Flags of Our Fathers-Print the Legend-Eastwood strips away myths surrounding Greatest Generation

A single photograph, we're told early on in Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers, can win or lose a war. But sometimes that photo shows us only part of the story, whether it's the part we don't want to see -- slaughtered villagers at My Lai, tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib -- or the part we do, with heroes front and center and the carnage out of view.

In Flags, the image under scrutiny is one of the most iconic in American photojournalism: five U.S. Marines and one Navy Corpsman planting Old Glory atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima during the fifth day of the 35-day battle there. That picture, "Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima," helped rally American support for the war, won a Pulitzer Prize for its photographer, Joe Rosenthal, and made overnight celebrities out of its subjects. But the soldiers on Mount Suribachi didn't feel like heroes, and with good reason.

Based on the bestselling book by James Bradley, whose father, John "Doc" Bradley, was the Navy corpsman in Rosenthal's photo, Flags of Our Fathers is about the three flag raisers who survived Iwo Jima -- Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), the dashing and mildly pompous Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and the proud Pima Indian Ira Hayes (Adam Beach) -- and how their moment in the spotlight irrevocably altered their lives. For these men were not the first to fly the Stars and Stripes, but rather a secondary team, assembled after the smaller flag erected earlier by a different group was claimed as a souvenir by a naval officer. It was this second flag, though, that was seen around the world, its raisers plucked from duty and ferried hither and yon by wily politicians who saw the makings of an inspired PR campaign. It was not the first -- or last -- time that perception trumped reality in the selling of wars to the American public.

According to the press notes for Flags of Our Fathers, in his later years John Bradley was plagued by hallucinations and night terrors, and Eastwood's movie unfolds as if it were one of them, jaggedly flashing back and forth between the charcoal sands of Iwo Jima and the clinking banquet rooms where the flag raisers shill for the war bond. Executed in stark widescreen compositions all but drained of color, the battle scenes are as visceral and nerve-fraying as anything in Saving Private Ryan, no small feat given that Eastwood is 76 this year and has never directed a film of this enormous physical scale. The landing on Iwo Jima is a master class in controlled chaos, as machine-gun bullets stream out of camouflaged Japanese pillboxes and mortar fire turns human bodies into sizzling piles of flesh and bone. But the most surreal, unsettling images in Flags come later, when Bradley, Gagnon and Hayes are pressed into reenacting their storied feat as a vaudeville spectacle, and when, at a celebratory dinner, they see the huddled likeness of themselves and their fallen brothers transformed into an ice-cream sculpture.

To an extent, Flags of Our Fathers is to the WWII movie what Eastwood's Unforgiven was to the western -- a stripping-away of mythology until only a harsher, uncomfortable reality remains. But what Eastwood really does is call into question an entire way of reading history, by which the vast and incomprehensible are reduced to digestible symbols and meanings. In war -- Eastwood offers us a timely reminder -- who is just and unjust depends on where you're watching from. And to further the point, his next movie, Letters From Iwo Jima, tells the story from the perspective of the Japanese.

In the meantime, with Flags, Eastwood has made one of his best films -- a conflicted, searching and morally complex deconstruction of the Greatest Generation that is nevertheless rich in the sensitivity to human frailty that has become, through movies like The Bridges of Madison County, Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby, the signature of a filmmaker originally celebrated as a strong and silent movie tough guy.

You feel this most of all in the characterization of Hayes, whose post-war descent into alcoholism and near-madness has been told many times before, in song ("The Ballad of Ira Hayes," covered by Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash) and on screen (1961's The Outsider, starring Tony Curtis), but never quite with the haunted intensity that Eastwood and Beach (who has never registered this powerfully on screen) bring to it. Theirs is an agonizing portrait of a man unable to readjust to civilian life, tormented by the recognition he felt he didn't deserve. And it is made all the more poignant by Eastwood's revelation, late in the film, that Hayes, like all of the men who raised the second flag over Iwo Jima, did show extraordinary bravery on the battlefield, just not in the way for which he was remembered. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but for men like John Bradley, Rene Gagnon and Ira Hayes, there were thousands more that went unspoken.

The tone of the film seems to be our boys were used, the photo was a lie, and if it wasn't for US propaganda, the war would've been lost.

'Flags' flies high under Eastwood's mastery
10/20/06 - 07:20 AM

Clint Eastwood just keeps getting better. At 76, his skill for directing films that mine the human experience for truth and emotion continues to astound.

He seemed at the top of his game in 2003 when he made Mystic River, then reached a new peak the following year with the emotionally wrenching Million Dollar Baby. Who would have thought he could best himself with an epic and unflinching film about World War II, especially after so many noteworthy war movies already have been made?

But with Flags of Our Fathers, we undeniably pledge our audience allegiance. When it seemed that everything had already been said about the Greatest Generation, along comes Eastwood with a compelling and eloquent examination of the nature of heroism. It is one of the year's best films and perhaps the finest modern film about World War II.

The story built around the battle of Iwo Jima and the political fallout from that epic clash between the USA and Japan is fascinating and morally complex. It's hard to imagine audiences failing to be riveted by the unrelenting combat sequences. The battle scenes are graphically depicted but never gratuitous. At the same time, the story looks at life during wartime, from several angles.

Flags starts with the iconic image of the famous photo in which six exhausted servicemen hoist the American flag five days into a battle on Iwo Jima that raged on for more than a month. The story built around this seminal photo is eloquently written by Paul Haggis (Crash) and Bill Broyles Jr. (Cast Away).

The focus is on the three surviving soldiers of the six -- played with sensitivity and intelligence by Ryan Phillippe, Jesse Bradford and Ryan Beach -- tapped by military and government officials and trotted around on a nationwide tour as the ultimate symbols of courageous warriors. The intent behind honoring this trio was to inspire patriotic fervor and persuade Americans to buy war bonds. Each man copes differently with the dawning reality that he is being manipulated. Beach is brilliant as a Native American soldier who laid his life on the line but still must endure racism. His character's arc from proud fighter to lost soul is heartbreaking.

The story is told, years later, to Phillippe's adult son (Tom McCarthy) by photographer Joe Rosenthal (Ned Eisenberg), who took the Pulitzer Prize-winning image. The lives of all three men are marked by their experience. The glimpse we get of the relationship between Phillippe's character as an older man and his son is achingly poignant.

The film is patriotic in the truest sense: honoring those who risked their lives in battle and questioning the motives of those in power who sought to use the soldiers as political pawns.

Though the film respects the heroes it depicts, it also takes a cynical look at the selling of war to the American people. Flags of Our Fathers is the rare action film that is superbly acted, hauntingly powerful and deeply insightful.

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