LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA (2006) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Clint Eastwood
Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya,
Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase
Clint Eastwood's second straight film dealing with the Battle of Iwo Jima, this time from the point of view of the Japanese. It's more tightly focused than "Flags of Our Fathers", which had to tell not just the story of the battle, but the subsequent war-bond campaign back home. The scale's more intimate, and it has two outstanding performances, by Ken Watanabe as the army general assigned the suicidal task of defending the island, and Kazunari Ninomiya as the grunt soldier through whose eyes much of the battle takes place. It's a harrowing portrait of men in combat, with at least one scene, involving an American G.I. guarding a couple of Japanese prisoners, that Clint might not have gotten away with if he hadn't made "Flags" first. On its own, "Letters" is a great war movie, full of admiration for the men who fight, and a passionate sense of war's horrible waste and futility. Its heroes, our enemies then, are ordinary people, not much different from ourselves. What happens to them is both tragic and heartbreaking.
