Letters From Iwo Jima

The following is a review I wrote for next week's issue of 34th Street Magazine, Penn's weekly arts & leisure magazine :

Like Steve Nash or a fine wine, it seems as if Clint Eastwood is getting better and better in his old age. A companion piece to his film Flags of Our Fathers, Letters From Iwo Jima tells the story of the infamous WWII Battle of Iwo Jima from the point of view of the Japanese soldiers. The film follows baker-turned-reluctant infantryman Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya) as he fights for his life alongside his countrymen, for whom honor and respect are paramount to life. Leading the Japanese attack is Gen. Tadamishi Kurabayashi (Ken Watanabe), an innovative leader who has a great respect for his American counterparts. We all know how the battle will end, but this knowledge doesn’t make the proceedings any less enthralling.

Eastwood does a remarkable job with this movie, perhaps his finest and most profound. We’ve had plenty of Saving Private Ryans, but this is the first American film to take the Japanese perspective and portray the Japanese soldiers as the normal, sympathetic people that they were. It’s shocking to see how much pressure was put on the soldiers to die with honor, even if it meant blowing themselves up with a grenade to avoid capture. Oddly, we find ourselves rooting for our Japanese friends, praying they’ll survive and devastated when they don’t.

Eastwood’s clear focus is to tell the story as directly and succinctly as possible. There is not a single artistic flourish, no extraneous shot; every single element is used sparingly and specifically to tell the story. The dialogue, all in Japanese, is superb and all the actors are fantastic. The first hour is a bit slow, but overall, this is easily one of the best films of the year and one of the most important war films in the history of American cinema.

Grade: A-