Review of Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) by Kinhung C — 12 Jan 2011

Clint Eastwood's epic of intimate carnage rolled into 2006 with flags flying. And even today, it's still top-quality movie-making, by a consummate master, from first frame to final frame. Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima was a blistering tone poem to the Japanese soldiers who defended the volcanic island of Iwo Jima against American forces for forty-five days in 1945.

Letters From Iwo Jima was conceived as a companion piece to Eastwood's earlier feature from '06, the amazing Flags of Our Fathers, itself an adaptation of the non-fiction best-seller from James Bradley. In that film, Eastwood chronicled the story of John 'Doc' Bradley and the men who were allegedly photographed lifting the American flag on the island of Iwo Jima, and the subsequent toll war and fame took on their hearts and minds. Eastwood was so inspired by the events of the battle of Iwo Jima, he decided to make a film that told things solely from the Japanese point of view. But before you go thinking Tora! Tora! Tora! All over again, snap out of it. Letters From Iwo Jima is an explosive piece of work, that pulls no punches, and smartly salutes risk-taking film making.

Working from a pitch-perfect screenplay by Iris Yamashita (her very first, and it's amazing), Eastwood burrows into the very souls of its subjects, particularly Lt. Gen. Tadamichi, played with soulful intensity by Ken Watanabe. Tadamichi was once an envoy to the U.S., but upon rejoining the Japanese forces, created the plan to tunnel the island of Iwo Jima and create caves, in an effort to take out the American forces that greatly outnumbered them.

Under Eastwood's brilliant direction, Letters From Iwo Jima is an absolute masterwork, evoking the classics of the great Japanese film makers Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu. Eastwood draws on the ferocious sense of action the invigorated Kurosawa's films, and mixes in the tenderness of storytelling that was a trademark of Ozu. Characters are delicately nuanced and striking in their shades of emotion, like Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a baker who longs for his wife and child left behind, or Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), the Olympic equestrian who actually brings his horse to the island.

Then there are the agonizingly brutal scenes of combat, presented in striking de-saturated color, and shot beautifully on the beaches of Iceland by the poetic camera of Tom Stern, and edited to devastating effect by Joel Cox and Gary D. Roach. The complexity of the terror onscreen is made all the more horrific as we see soldiers bang their helmets with grenades, opting for suicide rather than surrender.

Like Eastwood's other masterpiece of the decade, Mystic River, Letters From Iwo Jima burns deep into the mind and memory, with painful authenticity and detail. It's still unforgettable.