Eastwood shuns rah-rah cliches in ‘Flags’

Clint Eastwood long ago graduated from action-movie star to well-respected filmmaker. In fact, he’s practically the gray eminence among American directors, and an upholder of a certain traditional storytelling style that goes back to the heyday of the studio system in Hollywood.

However, his movies are anything but stuffy, as the emotional impact of “Million Dollar Baby,” his most recent film (and multiple Oscar winner) can attest. Eastwood’s newest, “Flags of Our Fathers,” combines elegant filmmaking technique with an almost experimental storytelling structure.

It’s also not what the TV commercials say it is: a conventional, flag-waving war movie. The film is based on a book about the true story of the men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima, which was captured in one of the most famous photographs of the century.

As has been known for many years, but which the U.S. government downplayed at the time, the flag-raising in the photograph was actually the second time the Stars and Stripes were unfurled atop Mount Suribachi. The guys who actually raised the first flag went relatively uncelebrated, while the men who were on hand for Joe Rosenthal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning picture were acclaimed as heroes. (In fact, almost half the men – boys, really – involved in both flag-raisings were dead within a month of the event.)

The film focuses on the three men in the photograph who survived: John Bradley, Rene Gagnon and Ira Hayes. They were whisked home to participate in a massive war bonds drive, which in the film’s depiction often consisted of reenacting the flag-raising – usually in ways that seemed to cheapen the real sacrifice on the island.

Eastwood, who does not appear in the film, tells this story in fascinating fashion. It jumps around chronologically, from the present day to the war bonds drive to arrival of the Marines on Iwo Jima, and back and forth again. We don’t get to the flag-raising – a masterly sequence – until late in the movie. In the longest and most brutal battle scene, we haven’t really gotten to know the main characters, and this (along with Eastwood’s favored dark lighting) means we can’t really tell who’s who.

Some of this will be unsatisfying to some viewers. The film also gets fairly explicit in its criticism of governments that trump up military heroics for the sake of public relations. At times the script, by Oscar-winner Paul Haggis and William Broyles Jr., gets almost too insistent on this point. Nobody’s likely to miss the parallels between the overblown war bonds drive and the Iraq War “Mission Accomplished” photo op, or the misleading accounts of football player Pat Tillman’s death in Afghanistan.

But if it won’t please everyone, “Flags” is strong stuff. I thought that Eastwood’s refusal to distinguish among the main characters reflects the movie’s theme: You can’t see the faces of the men in the flag-raising photograph either. They are not greater heroes than the thousands of other men who fought and died on the island, even if they got the deluxe treatment.

The toll of the unwanted fame is well etched by Ryan Phillippe, Jesse Bradford and especially Adam Beach. He plays Hayes, the Pima Indian tormented by alcoholism and post-traumatic stress disorder. Also excellent in smaller roles are John Benjamin Hickey, Neal McDonough and Barry Pepper.

The film is beautifully mounted, with Iwo Jima scenes shot on the coast of Iceland. The use of computer graphics to create a vast Navy is as good as it’s been in a big-scale movie. And there’s more to come: Eastwood has shot an Iwo Jima film from the Japanese perspective, which will be released in February.

Eastwood’s method of dropping back and forth in time, and staging a very violent battle scene without any payoff, is almost a rebuke to the usual rah-rah war-movie conventions. He won’t let you get revved up about this stuff. He wants you to think about it.