The Fog of War

War effort: Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), John "Doc" Bradley (Ryan Phillippe) and Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) in the Clint Eastwood film Flags of Our Fathers. (Paramount Pictures)

The Iwo Jima photo of six soldiers raising an American flag near the end of the Second World War is 61 years old, possibly the most reproduced photo in history and the subject of many parodies. Yet it still has the ability to land like a punch to the gut. There is something profoundly affecting about the upward momentum of that — let’s say it — phallic pole, and the animal strength in the haunches of those crouching, faceless men. The photo not only trumpeted the teamwork needed for the U.S.’s race to the finish of the War, but also affirmed a universal notion of triumph against all odds. We Canadians dug it, too.

Clint Eastwood’s rambling film Flags of Our Fathers attempts to unpack the image, showing the unromantic truth of the war that birthed it. In doing so, Eastwood wants to complicate the notion of heroism, and honour the men who fought in the Second World War not as faceless soldiers but as human beings, scarred even in victory. This is, without question, a noble pursuit, if hardly a fresh film subject. We’ve already seen soldiers trembling in the face of death in Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line, and then there is a little real-life event called Vietnam, which turned valour inside out. The chest-puffed good guy is a myth that no one believes anymore, as recovered-cowboy Eastwood has spent the latter period of a career reminding us. Flags is decent, and it smartly calls to task those who abuse the word patriot today, but it is also familiar to the point of tedium. Scene to scene, I had the strange sensation that I was flipping through a stack of war-movie DVDs: seen it, seen it, seen it, don’t want to see it, boring, seen it.

But our eyes, so says Flags of Our Fathers, are not always reliable. The Iwo Jima photo was never exactly what it seemed. The famous flag actually replaced an original, smaller one planted on Mount Suribachi during the largest sea armada invasion ever attempted, and the most expensive war fought by the U.S. Marine Corps. The battle lasted 35 days, and AP photographer Joe Rosenthal took the picture on day five. By the time the image had exploded around the country, reengaging a burnt-out citizenry in the war effort, half of the men in the picture were dead, and at least one had been misidentified.

In the film, the three Marines who survived, and actually appear in the photo, are pulled from duty and shipped back home to the United States, where they are turned into mini-celebrities; living, breathing war mascots. Young, diverse and handsome, they are an advertiser’s dream: vain Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford), described by one captain as “Our own Tyrone Power”; stoic field medic John “Doc” Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), a Native American who dulls the racist onslaught — “I heard you killed them with a tomahawk, Chief!” — with drink.

The three embark on a cross-country tour to sell the War, drumming up bond sales to replenish the government’s empty coffers. There is something delightfully Wag the Dog about the cigar-chomping military machine chugging along, crushing the truth in its wake: Who cares if one of the men has been misidentified? He’s dead! Break out the Andrew Sisters and let’s raise some funds!

Soldiers mount an assault at Iwo Jima. (Paramount Pictures)

But this relevant note about the marketing of war is struck over and over; co-screenwriter Paul Haggis (who wrote and directed Crash) will never say something once when he could spell it out 15 different ways. As the men grow tired of the travelling dog-and-pony show, the audience gets downright exhausted. In Chicago, New York City and small-town America, Ira gets drunk, Rene gets irritated and Doc takes care of everyone. At each stop, someone stands on stage and rejects the term hero, pleading for the public to get over the photo and honour the dead.

When Eastwood finally goes back to Iwo Jima to meet those men (the film has an annoying, bunny-hopping chronology), everything enlivens. Using CGI and a dank, churning beach in Iceland, Eastwood recreates an amphibious battle that’s staggering in scope and repulsive in detail. While never quite achieving the visceral shudder of Saving Private Ryan, the gold standard for the macabre in war, Eastwood gives his battle scenes a grey-washed horror of his own. As the first line of soldiers steps onto the beach, unseen Japanese gun barrels emerge slowly from the brush, sand dunes and hills until the Americans are entirely under siege, and entirely oblivious.

Once the carnage begins, dead bodies are so plentiful that some simply float out to sea or are crushed under the treads of American tanks. Twenty-two thousand Japanese died at Iwo Jima, while 26,000 Americans were wounded, and nearly 7,000 killed. And yet, for a film that wants to distinguish the men from the myth, the soldiers remain generic and interchangeable in their helmets.

Of the three anti-heroes left, only Adam Beach as Ira, whose dignity peels away before our eyes, feels fully realized; it is a mournful, career-making performance. But rather than linger on the film’s most intriguing character, Haggis’s blunt-instrument screenplay wastes time in an awkward modern-day narrative about Doc Bradley’s son that culminates in a maudlin hospital scene (Haggis should keep out of hospitals: he burdened Crash and the script for Million Dollar Baby with his bad bedside manners, too).

The father-son framework is a reminder the Greatest Generation is still among us, but its members are dying with their stories untold. Eastwood is determined not to forget the War, and he has made Letters from Iwo Jima, a companion film (scheduled for release next year) told from the perspective of the Japanese, who are entirely without personality in Flags of Our Fathers. Perhaps these two films together will cohere into something more meaningful than Flags is on its own, a two-part movie that not only deconstructs the famous photo, but builds something new.

Flags of Our Fathers opens across Canada on Oct. 19.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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