By William Wolf

LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA  Send This Review to a Friend

Director Clint Eastwood has scored a special coup. While making his absorbing and meaningful "Flags of Our Fathers,” rooted in the battle for Iwo Jima during World War II, he was also working on a film from the Japanese viewpoint. Now the resulting “Letters from Iwo Jima” has been released, and taken together, the two films are a remarkable achievement of the man whose initial acting career mushroomed into work behind the camera that has made him a top American director.

Eastwood’s latest, from a Japanese screenplay by Iris Yamashita based on a story by her and Paul Haggis, is in Japanese, with English subtitles. It tells a story sympathetic to Japanese soldiers who find themselves doomed in the face of the American military onslaught. They are holed up in an elaborate system of tunnels, but isolated and in a losing situation, they are expected to accept fanatical orders to die heroically for the empire. Not everyone is ready for the sacrifice, but a soldier who seeks to surrender can be killed by his own side.

Eastwood, with an excellent cast, depicts the ruthlessness of some indoctrinated Japanese officers. But there is also the more shaded character of Lt. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, played very convincingly by Ken Watanabe. By viewing the ferocious fighting from the Japanese side, Eastwood is able to show the ordinary soldier who, as did his American counterparts, thinks of how to survive and yearns for home. War is hell no matter which side you are on.

True to the restrained nature of Eastwood’s directorial vision, “Letters from Iwo Jima” is a lean, no-nonsense look at the battle. Violence is there without its being glorified, and the film has a pensive, understated quality, which makes it all the more powerful.

Years ago I interviewed Eastwood when he was an actor working on a film in what was then Yugoslavia. He was resting in a cave between takes. I asked him about his reputation for being a man of few words in his films, and he said that acting with little dialogue was harder than acting with much dialogue.

The spare quality that became his hallmark as an actor has surfaced in his role as a director, who knows that restraint can producer stronger films than one that is deliberately showy. Eastwood has proved in superb form this year with two films giving two sides of a bloody battle, one even in Japanese. What American director can match that accomplishment? A Warner Brothers Pictures and DreamWorks Pictures release.

  

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