"Flags of Our Fathers"

Clint Eastwood exposes some brutal truths about war and how we treat our soldiers in this blunt yet effective movie.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Clint Eastwood, Reviews

Oct. 20, 2006 | The photograph at the heart of Clint Eastwood's "Flags of Our Fathers" is so piercingly iconic that you have to see it only once to remember it forever: Shot on the fifth day of the 40-day Battle of Iwo Jima, the picture, taken on the fly by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal (he wasnt even looking through the viewfinder), shows six servicemen struggling to raise an American flag on Japanese soil. The picture is virtually a silhouette, an "action" shot in which the arrangement of the men's bodies (the composition is eerily similar to that of classical sculpture) tells us more than their faces do -- and that's good, because we can't see their faces at all.

When the picture became widely circulated back home, the fact that you couldn't identify the faces was part of the point: Parents who'd lost sons in the battle longed to believe they were seeing their own child wrestling with the weight of that improvised flagpole (it was actually a heavy old Japanese water pipe); and for parents whose kids were stationed far from that Japanese island, those unreadable faces -- faces that managed to say, with shadows, everything that could rationally be said about war -- became a blank they could fill in, a receptacle for grief and for hope.

A photograph like that is catnip for a director like Eastwood, a filmmaker who has always been exceedingly comfortable -- perhaps too comfortable -- with notions of sturdy American masculinity and conventional home-and-hearth values. But I don't think Eastwood is completely comfortable with this very famous, very familiar picture: He can look behind it, and around it, but there's no getting to the bottom of it. And his uncertain feelings, coupled with his usual Mitchum-solid confidence, are precisely what make "Flags of Our Fathers" such a surprising, and at times moving, picture.

This is a messier, more ambiguous picture than we'd expect of Eastwood, and it's not always easy sledding: The structure is somewhat fragmented and confusing, and Eastwood can't resist throwing in some corny, macho-sentimental voice-overs. There are many places where Eastwood's technique and sensibility jostle each other like roughhousing, squabbling brothers: There will be a shot, or a whole scene, that shows us he's followed some gut instinct -- the best moments in "Flags of Our Fathers" are effective because of, not in spite of, their blunt simplicity. But Eastwood doesn't know when to stop: He'll expand upon and explicate a point until he grinds it down, diminishing the power of ideas he's already conveyed quite effectively. He'll give us a clear set of dots to connect and then, as if he doesn't trust us, grab the pencil and connect them himself. And sometimes, the movie is just plain boring.

All that said, I found myself thinking about the movie in the hours and days afterward as bits and pieces of it began emerging more clearly from the haze of Eastwood's woolly ambitions. "Flags of Our Fathers," adapted from James Bradley's book (based on his father's wartime experience) by screenwriters William Broyles Jr. and shape-shifting multitasker Paul Haggis, tells the story of the six men who appear in Rosenthal's photograph, focusing most specifically on three of them: John Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), a Navy medic; Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford), a Marine runner; and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), a Marine and a Native American. Although the photograph became a symbol of American victory, the movie is careful not to wave it around as such: The photograph was taken on the fifth day of battle, and by the final day, more than a month later, three of the men -- Mike Strank (Barry Pepper), Harlon Block (Benjamin Walker) and Franklin Sousley (Joseph Cross) -- were dead. (Nearly 7,000 American soldiers were killed on Iwo Jima.)

Eastwood flips back and forth between the grueling battle (which took place in early 1945) and its aftermath, with a few forays into the recent past. After the battle, the three surviving subjects of the photograph were shipped home to the States and sent on tour to sell War Bonds. They became advertising tools for the war that had claimed so many of their comrades -- although as one of the chief fundraisers, played with slick effectiveness by John Slattery, points out, when your war coffers are almost empty, it means sending out a badly equipped army, which could only result in more deaths.

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