What I Rented - Flags of Our Fathers

The Battle of Iwo Jima was the first Pacific battle of World War II fought on Japanese soil. By capturing the desolate island, the Americans would cut off an important way station for Japanese planes and ships, as well as procure an essential stepping stone toward the Japanese mainland. It was a brutal battle, resulting in thousands of deaths. Yet, one moment, the raising of an American flag atop a hill and the photograph that was taken of it, brought hope to millions. Flags of Our Fathers focuses on the events, and people, surrounding this famous photograph.

Clint Eastwood’s film is incredibly ambitious, but its unfocused narrative spends so much time shifting back and forth from multiple points of view and periods of time that the emotional throughway is hard to find.

The opening act of the film is brilliant though, as Eastwood shows the arrival on Iwo Jima and the moments leading up to the first attack. The narrative is straight forward, the characters easily identifiable and distinguishable from one another, and the tension mounts steadily. The first moments on Iwo Jima are among the very best in the entire film. The marines storm the beach and find it completely deserted. As they walk further inland, Eastwood slowly reveals that the Japanese soldiers are hiding in elaborate underground bunkers, armed, and waiting for the perfect moment to strike. The battle scene that follows is harrowing.

The power of this first scene overshadows the rest of the movie, especially since Eastwood moves back to the American mainland to explore the power of propaganda. After the picture of the flag raising is taken, the men involved with raising it are brought back to the States and sent on a public relations tour in order to raise money for the war effort. As the film shows, the three surviving men (three others subsequently died in further combat) have difficulty accepting their roles as heroes. It’s an interesting deconstruction of heroism and finding reality behind “written history”, but too many scenes show the same thing. The men are praised for their heroic efforts, they put on smiling faces in front of the crowds, and then fall apart when the cameras are taken away.

The performers all try their best to make this duality interesting, but the script just moves from one similar situation to another, so even the performances become tedious. As the film moves into its third act, it goes even further into the future, trying to explore how the horrors of war affect aging. Eastwood finds some great moments in this section, including a tearful hospital scene between a father and son, but it’s another movie entirely, suddenly becoming a tale of a son sorting through history.

The further away from the battle scenes Eastwood takes the audience, the further away he gets from telling the emotional truth of that fateful photograph. An important aspect of the movie is that the American public never got to know the real men behind the flag raising, and after the movie, I was still unclear on who two of those men were. As the focus keeps shifting, Flags of Our Fathers moves away from character driven drama and takes on a more ideological stance, criticizing the government for exploitation, or commenting on how history is rarely truthful. By the end, with so many ideas dangling, Flags of Our Fathers resorts to a constant barrage of voiceovers in order to piece everything together into a cohesive whole. The ideas are compelling, but they are spoon fed to the audience, turning what began as an immersive drama into a didactic essay.

Star Rating - **1/2 outof 4