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Eastwood finds fidelity and faith in "Flags of Our Fathers."  (Film Review)

by Michael Sean McGowan

The Upside: Eastwood continues his streak of the most affecting movies of his career.

The Downside: Subtleness is not always in the cards.

    Before I saw it, I couldn't picture Clint Eastwood directing a movie like Flags of Our Fathers, and now I can't picture it being made by anyone else.  If Eastwood is known for anything, it's his cool, undemanding style which has produced movies that wrench out honesty through their stillness (like Million Dollar Baby) or are just plain crashing bores (A Perfect World).  Suffice to say Eastwood has never tackled anything as ambitious or as cast to a large canvas as the story of the Battle of Iwo Jima and the lives of the three men who were trumpeted as heroes for their parts in the raising of the flag on Mount Suribachi only a scant five days into the thirty-five day conflict, but his feather touch works wonders here.  No one is going to say that Eastwood has trumped Spielberg in stamping the template of how war movies are going to be made for the next twenty years, but like any good soldier in war, he's the right man at the right time.

    War movies are war movies, but after the times when Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne ruled the battlefield, even portraits of the purest honor under fire have taken a cynical twinge.  No one's going to accuse Saving Private Ryan of wavering in its patriotism, but it also stirred to the surface a hopelessness and vanity in war that would not have sat well when the feats of the Greatest Generation were still being unspooled in scratchy black and white.

    Not prone to over-sentimentalizing or wallowing in narcissistic self-pity, Eastwood's Flags maintains a regiment line that's as sensible as it is intuitive.  His story of Iwo Jima is essentially the same one lived by three servicemen who managed to live long enough to be paraded in front a star-struck nation that was being inundated by the picture of the Suribachi flag-raising on their magazine covers and newspaper front pages.  A minor act turned into an almost Biblical burning bush to be hawked and shilled by politicians out to sell war bonds and get their faces in front of the cameras.  However, if the raising of the flag was never the momentous event of the sort that capped The Sands of Iwo Jima (the photo in question actually shows the second raising- the first flag was taken down to keep it from becoming the souvenir of a greedy diplomat), Eastwood at least realizes that for the rank and file Americans who had grown weary of four years of war the picture did carry hope, did carry inspiration.  It was an powerful, final rally to arms when the nation needed the most.

    Flags weaves itself in amongst three competing time strands- the brutal landing of the marines on Iwo Jima, very much in the now-standard Spielberg handbook of unrelenting, shock-fast violence and grainy hand-held camera chaos, the protracted war of attrition that followed before the Japanese finally surrendered the island, and the only three Mount Suribachi survivors; Navy corpsman "Doc" (Ryan Phillippe), slick-talking front-lines runner Rene (Jesse Bradford), and Ira Hayes, an introspective Native American who's been more crippled than the others by the decimating tragedy he's witnessed.

    The three men are shipped back to the states for a roving tour, being hailed as the "heroes of Iwo Jima" while still haunted by the memories of the dead and dying left behind.  This is plenty a big soapbox for Eastwood to lash out his indignation at just about every branch of a soldier's struggle being twisted and perverted either for publicity or stupid jollies (one senator tells Hayes to say that he cut down Japanese soldiers with a tomahawk).  The very confusion of the events surrounding the flag are all the Petri dish for distilling the kind of fickleness arising when we get to pick and choose our heroes.  Who raised the flag the first time, but not the second?  How can you tell when most of the faces aren't even looking at the camera?  It's telling the way Rene, Ira, and Doc's sole criterion for becoming the War Department's new folk heroes is the fact that they managed to survive.

    While Eastwood casts more than one less-than-restrained accusatory finger (check out the dessert scene that borders on garishness), he also registers that there is a living heart beating behind this story, as well, and most of it is tied up in the performance of Adam Beach who makes Hayes a noble yet careening train wreck waiting to happen, an imploding star of impassioned sorrow and regret.  The fact that Beach, a fine actor who should have broken out after 1998's Smoke Signals, is given the chance to pump out so much more wattage than his co-stars may make him look like a scenery chewer, or make everyone else look sedated, but it's actually a graceful act.  The money shot is one scene when Hayes breaks down in the arms of mother of one of his lost compatriots, a heroic display of the raw emotional purging each man who's witnessed the worst of humanity needed when the nation wanted its heroes stoic and simple.

    It's the fine-wire act that not only makes Flags great, but also unique.  Whatever the crass machinations behind the flag of Suribachi, Eastwood is far more interested and enamored of the home-spun mothers and fathers watching and waiting and praying from afar and the rapturous crowds drinking in the thrill of renewed American pride.  Framed in cross-generations, Flags of Our Fathers accurately hits on why the memories and stories of the Second World War still resonate, and now more than ever.  Stories like Iwo Jimo or the landing at Normandy represents the best that a strong and benevolent soul can provide, to endure bloody Hell for the most chivalrous of causes.

    Flags of Our Fathers isn't the best of the more modern-day epics about World War II (I'll still take Terrence Malik's more trenchant and haunting The Thin Red Line), but even in the vein of other films that have come before it Eastwood's vision is unrelenting, angry, and but also strangely uplifting.  "It's all about the guy next to you," soldiers have often said and the achievement of Flags of Our Fathers is that Eastwood can easily see through the patronizing and phony-baloney "poetics" of war and make art about the guys next him.  A-

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