Editor’s note: In this series, RedFence Sr. Writer and Filmmaker James Roland takes a tour of this year’s five Academy Award Nominations for Best Picture. His reactions will be posted on Mondays and Wednesdays leading up to the awards ceremony, Feb. 25.
Best Pictures Part Three: Letters from Iwo Jima
by James Roland
I love it when I walk into a movie theater and that twenty-minute preamble is turned off – you know, the one with ads for all the bad movies that are coming out next month and the interviews with B-List pop stars – and everyone has to sit quietly and wait for the real previews to start.
In the case of Letters from Iwo Jima, the theater was filled with the older matinee generation, folks that talked loudly about their retirement years and aching joints or their hearing; one gentleman was recruited by his wife to find a theater employee and let them know the sound was turned off, even though he had no idea it was.
Every time I watch a war film it has the same audience and they react in exactly the same way: reserved approval for realism and ‘telling it like it was.’
So maybe it’s just me, the fluke youngster in the crowd, who is so bored with the half-hearted cliches of war films that I actually nodded off during a battle scene.
Letters from Iwo Jima is a cluttered, unfocused movie that was rushed into production after archeologists unearthed a batch of hidden letters in a cave on the island of Iwo Jima. According to the film, the letters were only discovered in 2005, and Clint Eastwood first heard of the letters while in pre-production for Flags of Our Fathers. This is hardly enough time to develop a thorough script, especially one that deals with emotions of war and the details of a collapsing empire.
It’s an exciting prospect: finding actual letters written by the soldiers of this battle, learning the details of what happened first hand and reading the hidden thoughts of men on the verge of dying. But scriptwriters Paul Haggis and Iris Yamashita seem scared to let the letters go, using them as literary life preservers as the plot sinks further and further into mediocrity.
The film opens in 1944, months before the actual battle takes place. The soldiers on Iwo Jima are tired and hungry, digging trenches on the beach in a futile attempt to defend the island from American troops. Instead of battling soldiers they battle dysentery, dirty clothes, and uncomfortable rocks. There is absolutely no interpersonal conflict, no tension, no story. Instead characters will pause from their banal duties to stare enraptured at something off camera while the filmmakers cross-dissolve into trite, sentimental flashbacks that include, shudder of shudders, an optimistic young baker that talks sweetly to his wife’s pregnant stomach after being drafted into the military.
Letters from Iwo Jima wallows in well-charted territory, offering nothing new to the war genre except for its one trick of flipping sides, showing the Battle of Iwo Jima from the Japanese soldiers’ point of view. But this neat trick is generally wasted, revealing very little about Japanese culture or society. With the exception of one plot line involving Japanese soldiers blowing themselves up with grenades the moment they suspect failure, there are no clues to the cultural motivations of the ancient Japanese Empire.
I suspect that producer Steven Spielberg has been involved in so many WWII projects over the years (Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers) that he has lost his sense of perspective. The filmmakers seem to assume that viewers are aware of the countless, painful hours that Japanese soldiers spent digging out the rock tunnels they used to defend the island. It wasn’t until talking to my father, a war film and history buff, that I learned this was a difficult and essential accomplishment. If I believed Iwo Jima I would think those soldiers stood around, daydreaming in voice-over while they tinked away with a tiny hammer.
Also unexplained is the deep Japanese hatred of America. Admittedly a point of ignorance for my generation, it is still confusing to hear Japanese characters rail against America for destroying the Japanese culture when they drew first blood and we had still to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
All of these deep cultural nuances are completely ignored. Instead, the film runs around in philosophical circles, covering all the same ground as every war film in recent memory:
1) Showing the randomness of fate through narrow escapes and unsuspected deaths
2) Revealing the true horror of war by contrasting the death of men with an animal
3) Portraying the opposing sides of the battle as socially similar
Part of Iwo Jima‘s message seems to be that both sides really weren’t that different and at the core of every human beats the same heart. But, considering that is the mantra of the American media, and even an uneducated southern farmer is going to agree with the message, it begs the question, “Why did I just spend ten dollars to hear it again?”
Despite the non-battle cry of “Can’t we all just get along!?”, what Iwo Jima really lacks is a true sense of human emotion. This is partly due to the reserved nature of the Japanese culture, but ultimately it is true that each culture, no matter how different, is the same at its core. But no matter how hard it tries, Letters from Iwo Jima fails to depict the Japanese men that lived and died on a barren island for the sake of their gods and country as anything other than misguided soldiers. And without that connection, a modern audience has no reason to care if a character is killed; he just blends in with the blood. And when that happens, Letters from Iwo Jima joins ranks with all B-rated slasher movies.
