An American director tells Japanese story

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, January 11, 2007

In a remarkable piece of moviemaking daring, director Clint Eastwood has made two full-length films that examine a celebrated World War II battle … from opposite sides. There have been movies that looked at battles from both sides, or from an anti-war view. But nothing quite like this.

The first film was “Flags of Our Fathers,” which didn’t tell the Allied story of Iwo Jima but rather the story of the men involved in the flag-raising on the island’s Mount Suribachi, which became a famous photograph. It’s a fascinating film, told in a nonchronological fashion that upends the usual formula of the war movie. Perhaps for that reason, it failed to catch on with audiences.

“Letters From Iwo Jima” is a story of the Japanese side. There are a number of ways one might approach a film about the aggressors in World War II, but Eastwood’s focus is on the men caught in the island’s no-exit trap, and on the general leading them.

The latter is Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, played by the fine actor Ken Watanabe, from “The Last Samurai.” As the film depicts him, Kuribayashi (who devised the system of tunnels and caves built as the island’s brutal defense) had many ties to America and felt personally conflicted about Japan’s role in the war.

Some of Kuribayashi’s letters were used in developing the script, by Paul Haggis and Iris Yamashita. The story unfolds in a strange, nearly shapeless way, not in battle scenes but in a series of confrontations (many between fanatical officers and more bewildered soldiers).

A few emerge as important characters, such as a baby-faced baker (Kazunari Ninomiya, an actor who elicits instant good will) with no great interest in either the Rising Sun in victory or ritual suicide in defeat. He just wants to get out alive. And there’s a real-life character, Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), a cultivated nobleman who won an equestrian gold medal at the Los Angeles Olympic Games a few years before the war.

Although the film has a slow build, Eastwood stages some riveting sequences in the later going: soldiers plotting desertion by faking illness, and the suicide-by-grenade showdown in a cave.

As intelligent and sensitive as “Letters” is, it struck me as more conventional than “Flags of Our Fathers.” A pair of mirroring scenes involving POWs of both sides felt like point-making on the part of Paul Haggis (in the mode of his Oscar-winner “Crash”), and closer to the cliches of the old-fashioned platoon movie than anything in “Flags.”

“Letters from Iwo Jima” has already won some year-end awards (best picture from the LA Film Critics), and seems better-liked than its English-language twin. Yes, in case we hadn’t mentioned it, the film is in Japanese, with subtitles.

There is no real overlap between the two movies – the “Flags” cast members don’t show up in cameos here – save perhaps for one eerie moment. We see Gen. Kuribayashi gaze out across the island toward Mount Suribachi, where the U.S. flag is newly flying. Eastwood doesn’t cut to a close view, even though he just made an entire movie about that flag (he’s a good director), so it looks very small in the distance. But as the fatalistic Kuribayashi knows, it’s huge.

Slow, but moving: The second part of director Clint Eastwood’s take on the battle of Iwo Jima, this time from the Japanese side. This intelligent and sensitive film has a slow build-up, and is somewhat more conventional than “Flags of Our Fathers,” but it creates a strong sense of the claustrophobic no-exit for the soldiers, and a handful of memorable characters. With Ken Watanabe. (In Japanese, with English subtitles.)

Rated: R rating is for violence, subject matter.

Now showing: Egyptian, Seattle