Iwo Jima” seems to me the more accomplished of the two films — by which I mean that it strikes me as close to perfect — the two enrich each other, and together achieve an extraordinary completeness. They show how the experience of war is both a shared and a divisive experience, separating the dead from the living and the winners from the losers, even as it binds them all together.

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Both films travel back and forth in time and space between Iwo Jima and the homelands of the combatants. In “Flags of Our Fathers” the battle itself happens mainly in flashback, since the movie is in large measure about the guilt and confusion that survivors encountered upon their reluctant return home. Free download picture style canon. In “Letters From Iwo Jima” the battle is in the present tense, and it is home that flickers occasionally in the memories of men who are certain they will not live to see it again.

“Letters From Iwo Jima” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes extremely graphic combat violence.

LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA

Opens today in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Directed by ; written (in Japanese, with English subtitles) by Iris Yamashita, based on a story by Ms. Yamashita and Paul Haggis; director of photography, Tom Stern; edited by Joel Cox and Gary D. Roach; music by Kyle Eastwood and Michael Stevens; production designers, Henry Bumstead and James J. Murakami; produced by Mr. Eastwood, Steven Spielberg and Robert Lorenz; released by Warner Brothers Pictures and DreamWorks Pictures. Running time: 141 minutes.

WITH: Ken Watanabe (Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi), Kazunari Ninomiya (Saigo), Tsuyoshi Ihara (Baron Nishi), Ryo Kase (Shimizu), Shidou Nakamura (Lieutenant Ito) and Nae (Hanako).

• DirectorClint Eastwood

• WritersIris Yamashita, Tadamichi Kuribayashi, Tsuyoko Yoshido

• StarKen Watanabe

• RatingR

• Running Time2h 21m

• GenresDrama, History, War

• Movie data powered by IMDb.com
  Last updated: Nov 2, 2017