FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS (2006) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Clint Eastwood
Ryan Philippe, Adam Beach, Jesse Bradford,
Barry Pepper, John Benjamin Hickey, Jamie Bell,
John Slattery, Paul Walker, Robert Patrick
Clint Eastwood's epic recreation of the Battle of Iwo Jima and the famously photographed flag-raising on Mount Surabachi, with the focus on the three men in the photograph who survived the battle and then were shipped home and showcased as heroes in a public relations campaign to sell war bonds. Eastwood has spent much of his career exploring the nature of heroism, often subverting or debunking it. Here he salutes the real thing, in a film about three undeniably brave men who don't consider themselves heroes at all. The fact that there's little to distinguish one G.I. from another, especially in the battle scenes, doesn't help the picture dramatically, but it does underscore how a generation of soldiers saw themselves, as ordinary guys trying to get a terrible job done, hoping to survive and go home, and then later on not talking about it very much. We know some of them. They're our fathers, our grandfathers, and those who remain are quite old. They might've left the war behind at Iwo Jima, or Normandy, or Anzio, or Leyte Gulf, but as this ambitious, respectful and unsparing movie suggests, the war never really left them.
