Flags of Our Fathers

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The Original BJ
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Post by The Original BJ »

dws, I enjoyed reading your article a lot too. One point I think you really nailed is how unfair it was that some critics lambasted this film for being little more than shameless Oscar-bait. I wasn't a big fan of this film, but it is ridiculous to claim that Eastwood and Co. merely made Flags as an attempt to bag more trophies. Just because Oscar favors certain directors and subject matters doesn't necessarily make those projects mere award ploys.
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Post by dws1982 »

Thanks Damien. I don't know if you've read it yet, but over the past day or so, I've edited the piece slightly--mostly just changing a few sentences that needed clarification.

There's a guy named Carloss Chamberlin who has written some great pieces on Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby in Senses of Cinema (He also wrote the best piece on Good Night and Good Luck that I've read, calling it, "a rather disturbing attack, McCarthyesque in its ferocity, on an entire generation of toothless Cold War liberals."). I kept waiting on him two write something about Flags, especially since--whether positive or negative--there were so few in-depth, thoughtful takes on the film out there. But nothing ever appeared (maybe he'll publish something about Flags and Letters in the next issue), and I've been wanting to write more anyway since I've been out of school, so I decided I'd put something out there, at least until something else comes along.
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Post by Damien »

Daniel, thanks for posting your eloquent defense of the film. Because it's late, I was only able to give your piece a cursory look, but will give it another more closely-attenued read in the next day or two.

As someone who has advocated Eastwood going as far back as to the widely-ridiculed 1973 film Breezy, I appreciated any defense of this wonderful filmmaker, even when I think he's not quite on his game . My beloved just bought Flags and the supern Letters From Iwo Jima, so I will give Flags another look.
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Post by dws1982 »

Here's a link to a fairly long form (just over 4000 words) piece I finally completed in defense of Flags. I'm still not really happy with it, and I hope to eventually expand it more. After spending most of my spare time in the past few days watching the movie and working on this, I still think of it as a very rough draft (certain things I bring up, but don't really explain; I hope to finish this some day), but there it is.
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Post by The Original BJ »

Sonic's comment on Eastwood's lack of agility reminded me that the director's mishandling of present-day bookend sequences has plagued his films before (and forgive me if someone down-thread has already mentioned this.) The Bridges of Madison County is a much better film than Flags of Our Fathers, but the modern sequences still suffer from the same corniness, theme-statement dialogue, and perfunctory character development that plague this picture. I've always wondered how Eastwood could have handled Bridges's central storyline so beautifully, but trip up around the edges; now I'm starting to wonder if this is a trend.
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Post by Mister Tee »

This may be just me, but a subsidiary confusion during the old codger collage near the end was, they switched Sweeneys on me -- one moment I was watching Cariou speak, then, just as on Broadway, Hearn had replaced him -- I thought I was hallucinating.

Damien's comment about the Jesse Bradford character brought something else to mind. I thought his schemer was perhaps the most fully drawn of the group; the seamless glide into note-perfect sentiment at the first bond rally was one of the best moments in the film. But did it make any sense for a character so shrewd to have been a lowly janitor the rest of his life? I know that's what the facts are -- it's one of the handicaps of writing "real-life" stories -- but it seemed to me the character as portrayed had too much Sammy Glick in him not to survive at a higher level.
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Post by Sonic Youth »

I'll see it again. It's not a bad movie. He's just not the right director for it.

There's another very, very odd thing about this movie that I don't know how to explain. Nothing about this film felt either contemporary or of the period. It felt like the sort of 1940s type film that directors such as... I don't know, John Sturges were making in the 1960s. There was something stiff and stagy and fusty about the film, particularly the present day scenes, as if Clint's development came to a halt four decades ago. This is something I've never noticed in any of his other films, but that same quality briefly appeared again in Letters From Iwo Jima during Watanabe's dinner party flashback. Just a little... off.
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Post by dws1982 »

Damien wrote:Actually, the Old Codger to whom I was referring is called Mr. Beech -- the guy talking to Phillippe's son at the beginning of the picture -- and IMDb later told me it was Sweeney Todd himself, Len Cariou. Watching the movie, I had no idea who Mr. Beech was in the World War 2 scenes.

Len Cariou = John Benjamin Hickey in the WWII Scenes.
George Hearn = Stark Sands in WWII Scenes (A pretty minor character in the WWII scenes, seen during the card-playing scene at Camp Tarawa, and during the final battle sequence, where Ryan Phillippe is wounded).
Harve Pressnell = Neal McDonough in WWII scenes.
George Grizzard = Ryan Phillippe.

The first time I saw it, I actually didn't pick up on who George Hearn's and Harve Pressnell's characters were in the WWII scenes, and I had read the book before. Apparently no one here--other than me--would ever want to watch it again, but like most Eastwood films, it really is a movie that rewards repeat viewings. (Some Eastwood films, like Mystic River, don't hold up as well on repeat viewings. But either way, his films are usually worth taking a second look at.)
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Post by Damien »

Sonic Youth wrote:Ryan Phillipe is ostensibly the central character - he's the old codger - but it doesn't feel like he's the film's protagonist.
Actually, the Old Codger to whom I was referring is called Mr. Beech -- the guy talking to Phillippe's son at the beginning of the picture -- and IMDb later told me it was Sweeney Todd himself, Len Cariou. Watching the movie, I had no idea who Mr. Beech was in the World War 2 scenes.
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Post by Sonic Youth »

Big Magilla wrote:Any film with as many characters is bound to be somewhat confusing as to who is who, but I was ale to keep them straight in the theatre - a task made even easier on DVD, where you can pause the film and look up the cast list on the imdb. or slow reverse back to your point of reference.

Me, I don't want to refer to an index while watching a movie. Ryan Phillipe is ostensibly the central character - he's the old codger - but it doesn't feel like he's the film's protagonist. A stronger focal point would have helped.

I also said last week the film doesn't suit Eastwood's straightforward temperment, and the reason is primarily structural. The story is told in flashbacks within flashbacks, and these multiple degrees of separation is not where Eastwood's expertise lies. Of the many gifts he has as a director, agility is not one of them. He had enough trouble trying to juggle two simultaneous crescendos at the end of Mystic River.

Plus, he's no Spielberg in the battle department.

And I still don't believe Phillippe has star presence. He has trouble with enunciation, as if his upper palate keeps getting in the way when he talks.
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Post by Damien »

Tee, I think your analysis is spot on (I just watched the film last night -- I'm having as hardva time as you playing catch up).

The film is a real muddle, because it doesn't seem to know what it wants to be about. There are so many themes and sub-themes floating around here: the character of The Soldier, the cult of celebrityhood, the absurdity of war, struggles with self-identity, American Momism, the nature of heroism, as well as some standard war movie tropes and some nice character studies.

But primarily it's about celebrity and hero worship, and I had the same reaction as Tee -- much of the time the picture plays like a non-comedic version of Hail The Conquering Hero. (Jesse Bradford's brash go-getter is close to a comic figure, and has his roots in Harold Lloyd -- he'd be right at home in a Preston Sturges movie.) The tone and the material don’t mesh.

But not only are the movie's issues confused and undeveloped, as Tee points out, the film itself is terribly confusing in terms of who is who and who did what and what was the relationship of one person to another (like Tee, I didn’t know for sure who other than the Holy Trinity was at either flag raising, or which soldier each mother belonged to. And I never did figure out who the old codger narrating the film was). It’s a real problem in that the non-linear structure of the film only further confuses a narrative that is ABOUT confusion and misreadings. As a result, the film is never terribly moving, or terribly compelling.

Flags’s treatment of the way the three men were manipulated by politicians – while presumably accurate – seems pretty facile and not in the least startling to us in this day and age (much in the same way that, to Robert Redford’s surprise, no one was particularly surprised or concerned that a TV game show was crooked.)

Eastwood’s compassion is strongly on view but so is his tendency to turn unlikable characters into buffoonish caricatures. (That’s probably more of Paul Haggis than Eastwood’s, but as the director the responsibility ultimately lies with Clint’s). Flags Of Our Father’s is an honorable failure but a failure nonetheless. It does succeed in one thing – showing that Ryan Phillippe does have real star presence.
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Post by Big Magilla »

It's not a perfect film - nothing in 2006 was - but it has the melancholy air of Eastwood at his best and that's a fine thing even if the whole is not quite as fine as Letters From Iwo Jima, his other film this year. The two fit together more cohesively than the abstract pieces of Babel. Could another director have made a cozier, warmer, funnier film? Possibly, but that would be somebody else's movie, not Eastwood's.

Any film with as many characters is bound to be somewhat confusing as to who is who, but I was ale to keep them straight in the theatre - a task made even easier on DVD, where you can pause the film and look up the cast list on the imdb. or slow reverse back to your point of reference.

Eastwood's point of view is from the inside looking out. Yeah, the non-vets are portrayed as jerks, but so are the Americans from the Japanese point of view in Letters.

Adam Beach strikes all the right notes as Ira Hayes. The guy didn't suddenly snap in real life any more than he did in the film. He was tightly wound, waiting to explode, one of the year's best portrayals of a character in conflict - right up there with Ryan Gosling in Half Neslon, Jackie Earle Haley in Little Children and Helen Mirren in The Queen.
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Post by dws1982 »

It sure is lonely being alone in this boat.

But I'll manage; I've been there before and probably will be again.
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Post by Mister Tee »

My frantic Oscar-cramming (is anyone else having the difficulty catching up I am?) continued this weekend, finally catching up with Flags.

On paper, the subject matter of this film is far more to my taste than Iwo Jima's, but I thought this film amounted to substantially less. It was absorbing enough to watch, and had interesting elements scattered throughout, but I thought overall it was a mess.

The problems probably began with the non-fiction source material. Such a wide-ranging study of various characters -- centered on one brief period, but covering disparate lives over a period of many years -- is something easily acceptable in book form, but horribly difficult to bring off in the demanding dramatic format of film. (Seabiscuit is another, far worse example of a probably solid book the filmmakers couldn't harness for the screen) I'm not sure Haggis/Eastwood ever figured out exactly what the core of their story was...if they had, I don't see how they could have spent the last 10-15 minutes on that "who cares?" father-son relationship. (And what BJ said way down-thread is absolutely true: that final hospital embrace is a complete disgrace. I could just about hear Spielberg's voice saying "Remember how I screwed up the end of Saving Private Ryan? We're going to do the same thing to your movie") I think this lack of focus accounts for why so many people felt the movie restated its points so often. I can accept and appreciate that the filmmakers are dancing around themes...but those themes need to head somewhere finite in the end, and I don't think that successfully happens.

A related, maybe more central problem: I don't think Eastwood/Haggis ever really came to grips with their most dramatic/resonant element -- the fact that the wrong guys were getting the credit for famous shot. That's obviously the core of the story -- the part I never knew -- but it emerges so in dribs and drabs that I don't think it ever registers with the full dramatic impact it ought to. In fact, perhaps it's just me being slow, but I found the presentation of the various families, and the references to the true flag-raisers, hopelessly confusing. The roles played by our three main characters were clear, but I was never quite sure who else was in the picture but had been killed, or who should have been in the picture because they did the original raising, and how the mothers of each matched up. Are we saying Judith Ivey's son was in the picture, as she thought, but that no one would acknowledge it? Well, what difference does it make if he's in the picture, when the picture is only of the impostor-flag-raisers? What point are we making -- that some people were robbed of credit of being in the second shot, or simply that the first group was screwed by history? Granted, the overall point may be everyone on the island deserved the acclaim received by the singled-out few, but I still think the expression of all this is hopelessly muddled. (It may not have helped that I didn't recognize many of the actors, so I had trouble telling their characters apart, and too many names were thrown around for me to keep track)

Beyond that, I think -- as other have suggested -- Eastwood may have been the wrong director for this project because it doesn't quite suit his temperament. He's of course done revisionism (as in Unforgiven), but of a rather more mournful sort. The revisionism in this story is black-comic, and, though Clint has many gifts, a satiric touch is not among them. This movie has a bit of Hail the Conquering Hero buried within it, yet the comic aspects are utterly missed (even if they were later negated by the horror of battle, they should have been there in the first place). It seems to me the film needed more the tone of Billy Wilder c. A Foreign Affair (or Stalag 17). Eastwood's (understandable) devotion to veterans gets in his way here; makes the whole thing feel too reverential where a touch of absurdism needed to poke through.

I also think there's far more than the usual display of Clint's worst tendency: characterizing certain characters as jerks. Nearly everyone agrees the white-trash relatives are the worst aspect of Million Dollar Baby. This film seemed to have dozens of such characters -- pretty much anyone who WASN'T A VETERAN, most emphatically including all elected public official (except Harry Truman, whose humble upbrining apparently exempted him from ridicule).

I also think the Ira Hayes story is too overwrought from the get-go -- Beach seems to play every scene at 8 or 9 on the 10 scale, rather than slowly building to explosion. Probably, though the real fault is Haggis -- his views on race remain the shallowest, and he's just not up to dealing with such a retro racism and making it in any way fresh.

It's not as if (as many, and I above, have said) I hated the film. It had alot of nice touches (the way the photographer accidentally catches the slanted-flag shot; the camaraderie of the guys; some of the harrowing battle scenes). It looks good. It didn't bore me or anything. But the original critical raves seem way out of scale to what I saw up on the screen.
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Post by dws1982 »

This isn't exactly my long form piece on this; once I see it on DVD in a few weeks, with the ability to watch certain scenes over and over, I can formulate that. But it's fairly long, and fairly scattered. Spoilers ahoy for those who haven't seen it yet.

I know you've called it a "War Movie" War Movie, Sabin, but I'm not sure I can agree with that. To me, Eastwood establishes an interesting dynamic in the early, training scenes: groups are emphasized--almost every scene involves large groups of four or more people. Well, this isn't necessarily that interesting compared to the way he switches that in the battle scenes, which mostly emphasize either A) Individuals, or B) Duos. There are two major exceptions to this: The first is the taking of The Photograph, which is mostly underplayed by Eastwood, and the second is what I refer to as the Montage of Death.

The Montage of Death, for me, is one of the most fascinating things in the film because of the way it stands out from the rest of the battle scenes. It's basically the centerpiece of the film, and the way Eastwood crosscuts between it and the flag raising scene made it extremely disturbing for me. (This is the same flag raising scene at the very beginning of the movie, and it loops back into it here.) For the earlier parts of the movie, during the battle scenes, most death had been reserved for either Japanese soldiers or basically extras playing American soldiers. Not one of the guys we were introduced to in the training scenes had been killed. But then suddenly, in this sequence, death is all around. It can't be escaped. Eastwood does something I've never seen in another war movie--we know that three of the guys survive, but every other character we were introduced to in the beginning is eliminated within one sequence (less than ten minutes long). And it's not one of those "Let's kill the least famous actor first, and work our way up to the biggest star" things we see in other war movies--Barry Pepper gets taken down first; Death in war isn't as discriminating as death in war movies, and this sequence underlines that fact.

It goes back to the starting point at the end of this sequence, with Iggy's disappearance, and the way Eastwood handles the torture and death of Iggy is one of my favorite things about the movie. It also seems to be Eastwood's most direct comment on modern war films. Nowdays, especially in the age of big special effects, most war movies think it's their duty to create some super-realistic combat situation for the audience, but they forget what Sam Fuller said: Unless the ushers stand up at the screen and shoot bullets at the audience, it's impossible for a film to convey the real experience of being in combat. Eastwood wisely leaves Iggy's torture and death offscreen. He understands that whatever it was that haunted James Bradley for the rest of his life was something that could never be approximated through some flashy makeup and visual effects, and that to try to show it would be gratuitous. It makes for a heartbreaking scene on its own, and it's also an example of where most war films get it wrong.

The structure, for one, may be a little too reliant on the constant flashbacks for its own good, but it leads to a strange thing for a war movie: By the time the guys ship out from Camp Tarawa to Iwo, we already know exactly who lives and dies. (Harve Pressnell tells us that the three other flagraisers were dead within a week of the taking of The Photograph. The earliest battle scenes and modern scenes indicate that something very bad happens to Jamie Bell's character. We see Paul Walker's mom get the news about her son's death when we see the picture making the rounds around newspapers across the country.) It indicates to me, for one, that Eastwood isn't interested in using their fates to create cheap suspense like some war movies would. The structure also leads into that final scene which was just beautiful for me. The guys get the brief respite from the front lines of the battle, but at best it's just happiness for a few minutes. It's a serenely beautiful scene, but it's very bittersweet, because we know the real ending. And then a typical Eastwood final shot--a God's-eye view of the beach.

There's more that I may not have time to go into tonight; I think it does have a connection to Eastwood's career as a symbol of masculinity: Whereas Eastwood was dismissed for decades as nothing more than a symbol, these men are brought back to the States and also dismissed as symbols. This part is where I really feel I need to watch it on DVD again. Eastwood seems to sympathize with both sides here: While he understands the emotions behind the desire to create heroes, he also understands that this kind of reductive thinking does some major harm to these guys, mentally speaking. This is one part of the movie that I'm not sure what to make of.

The three protagonists are all traditionally Eastwoodian characters--all men of few words, none are extroverted, all reluctant to reveal much about themselves, all are on the outside of mainstream society. (Hayes because of his ethnicity, Gagnon doesn't fit in in the military, and Bradley himself seems kind of standoff-ish.) And of course, there's loneliness all over the place. Even when they come back to America, where they're hailed as heroes, they all are kept completely on the outside. This contrasts with military life, where the group collectively blends into one functioning body; Here the crowd is the collective body, while the guys stand out.

There's a lot more to talk about, like the way Eastwood almost never shows us The Photograph in the film except in some distorted way. But I hope this--along with what I posted before--is a nice start.
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