Flags Of Our Fathers

[October 18th, 2006] According to the opening voiceover of Flags of Our Fathers, the American people require "easy-to-understand truths and damn few words" in order to make sense out of war. The voiceover outlines the intellectual locus of the film: When it comes to making heroes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Meanwhile, director Clint Eastwood drags us through a montage of historic photographs and scenes of old men telling their war stories. Even at this early stage, this much is clear: Flags may look like an epic war film, but it's really just a grisly, clichéd and exhausting lecture. Eastwood should have followed the advice of his movie's central theme and allowed the events and images to speak for themselves. Instead, didacticism drags down a potentially fascinating and tragic historical drama. Even the images themselves are problematic; footage that should have been stunning—such as an aerial view of the massive U.S. Navy buildup around the southern beach of Iwo Jima—is, through Eastwood's lens, flat and melodramatic. Other moments are just plain corny. At a banquet in the heroes' honor, waiters serve a meringue sculpture of their historic flag-raising and then, without any sense of irony whatsoever, pour bright red strawberry gore all over the dessert. Throughout the picture, the characters and dialogue are as canned as Army rations, so we can't even take pleasure in pulling for the unlucky young men fighting and dying on a desolate island. In fact, the violence that kills most of the boys serves the viewer best by clearing up any confusion about who is who. With poorly delineated characterizations and largely unfamiliar actors, the main characters are set apart primarily by being the only ones left standing, and the movie soldiers on, muttering lamely to itself about heroism. After all is said and done, a single picture really cannot make sense out of a war. Rather, it illuminates a moral fault line and inspires viewers to stand on one side or the other. Flags is the first installment of Eastwood's ambitious pair of films about the Battle of Iwo Jima. Here's hoping that the second installment, Letters from Iwo Jima, which will endeavor to tell the story from the Japanese perspective, blows its predecessor away. R .