Letters From Iwo Jima

A-

After the disappointing Flags of Our Fathers, I was wary of Letters From Iwo Jima. But I still had my hopes up since everyone said Iwo was better than Letters. I agree it was the better movie, but I'm still kind of undecided on whether it should be as widely praised as it was. Because it is based on a historical event, The Battle of Iwo Jima, and filmed in Japanese, there is a certain amount of credibility to the movie. It is even in black-and-white, to give it yet another layer of authenticity. But one of my major complaints is that the movie is really fictional, with a true story in the background. It is fictional because so few of the Japanese soldiers actually lived to tell the tale (99% died on the island) and even though a few of the characters in the movie live, those are fictional. And some of the major events are either speculative or completely made up, like what happened to the island's commander and one of the major characters, General Kuribayashi. So this isn't a true story, but more like Titanic, a fictional side story with a historic background.

The story is very good in that it shows the Japanese side. In most movies, Japanese soldiers are just shown as ruthless automatons, fighting to the death and committing atrocities. Maybe, like in Midway, you see them swallow the bitter pill of defeat at the hands of the Americans. Here you see that many of the soldiers are victims, whether because they were drafted into a war they didn't really care about, or as they were lied to by commanders who would let them think the war could still be won.

The movie would have been a lot better if I knew these were the real events, or as close as they could come to them. But I think instead they concentrated on telling a story that has been changed and put through a filter. In Wikipedia I read that foreign audiences thought that the movie had too much of an American spin, emphasizing Kuribayashi's and other characters' ties to America and their eventual realization that the Americans were like themselves. In the movie, the battle seems to last a couple of days. In reality it stretched on for a month. This portrayal calls into question everything else in the movie, which makes me feel a little cheated.

If I put all of that baggage aside, the movie stands up pretty well. Ken Wantanabe is an absolutely fantastic actor and his portrayal of General Kuribayashi is excellent. Though he is speaking Japanese (subtitled), his facial expressions tell volumes without any dialogue at all. The various conflicts between the officers and the story of the foot soldiers are very good and certainly add a lot of depth to the usual flat portrayal of the Japanese troops. The characters are very strong and substantially fleshed out through flashbacks. Knowing the ending makes the movie very bleak, but knowing that ending helped the United States win the war certainly takes some of the edge off. Ultimately the tragedy isn't that the Japanese lost, but that they weren't allowed to surrender. The present-day bookends of the story seem tacked on, with almost no bearing on the story. If Eastwood was going to use that gimmick, it seems like he could have come up with something better. If it were true, this would be a great movie. As it stands, this is only a very good portrayal of a story that could be true. A-

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