Flags of Our Fathers

[rudeboy]

An interesting article from The Guardian on the lack of African-American soldiers in Flags and similar movies.

Where have all the black soldiers gone?

African-Americans written out of Pacific war in Clint Eastwood's new film, veterans say

Dan Glaister in Los Angeles
Saturday October 21, 2006
The Guardian
On February 19 1945 Thomas McPhatter found himself on a landing craft heading toward the beach on Iwo Jima.
"There were bodies bobbing up all around, all these dead men," said the former US marine, now 83 and living in San Diego. "Then we were crawling on our bellies and moving up the beach. I jumped in a foxhole and there was a young white marine holding his family pictures. He had been hit by shrapnel, he was bleeding from the ears, nose and mouth. It frightened me. The only thing I could do was lie there and repeat the Lord's prayer, over and over and over."

Sadly, Sgt McPhatter's experience is not mirrored in Flags of Our Fathers, Clint Eastwood's big-budget, Oscar-tipped film of the battle for the Japanese island that opened on Friday in the US. While the film's battle scenes show scores of young soldiers in combat, none of them are African-American. Yet almost 900 African-American troops took part in the battle of Iwo Jima, including Sgt McPhatter.

The film tells the story of the raising of the stars and stripes over Mount Suribachi at the tip of the island. The moment was captured in a photograph that became a symbol of the US war effort. Eastwood's film follows the marines in the picture, including the Native American Ira Hayes, as they were removed from combat operations to promote the sale of government war bonds.

Mr McPhatter, who went on to serve in Vietnam and rose to the rank of lieutenant commander in the US navy, even had a part in the raising of the flag. "The man who put the first flag up on Iwo Jima got a piece of pipe from me to put the flag up on," he says. That, too, is absent from the film.

"Of all the movies that have been made of Iwo Jima, you never see a black face," said Mr McPhatter. "This is the last straw. I feel like I've been denied, I've been insulted, I've been mistreated. But what can you do? We still have a strong underlying force in my country of rabid racism."

Melton McLaurin, author of the forthcoming The Marines of Montford Point and an accompanying documentary to be released in February, says that there were hundreds of black soldiers on Iwo Jima from the first day of the 35-day battle. Although most of the black marine units were assigned ammunition and supply roles, the chaos of the landing soon undermined the battle plan.

"When they first hit the beach the resistance was so fierce that they weren't shifting ammunition, they were firing their rifles," said Dr McLaurin.

The failure to transfer the active role played by African-Americans at Iwo Jima to the big screen does not surprise him. "One of the marines I interviewed said that the people who were filming newsreel footage on Iwo Jima deliberately turned their cameras away when black folks came by. Blacks are not surprised at all when they see movies set where black troops were engaged and never show on the screen. I would like to say that it was from ignorance but anybody can do research and come up with books about African-Americans in world war two. I think it has to do with box office and what producers of movies think Americans really want to see."
He added: "I want to see these guys get their due. They're just so anxious to have their story told and to have it known."
Roland Durden, another black marine, landed on the beach on the third day. "When we hit the shore we were loaded with ammunition and the Japanese hit us with mortar." Private Durden was soon assigned to burial detail, "burying the dead day in, day out. It seemed like endless days. They treated us like workmen rather than marines."

Mr Durden, too, is wearied but unsurprised at the omissions in Eastwood's film. "We're always left out of the films, from John Wayne on," he said. Mr Durden ascribes to both the conspiracy as well as the ####-up theory of history. "They didn't want blacks to be heroes. This was pre-1945, pre-civil rights."

A spokesperson for Warner Bros said: "The film is correct based on the book." The omission was first remarked upon in a review by Fox News columnist Roger Friedman, who noted that the history of black involvement at Iwo Jima was recorded in several books, including Christopher Moore's recent Fighting for America: Black Soldiers - the Unsung Heroes of World War II. "They weren't in the background at all," said Moore. "The people carrying the ammunition were 90% black, so that's an opportunity to show black soldiers. These are our films and very often they become our history, historical documents."

Yvonne Latty, a New York University professor and author of We Were There: Voices of African-American Veterans (2004), wrote to Eastwood and the film's producers pleading with them to include the experience of black soldiers. HarperCollins, the book's publishers, sent the director a copy, but never heard back.

"It would take only a couple of extras and everyone would be happy," she said. "No one's asking for them to be the stars of the movies, but at least show that they were there. This is the way a new generation will think about Iwo Jima. Once again it will be that African-American people did not serve, that we were absent. It's a lie."

The first chapter to James Bradley's book Flags of Our Fathers, which forms the basis of the movie, opens with a quotation from president Harry Truman. "The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know." It would provide a fitting endnote to Eastwood's film.

Sgt Thomas McPhatter, 8th US Marine Corps ammunition company, was at Iwo Jima in 1945. These are his memories
We set up an ammunition dump and the Japanese spotted it because they were firing mortars. There was black powder and smoke everywhere. It's unbelievable what you can smell. Men losing their legs ...

"On the second night we were hit again by mortar fire. All of a sudden the dump was burning. I said the whole dump's going to go soon, and we couldn't put the fire out. We made our way to the beach ... when I got to the beach my eyes were burning and the dispensary put something on my face. Two days later they start ammunition drops from planes. They started dropping the ammo in multi-coloured parachutes like an ice-cream canopy. So you've got to chase ammunition with the enemy firing on you. Oh, Lord. My platoon leader put us in for a commendation but that never got anywhere. It was beyond the call of duty.

"Our last involvement was when we turned back a banzai attack ... the last battle on Iwo Jima. There were army people there who had come after us to repair the airfield who were living in tents ... they came out of their holes with their swords drawn, high-hollering 'Banzai!' The Japanese cut the guy ropes and they were running them through the canvas with their swords. When they came through our area, we were still sleeping in the dirt. We cut them down. It was the black soldiers that did it. It's never been recognised.

[Big Magilla]

Yes, the battle scenes are tedious, what battle scenes aren't? And, yes, the message is repetitious, but that's the point, isn't it? These guys kept telling everyone they weren't heroes, but no one would listen, and after the war, no one cared.

The only problem I had with the film was the structure, a fault of the screenplay, not Eastwood's direction, which is masterful. Had I written the screenplay, it would have begun with the death of the Ryan Philippe/George Grizzard character and followed the son as he interviewed the survivors to learn about the campaign and the war bond drive, flashing back as each of them remembers instead of the confusing flashback, flash forward, flashback again, flash forward again and so on.

Terrific performances by Philippe, Jesse Bradford and especially, as expected, Adam Beach as the tragic Ira Hayes, the best known of the three.

Ah, yes, the closing credits. I can't remember another film for which all, or almost all, of the audience stayed riveted to their seats while the closing credits ran.

This film has Oscar written all over it. Nominations for Picture, Director, Cinematography, Editing, Sound, Sound Effects and Supporting Actor (Beach) are virtually assured. Screenplay and Original Score (by Eastwood) are also likely.

[dws1982]

Aren't those so-called book-ends from the book itself? The catharsis BJ refers to is real. It's what got the book written in the first place.

This is true; The book would have never been written if Bradley hadn't interviewed survivors from his father's unit. The modern-day scenes bother me less today after thinking about it, than they did initially. They're well done, but I still think they didn't really have to be there.

Although one of the modern scenes did lead quite nicely into that beautiful final scene. And the closing credits were just fantastic--one of the few times that I've stayed all the way through the closing credits in a theater. (The Pianist is the only other time I can remember doing that.)

[Big Magilla]

Aren't those so-called book-ends from the book itself? The catharsis BJ refers to is real. It's what got the book written in the first place.

Anyway, I haven't seen it yet. I'm really looking forward to it to determine which side of the argument I fall on. I have four films to see this week and will hopefully see two of them today. I have to chose from among Flags, The Queen, Infamous and The Last King of Scotland.

[OscarGuy]

You can probably thank Spielberg for the present-day bookends. I haven't seen the film yet but hearing you talk about it, it smells of Spielberg's war films. Schindler's List did the exact same thing if you'll remember. So, since Spielberg was a heavy hand in the film, I wouldn't doubt if he had them added to the screenplay before Eastwood shot.

[The Original BJ]

I'm with Sabin on this one. As a fan of Eastwood's work, I have to say that I was very disappointed, and also flabbergasted at some of the raves this film has received.

I thought Flags was A) BOOOOOOOOOORING and B) completely redundant. The film has such a one-stop political agenda it starts to get repetitious within the first half-hour. Take a drink every time a slimy politician makes our noble heroes feel visibly UN-heroic and you'll have destroyed your liver by reel two! The voice-over states clearly how problematic it is to separate people into heroes and villains, but the film is guilty of just that.

I'm shocked by how obvious and repetitive this story was, but, given this obviousness, it strikes me as even more bizarre that the film doesn't really set up its book-end sequences very well. Would it have hurt to clarify who some of these people were?

For me, it wasn't the stench of Crash that hovered over this project, but the shadow of Saving Private Ryan, itself an overpraised but nonetheless fine film. There's the desaturated beach battle scenes, of course, but also the present day bookends. And WHO thought it was a good idea to devote the entire last HALF HOUR of the film to chronicling the lives of these one-dimensional characters well after their story should have ended? Plus, there's a scene near the end that makes Private Ryan's "Have I lived a good life" speech look like a masterpiece of subtlety. I found it phony and manipulative, particularly given that the scene attempts to serve as an emotional catharsis for a relationship that had been virtually non-existent until this point.

After all of that, it might sound like I hated this film, and I really don't. It's just that I expected so much more from a filmmaker who dealt with the confusing moral choices of his characters in such a less simplistic (and far bleaker) manner in films like Unforgiven, Mystic River, and Million Dollar Baby, all of which I love. Oh yes, there were plenty of times when I noticed the graceful elegance of Eastwood's direction. But there were plenty of times when I felt like I could have been watching a Ron Howard movie. (I'm sure I'll get stones thrown at me for that one.)

I wish I had more to say. I really wanted to like this movie, but I found it interminably dull.

[Penelope]

I need to see it again, too, since I'm not certain, yet, if Flags is a *** or ***1/2 film. It's certainly much better than Million Dollar Baby (I swear, for as long as I live, I will never understand the love for that overblown Lifetime movie), on par with Mystic River, and just below Unforgiven.

Certainly, it's a film with flaws; the Paul Haggis contributions to the script are obvious and, as usual, cringe-worthy, but Eastwood, with his usual skill, smoothes over them for the most part. The narrative is undeniably disjointed, but it contributes to the film building up to a genuinely heartbreaking coda--I was deeply moved by the film, particularly in the final hour.

And there's no doubt that Adam Beach will be nominated, and I wouldn't be surprised if he wins; the film itself will be nominated, as will Clint, but it's not strong enough to win. So Beach becomes the standard-bearer for the film--he has all the Oscar-bait scenes, providing the most emotional resonance for the film, and, simply put, he's really terrific.

[dws1982]

I'm not sure how much credibility I have here, since my feelings about Eastwood are well known. So, grain of salt, etc.

I know I need to see this again; The theater I saw it at had some problems: The film was projected slightly off-center, causing some of it to overlap onto the curtain, and there was what seemed like two rectangular lights shining on the bottom of the screen during any dark scene. AND there was some rattling noise coming from the projection room during every quiet scene.

I don't know if this is one of Eastwood's masterpieces, but I also know that it doesn't deserve placement alongside his misfires like The Rookie or The Eiger Sanction. I don't get the criticisms that it isn't an Eastwood film. I think his fingerprints are all over it, and that Flags of Our Fathers is probably even more of an Eastwood film than Mystic River is. (I do still like that movie a lot, even though it hasn't quite held up over the past few years.) From an auteurist perspective, I think there are a lot of interesting things going on, which I hope to expand upon later.)

Those modern sequences were my main problem. Well done, and well acted, but they were fairly pointless. I had no problems with the non-linear structure though, and thought that it actually made certain sequences a lot more effective than they would've been in a linear narrative.

[Sonic Youth]

Conservatives attack Flags of Our Fathers

Black soldiers attack Flags of Our Fathers

Anyone else?

[Sabin]

...nobody gets me.



Edited By Sabin on 1161316746

[Sonic Youth]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you. But are you saying you disagree with the critics, Sabin?

[Sabin]

HOW IS ANYTHING IN THIS MOVIE NEW OR VITAL?!?

I'm sorry but this is almost physically exhausting for me to read these positive reviews. I feel as though these reviewers are just grappling for positive takes on Eastwood and his film. He's not saying anything new about war. I'm sorry, it's a "war movie" war movie.

[dws1982]

Rave from Turan:

Flags of Our Fathers" is a story of extremes. It's the story of great heroism on a tiny island, of a photograph taken in 1/400th of a second that wreaked havoc with the lives of everyone in it and influenced the course of a war.

It's also a very American tale, set 60 years ago but startlingly relevant today, which intertwines and often contrasts bravery and chicanery, idealism and disillusion, war and propaganda, truth and national security. This sad true story wrings you out emotionally because it's concerned with both the deaths of young men in battle and what happens when the needs of those who survive clash with what society expects and politics demands.

A narrative like this requires a measured, classical style to be most effective, and it couldn't have found a better director than Clint Eastwood. After two best picture Oscars, 26 films behind the camera and more than 50 years as an actor, Clint Eastwood knows a gripping story and how to tell it. He found this one in James Bradley's book about the celebrated Feb. 23, 1945, flag-raising on Iwo Jima, a narrative that was nearly a year on the New York Times bestseller list and has 3 million copies in print.

Bradley (who co-wrote the book with Ron Powers) was not a disinterested World War II historian. His father, Navy corpsman John "Doc" Bradley, was the only non-Marine of the six men who raised the flag and figured in Joe Rosenthal's iconic photograph.

Bradley was also one of the three who survived perhaps the most hellish battle of the war only to be brought back to the U.S. and exhibited like a prize heifer in a crucial war bonds tour, nicknamed the Mighty 7th, which saw the raising of an unprecedented and much-needed $26.3 billion for the war effort. The author's quest to understand how that unnerving combination of experiences whipsawed his father and his comrades is the engine that powers both the book and this gripping, emotional film.

Certainly everything about the Iwo Jima firestorm and its aftermath turned out to be so much larger than life that it led to three previous films, a Johnny Cash song and the 100-ton statue of the six men that dominates Arlington National Cemetery.

Twenty-seven Congressional Medals of Honor, the most ever for one battle, were earned on Iwo Jima; one-third of all Marines who died in World War II were killed on that 7 1/2-square-mile island, as were 95% of its 22,000 Japanese defenders, whose story Eastwood will tell in a parallel film, "Letters From Iwo Jima," to be released in early 2007.

Making this carnage that much more poignant was the fact that most of it was happening to boys/men in their teens and early 20s. Eastwood and his casting director, Phyllis Huffman (who, like veteran production designer Henry Bumstead, died before the film was released), tried hard to select actors who either were young or looked it. The result is a strong ensemble that includes Ryan Phillippe, Jesse Bradford and Adam Beach as the three flag-raising survivors and Barry Pepper as their sergeant.

Written by William Broyles Jr. (himself a former Marine) and Paul Haggis ("Million Dollar Baby," "Crash"), "Flags of Our Fathers" opts for an opening that is structurally complex, touching lightly on most of the situations and viewpoints the film will eventually flesh out.

The first shot is of a young soldier (Phillippe) alone in the devastated lunar landscape that was Iwo Jima in combat (these sequences were shot in Iceland, which has similar black sand beaches). This, we learn in seconds, is a recurring dream an elderly Doc Bradley has of himself on Iwo, desperately looking for the close buddy, Ralph "Iggy" Ignatowski (Jamie Bell), who he has unaccountably become separated from.

In addition to Bradley in combat and in retirement, we witness the fuss Rosenthal's photo, considered perhaps the most reproduced shot in history, made from the moment it was first seen. And we also get a glimpse of the surreal nature of the ensuing bond tour; the first flag-raising we see is not the real thing but a garish re-creation before 100,000 spectators at Chicago's Soldier Field.

We also hear photographer Rosenthal as he attempts to explain why his picture touched a national nerve. "What we do in war, the cruelty is almost incomprehensible," he says. "But somehow we need to make sense of it. The right picture can win or lose a war. I took a lot of other pictures that day, but none of them made a difference. Looking it at, you could believe the sacrifice was not a waste."

It's at this point that the men who raised the flag are introduced softly, not really differentiated from the others in their units. Though "Flags" eventually shows us all six, it concentrates on experienced Sgt. Mike Strank (Pepper, a veteran of "Saving Private Ryan") and the three men who will make it back alive.

First among equals is Bradley, the calm, centered undertaker-in-training whose character is well served by Phillippe's naturally haunted air. Most problematic as a soldier is handsome Rene Gagnon (Bradford), a.k.a. "our own Tyrone Power," who literally joined the Marines because he liked the uniform.

Then there is Ira Hayes ("Smoke Signals' " Beach), a Native American from the Pima tribe, a soldier whose grim experiences putting up with constant prejudicial put-downs and surviving the most brutal hand-to-hand combat are the emotional heart of the film. With the Japanese so entrenched in a system of underground bunkers and tunnels that many Marines never saw an enemy soldier alive, the landing at Iwo is portrayed, in the film's action centerpiece, as especially devastating in the "Saving Private Ryan" tradition. As shot by Eastwood veteran Tom Stern, the battle is pure, pitiless chaos, an unflinchingly graphic look at the split-second randomness of who stays alive and who is savagely cut down.

Compared with this brutality, the two flag-raisings that took place on Iwo Jima's Mt. Suribachi (the film is careful to explain this often misunderstood situation) ended up being no big deal at all, mundane moments that were the equivalent, as one of the survivors said, of "becoming a hero for putting up a pole." But that is precisely what happened.

It happened because no one counted on the torrential impact of that photograph, which, among other things, ended up on 150 million postage stamps. The trio of surviving flag-raisers are air-lifted back to the States, in Hayes' case very much against his will, and in effect press-ganged into an extensive public relations tour to raise that much-needed money.

The bulk of "Flags of our Fathers" cuts back and forth between the tour and the men's flashbacks to the hellacious combat on Iwo, detailing the reality the survivors are haunted by, a reality that makes them powerfully uncomfortable with being lionized for their connection to what they consider to be a misleading picture.

This conflict between the reality of the flag-raising and the image the government insisted on projecting for its own needs (a conflict that including refusing to correct a misidentification of one of the dead flag-raisers) is the "Flags of Our Fathers" theme that resonates most pointedly today.

It is interesting to note, in this age of the overblown Jessica Lynch story and President Bush's "Mission Accomplished" aircraft carrier speech, that the need to create media heroes and the determination to use war for political/governmental purposes has hardly gone away. The war in Iraq was likely not high on anyone's mind when this film was conceptualized, but the echoes of the current conflict turn out to be inescapable.

Also inescapable is the wonderful appropriateness of having this thoughtful and disturbing meditation on the qualities that make up heroism and the quixotic nature of fame come from a man who made his considerable reputation playing clean-cut heroes.

As he did in "Unforgiven," "Mystic River" and "Million Dollar Baby," Eastwood handles this nuanced material with aplomb, giving every element of this complex story just the weight it deserves. The director's lean dispassion, his increased willingness to be strongly emotional while retaining an instinctive restraint, continues to astonish. We are close to blessed to have Eastwood still working at age 76 and more fortunate still that challenging material like "Flags of Our Fathers" is what he wants to be doing.

--------------------------------------------

And one from Manhola Dargis:
It seems hard to believe there is anything left to say about World War II that has not already been stated and restated, chewed, digested and spat out for your consideration and that of the Oscar voters. And yet here, at age 76, is Clint Eastwood saying something new and vital about the war in his new film, and here, too, is this great, gray battleship of a man and a movie icon saying something new and urgent about the uses of war and of the men who fight. “Flags of Our Fathers” concerns one of the most lethal encounters on that distant battlefield, but make no mistake: this is also a work of its own politically fraught moment.

The film distills much of the material covered in James Bradley and Ron Powers’s affecting book of the same title about the raising of the American flag during the battle for Iwo Jima. Mr. Bradley’s father, John Bradley, nicknamed Doc and played by an effectively restrained Ryan Phillippe, was one of six men who helped plant the flag (it was the second planted that day) on the island’s highest point on the fifth day of the monthlong American offensive. An Associated Press photographer, Joe Rosenthal, immortalized the moment, and American politicians seized the day, sending the three surviving flag raisers — Doc, Ira Hayes (Adam Beach, delivering heartbreak by the payload) and Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) — on a hugely successful war-bond drive.

Collectively hailed as heroes from sea to shining sea, Rene embraced the spotlight, Doc settled into stoic unhappiness, while Ira, a Pima Indian shattered by Iwo Jima and its dead, sobbed and drank himself into oblivion. The efforts of Doc’s adult son (Tom McCarthy) to tell his father’s story years later give the film its scaffolding, but it is Mr. Beach’s Ira, with his open face and vulnerability, who haunts it. Tears mixing with booze, he floods his scenes with raw emotion that serves as a rebuke to gung-ho fictions like “Sands of Iwo Jima,” a 1949 bad joke in which John Wayne hands an American flag to the real Ira, Doc and Rene so they can raise Old Glory once more, this time over the sands of Southern California.

Mr. Eastwood’s cinematic deconstruction takes a considerably darker view of the historical record. The Air Force had repeatedly bombed Iwo Jima before the American landing on Feb. 19, 1945; by D-Day, barely a blade of grass survived, even as more than 20,000 Japanese soldiers remained dug in. To replicate that scorched earth, Mr. Eastwood drains much of the color from the film’s already muted palette, so much so that many of the scenes on the island look as if they were shot in black and white. It seems impossible that anything living could survive long in this charred, spooky place, and it isn’t long after the invasion that American bodies begin piling up amid the orange-red explosions and dull-red sprays of blood.

During these anxious moments, Mr. Eastwood characteristically keeps his sights (and ears) on the troops and the choreographed chaos of their movements; the focus remains on them, not the filmmaking. When the men hit the shore, the cameras stick close to them, moving and then, during a sudden hailstorm of bullets, running alongside the men as if similarly searching for cover. Despite the occasional bird’s-eye view that underscores the staggering scale of the operation — the hundreds of boats hugging the coast, the thousands of men dotting the land — the filmmaking retains a devastating intimacy, as in a quiet shot of dead soldiers lying facedown on the beach, the water under their bodies receding as if it were blood.

The scenes on Iwo Jima are harrowing, borderline surreal, and even after Doc, Ira and Rene leave the island, they never fully escape it. During the bond drive, the pop of a camera bulb, a flash of lightning and the bang of a backfiring car engine instantly return the three to the island and its horrors, a blurring between past and present that, with seamless, ruthless efficiency, Mr. Eastwood and his longtime editor, Joel Cox, turn into a dreadful memory loop. In Mr. Bradley and Mr. Powers’s book, one Iwo Jima veteran describes seeing his dead friends while sitting in class at medical school; the flashbacks, he says, were “like a movie screen wrapped around me.” We see a version of that movie here, and it is terrible.

Most war movies, even those that claim to be antiwar, overtly or implicitly embrace violence as either a political or cinematic means to an end. Few filmmakers can resist the thrill of the rocket’s red glare and the spectacle of death; the violence is simply too exciting. There are plenty of big bangs in “Flags of Our Fathers,” but because the screenplay, by William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis, oscillates among three separate time frames — Iwo Jima, the bond tour and, less successfully, contemporary scenes involving Doc and his son — and because the flag raisers were pulled off the field before fighting ended, the violence of their war remains at a frenzied pitch. It doesn’t build, evolve, recede; it terrifies and keeps terrifying.

What do we want from war films? Entertainment, mostly, a few hours’ escape to other lands and times, as well as something excitingly different, something reassuringly familiar. If “Flags of Our Fathers” feels so unlike most war movies and sounds so contrary to the usual political rhetoric, it is not because it affirms that war is hell, which it does with unblinking, graphic brutality. It’s because Mr. Eastwood insists, with a moral certitude that is all too rare in our movies, that we extract an unspeakable cost when we ask men to kill other men. There is never any doubt in the film that the country needed to fight this war, that it was necessary; it is the horror at such necessity that defines “Flags of Our Fathers,” not exultation.

In this respect, the film works, among other things, as a gentle corrective to Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” with its state-of-the-art carnage and storybook neatness. (Mr. Spielberg, whose company bought the film rights to “Flags of Our Fathers,” is one of its producers.) Where “Saving Private Ryan” offers technique, Mr. Eastwood’s film suggests metaphysics. Once again, he takes us into the heart of violence and into the hearts of men, seeing where they converge under a night sky as brightly lighted with explosions as any Fourth of July nocturne and in caves where some soldiers are tortured to death and others surrender to madness. He gives us men whose failings are evidence of their humanity and who are, contrary to our revolted sensitivities, no less human because they kill.

One view of Mr. Eastwood is that he has mellowed with age, or at least begun to take serious measure of the violence that has been an animating force in many of his films. In truth, the critical establishment caught up with the director, who for decades has been building a fascinating body of work that considers annihilating violence as a condition of the American character, not an aberration. “Flags of Our Fathers” is an imperfect addition to that body of work, though its flaws are minor and finally irrelevant in a film in which ambivalence and ambiguity are constituent of a worldview, not an aftereffect. Notably, Mr. Eastwood’s next film, “Letters From Iwo Jima,” set to open early next year, revisits the same battle, this time from the point of view of the Japanese.

[Sabin]

The OGger's on my side. The first (of many) middling mainstream print takes?

FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS: B-



Stark in its valor, graphically alive in its pose of action, the famous photograph of five Marines and a Navy corpsman raising the U.S. flag on Mount Suribachi, one of the crests of Iwo Jima, exerts such a singular and iconic power that almost anyone could come up with a different explanation for what remains so stirring about it. The position of the men — that crouch wrenching upward — is a perfect metaphor for the crucial last gasp of American will that pushed the nation to victory at the end of World War II. And, of course, the fact that you can't see any of the men's faces incarnates the selflessness of their mission. They are individuals who, by implication, could be anyone; they are soldiers fused and transformed into a straining human statue that becomes, in an instant, timeless. As they lift the flag, all of us lift the flag. And that is America — or, at least, that is its promise.

In Flags of Our Fathers, director Clint Eastwood pays homage to the physical and spiritual force of that photograph. At the same time, he wants us to know that everything about the image — how it was created, how it inspired people, what went on in the hearts and minds of the soldiers before and after the photo was taken — is less a reality than a mythology, a concoction, a telling, even tragic example of how we, as Americans, are always too eager to overlook the truth and print the legend.

Shot by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal on Feb. 23, 1945, a mere 5 days into the crucial 36-day battle to take the forbidding black-sand Japanese island (which proved to be a tipping point in the Pacific campaign), the photograph entered the national bloodstream virtually overnight, spreading to people through newspapers and other reprints. Eastwood sets his film in two different worlds, cutting back and forth between the Battle of Iwo Jima, in all its shattering chaos and horror, and the homefront public relations war that gets orchestrated around the photograph, with three of those quasi-anonymous, flag-raising soldiers paraded around the country as heroes. They become shills for war bonds, schmoozing with smarmy politicians and posing next to kitschy sculptures of their famous image in a kind of misbegotten military pop-star tour.

As the movie presents it, the stalwart ''Doc'' Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), the lightweight dandy Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford), and the courageous, turbulently troubled Native American Ira Hayes (Adam Beach) all, to a greater or lesser degree, chafed at their roles. They knew they were selling themselves — and, in the process, reducing the gritty bravery of their fellow soldiers to a wall poster, a user-friendly parody of itself. In Flags of Our Fathers, Eastwood is here to tell us that the reality of World War II was scarier and darker than any inspirational photograph. He comes close to saying that the war had no ''heroes,'' just frightened young men straining to survive.

Eastwood pounds us with that message, over and over again. The trouble is, he's preaching to the choir — or, at least, to a culture, profoundly influenced by Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation and Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, that has already absorbed the lesson that ''the Good War,'' while it may have been noble, was never less than hell. I think it's fair to say that most of us are past the point of thinking of the soldiers who fought in WWII as plaster saints, yet Flags of Our Fathers, an honorable and rather plodding movie, insists on demythologizing what no longer needs to be demythologized.

The battle sequences, shot with a desaturated, nearly black-and-white clarity in Iceland, and with an added layer of CGI, evoke Saving Private Ryan, and that's a problem: The rawness of the action holds us, yet Eastwood never approaches Spielberg's mesmerizing logistical virtuosity, his revelations of blood and terror. Inevitably, the heart of the movie shifts Stateside. Yet here too, Flags of Our Fathers offers more earnestness than urgency. I never felt we were truly getting to know the three soldiers outside of their awkward PR juggernaut. Phillippe's Doc is crucially underwritten, and Bradford never gets past a certain self-contained smoothness, though Adam Beach, the star of Smoke Signals, digs deep into Ira Hayes' tormented, drunken ambivalence about his role as a symbol. His lacerating performance suggests what Flags of Our Fathers, with a less didactic historical focus, might have been: an investigation into the everyday lives of American soldiers who saved the world but never knew what to do with the agonies they carried home with them.

[Damien]

Rex Reed has been making crazy, over-the-top statements about the end of civilization for decades. That's his modus operandum, and as Magilla says, it can be quite amusing. (Maybe you have to be old enough to remember a time when, shockingly enough. Rex was consider the quintessence of young, hip and sophisticated. There was a reason why he was cast in Myra Breckinridge, and why he was such a favorite on late 60s early 70s talk shows.) He's a lousy film reviewer because he has no concept of film language, and is instead in the worthless "liberal/humanism" school of reviewing as Bosley Crowther and Judith Crist. (Anyone remember the feud between him and Crist around 1960, stemming from his making fun of her for doing commercials for a femine hygiene spray?)

I know a couple people who know Reed and they say he is anything but a lousy human being, that he is warm and kind and generous of spirit. And he is still embarrassed to death about the shoplifting incident which he describes as a brain fart. I also know someone who had sex with Rex once, but they were both drunk on margaritas at the time -- and, hey, it's one way to see the inside of the Dakota.