Movie Review: 'Flags of Our Fathers'
On February 23, 1945, D+4 of the battle for Iwo Jima
(code-named Operation Detachment), five Marines and a Navy corpsman clambered
up to the summit of Mt. Suribachi, a dormant volcano on the southern tip of the
7.5-square mile island; with an altitude of 166 m (546 ft), Suribachi dominates
the unusually flat terrain of Iwo Jima and, as such, was an important military
objective – whoever held the high ground could direct artillery and mortar fire
at any point on the small island located nearly 700 miles southeast of Tokyo.
The five Marines - Franklin Sousley, Harlon Block, Michael Strank, Rene Gagnon, and Ira Hayes, along with their Navy medic, John “Doc” Bradley – were just a small fraction of the 110,000 members of the Fleet Marine Force that were involved in Operation Detachment, but as a result of what at the time they considered a routine – almost mundane – assignment, they became immortalized when Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal took one of the most famous pictures of all time: “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima.”
The now-famous photograph, to people who don’t know much about World War II, looks a hell of a lot as though the flag is being raised at the triumphal climax of the Battle of Iwo Jima; however, as Clint Eastwood’s 2006 film Flags of Our Fathers points out, Rosenthal captured the moment on the fourth day of what would be a four-week long battle that would claim nearly 28,000 American casualties – 8,226 killed – and almost all of Iwo Jima’s 22,000 Japanese defenders. Indeed, a few minutes after the photograph was taken, one of the flag-raisers was dead, and when Iwo Jima – the name means “Sulfur Island” in Japanese – was declared secure on March 16, 1945, only Gagnon, Hayes, and “Doc” Bradley survived.
Based on the best-selling book by John Bradley’s son James and co-author Ron Powers, Flags of Our Fathers is a stirring, earnest, and – above all – very relevant film about the true nature of courage under fire, the clash between truth and wartime propaganda, and the power of mass media in a democracy to shape public opinion.
Like Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, and The Pacific, Eastwood's film is also about the bonds formed between men in wartime, and the pros and cons of such bonds both during the war and after. This theme is stated various times either through the interaction of the characters or in actual bits of dialogue, such as this voiceover from the film’s final act:
James Bradley: I finally came to the conclusion that he maybe he was right: maybe there are no such things as heroes, maybe there are just people like my dad. I finally came to understand why they were so uncomfortable being called heroes. Heroes are something we create, something we need. It's a way for us to understand what is almost incomprehensible, how people could sacrifice so much for us, but for my dad and these men the risks they took, the wounds they suffered, they did that for their buddies. They may have fought for their country but they died for their friends. For the man in front for the man beside him, and if we wish to truly honor these men we should remember them the way they really were, the way my dad remembered them.
Flags of Our Fathers is one of Eastwood’s most ambitious films, not only because it is cinematically complex and tells a multi-layered story, but because it’s only one half of a two-film saga about one of World War II’s bloodiest battles. (Letters from Iwo Jima, which was released a few months after Flags, tells the story of Sulfur Island’s Japanese defenders.)
Like the Bradley-Powers book, the screenplay by William Broyles, Jr. (Apollo 13) and Paul Haggis (Million Dollar Baby, Crash, Casino Royale) tells the American side of the Battle of Iwo Jima as a series of flashbacks, starting with a nightmare that a now-old John Bradley (George Grizzard) is having.
In this nightmare, Bradley’s younger version (Ryan Phillippe) is back on Iwo, wearing his Marine-issue combat uniform and helmet, hearing the words “Corpsman! Corpsman!” being screamed by unseen Marines in an eerily abandoned lunar-like landscape.
After the audience has been introduced to various characters in contemporary post-World War II times as James Bradley (Tom McCarthy) interviews them in preparation for his book, Flags of Our Fathers veers back and forth through various periods of time, alternating between the preparations for Operation Detachment, the taking of the picture itself, the government’s “Mighty Seventh” War Bonds Drive PR campaign which centered on the three surviving flag raisers – “Doc” Bradley, Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford), and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach ), and the actual flag-raising itself.
Dave Severance: Nobody even noticed that second flag going up. Everybody saw that damn picture and made up their own story about it. But your dad and the others knew what they had done, and what they had not done. All your friends dying, it's hard enough to be called a hero for saving somebody's life. But for putting up a pole?
My Take
The five Marines - Franklin Sousley, Harlon Block, Michael Strank, Rene Gagnon, and Ira Hayes, along with their Navy medic, John “Doc” Bradley – were just a small fraction of the 110,000 members of the Fleet Marine Force that were involved in Operation Detachment, but as a result of what at the time they considered a routine – almost mundane – assignment, they became immortalized when Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal took one of the most famous pictures of all time: “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima.”
The now-famous photograph, to people who don’t know much about World War II, looks a hell of a lot as though the flag is being raised at the triumphal climax of the Battle of Iwo Jima; however, as Clint Eastwood’s 2006 film Flags of Our Fathers points out, Rosenthal captured the moment on the fourth day of what would be a four-week long battle that would claim nearly 28,000 American casualties – 8,226 killed – and almost all of Iwo Jima’s 22,000 Japanese defenders. Indeed, a few minutes after the photograph was taken, one of the flag-raisers was dead, and when Iwo Jima – the name means “Sulfur Island” in Japanese – was declared secure on March 16, 1945, only Gagnon, Hayes, and “Doc” Bradley survived.
Based on the best-selling book by John Bradley’s son James and co-author Ron Powers, Flags of Our Fathers is a stirring, earnest, and – above all – very relevant film about the true nature of courage under fire, the clash between truth and wartime propaganda, and the power of mass media in a democracy to shape public opinion.
Like Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, and The Pacific, Eastwood's film is also about the bonds formed between men in wartime, and the pros and cons of such bonds both during the war and after. This theme is stated various times either through the interaction of the characters or in actual bits of dialogue, such as this voiceover from the film’s final act:
James Bradley: I finally came to the conclusion that he maybe he was right: maybe there are no such things as heroes, maybe there are just people like my dad. I finally came to understand why they were so uncomfortable being called heroes. Heroes are something we create, something we need. It's a way for us to understand what is almost incomprehensible, how people could sacrifice so much for us, but for my dad and these men the risks they took, the wounds they suffered, they did that for their buddies. They may have fought for their country but they died for their friends. For the man in front for the man beside him, and if we wish to truly honor these men we should remember them the way they really were, the way my dad remembered them.
Flags of Our Fathers is one of Eastwood’s most ambitious films, not only because it is cinematically complex and tells a multi-layered story, but because it’s only one half of a two-film saga about one of World War II’s bloodiest battles. (Letters from Iwo Jima, which was released a few months after Flags, tells the story of Sulfur Island’s Japanese defenders.)
Like the Bradley-Powers book, the screenplay by William Broyles, Jr. (Apollo 13) and Paul Haggis (Million Dollar Baby, Crash, Casino Royale) tells the American side of the Battle of Iwo Jima as a series of flashbacks, starting with a nightmare that a now-old John Bradley (George Grizzard) is having.
In this nightmare, Bradley’s younger version (Ryan Phillippe) is back on Iwo, wearing his Marine-issue combat uniform and helmet, hearing the words “Corpsman! Corpsman!” being screamed by unseen Marines in an eerily abandoned lunar-like landscape.
After the audience has been introduced to various characters in contemporary post-World War II times as James Bradley (Tom McCarthy) interviews them in preparation for his book, Flags of Our Fathers veers back and forth through various periods of time, alternating between the preparations for Operation Detachment, the taking of the picture itself, the government’s “Mighty Seventh” War Bonds Drive PR campaign which centered on the three surviving flag raisers – “Doc” Bradley, Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford), and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach ), and the actual flag-raising itself.
Dave Severance: Nobody even noticed that second flag going up. Everybody saw that damn picture and made up their own story about it. But your dad and the others knew what they had done, and what they had not done. All your friends dying, it's hard enough to be called a hero for saving somebody's life. But for putting up a pole?
My Take
Unlike 1949’s Sands of Iwo Jima, Eastwood’s film
isn’t a simple made-to-entertain war movie. It’s both a very personal memoir
about a man learning about his father’s past – Doc Bradley never told his son
James about his role in the flag-raising or that he’d earned a Navy Cross on
Iwo Jima – and a history lesson – we see how the Battle of Iwo Jima was fought,
some of the tactics involved, learn about the war bond drives that raised money
that enabled the government to pay for the weapons and materiel used in World
War II, and the huge emotional toll paid by the survivors of such battles as
Iwo Jima. (This last factor is painfully evident when we watch the scenes that
deal with Adam Beach’s Ira Hayes, the Pima Indian Marine who not only had to
deal with prejudice from white Americans, but also a bad case of “survivor’s
guilt” that led him to alcoholism.)
It’s also a cautionary tale about the way government often “spins” certain things during wartime for its own purposes. As a result of the Jessica Lynch incident during the initial stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, it’s hard to not see a certain cynicism in the way the Treasury Department, here personified by Bud Gerber (John Slattery), takes Doc, Renee, and Ira on a cross-country tour to sell war bonds.
Whether or not the real Gerber was as unctuous as the movie depicts him, I have no idea, and indeed I sometimes question if this part of the story is accurate, but the man isn’t interested in such things as “truth” or “accuracy” about the two flag raisings and which Marines were involved and which weren’t in Rosenthal’s photograph:
Ira Hayes: Hank wasn't in the picture.
Bud Gerber: Sorry?
Ira Hayes: Hank didn't raise that flag. He raised the other one. The real flag.
Bud Gerber: The what? The real... the real flag? There's a real flag?
John "Doc" Bradley: Yeah, ours was the replacement flag. We put it up when they took the other one down.
Bud Gerber: Am I the only one getting a headache here? You know about this?
Keyes Beech: It was after it was already in the papers. The mothers had already been told by then.
Bud Gerber: Aw, that's it, that's beautiful. Yeah, that's beautiful. Yeah, why tell me? I'm only the guy that has to explain it to a hundred and fifty million Americans. Who is in the goddamn picture? Are any of you guys in the goddamn picture?
Ira Hayes: Yeah, we're in the goddamn picture.
Bud Gerber: Six guys raising a flag over Iwo Jima. Victory is ours. You're three of them, right?
John "Doc" Bradley: This was the fifth day, sir. The battle went on for thirty-five more.
Bud Gerber: Well, what'd you do, raise a goddamn flag every time you stopped for lunch?
Ira Hayes: [whispers to Bradley] Can I hit this guy?
Flags of Our Fathers isn’t, as a few other critics have implied, a liberal interpretation of or criticism of American participation in World War II nor does it minimize the courage and sacrifice of the men and women who served our country during mankind’s biggest and bloodiest conflict. Considering that Steven Spielberg was one of the film’s executive producers, to say that Eastwood, Broyles, and Haggis have created a negative film about Iwo Jima or the men who fought and died there is rather ridiculous.
Despite having a great cast, incredible battle sequences – which are wisely inter-cut with the war bond drive sequences – a lovely and subtle score composed by the director himself, and realistic special effects, Flags of Our Fathers wasn’t a big box-office success; according to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), it earned a domestic gross of slightly more than $33 million.
War films, by and large, don’t do well in times of war, at least, in times of post-World War II conflict. With American military forces in action not just in Iraq but also Afghanistan, not too many moviegoers wanted to spend their entertainment budget on a film that, although supportive of the men and women who served from 1941 to 1945 with honor and distinction, isn’t an escapist action-adventure flick with simplistic heroics and Hollywood stereotypes.
Still, Eastwood has done the World War II generation and the nation a great service by making the Iwo Jima Duology. It has its tragic and even bitter scenes, of course, but its soul is clearly in the right place.
It’s also a cautionary tale about the way government often “spins” certain things during wartime for its own purposes. As a result of the Jessica Lynch incident during the initial stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, it’s hard to not see a certain cynicism in the way the Treasury Department, here personified by Bud Gerber (John Slattery), takes Doc, Renee, and Ira on a cross-country tour to sell war bonds.
Whether or not the real Gerber was as unctuous as the movie depicts him, I have no idea, and indeed I sometimes question if this part of the story is accurate, but the man isn’t interested in such things as “truth” or “accuracy” about the two flag raisings and which Marines were involved and which weren’t in Rosenthal’s photograph:
Ira Hayes: Hank wasn't in the picture.
Bud Gerber: Sorry?
Ira Hayes: Hank didn't raise that flag. He raised the other one. The real flag.
Bud Gerber: The what? The real... the real flag? There's a real flag?
John "Doc" Bradley: Yeah, ours was the replacement flag. We put it up when they took the other one down.
Bud Gerber: Am I the only one getting a headache here? You know about this?
Keyes Beech: It was after it was already in the papers. The mothers had already been told by then.
Bud Gerber: Aw, that's it, that's beautiful. Yeah, that's beautiful. Yeah, why tell me? I'm only the guy that has to explain it to a hundred and fifty million Americans. Who is in the goddamn picture? Are any of you guys in the goddamn picture?
Ira Hayes: Yeah, we're in the goddamn picture.
Bud Gerber: Six guys raising a flag over Iwo Jima. Victory is ours. You're three of them, right?
John "Doc" Bradley: This was the fifth day, sir. The battle went on for thirty-five more.
Bud Gerber: Well, what'd you do, raise a goddamn flag every time you stopped for lunch?
Ira Hayes: [whispers to Bradley] Can I hit this guy?
Flags of Our Fathers isn’t, as a few other critics have implied, a liberal interpretation of or criticism of American participation in World War II nor does it minimize the courage and sacrifice of the men and women who served our country during mankind’s biggest and bloodiest conflict. Considering that Steven Spielberg was one of the film’s executive producers, to say that Eastwood, Broyles, and Haggis have created a negative film about Iwo Jima or the men who fought and died there is rather ridiculous.
Despite having a great cast, incredible battle sequences – which are wisely inter-cut with the war bond drive sequences – a lovely and subtle score composed by the director himself, and realistic special effects, Flags of Our Fathers wasn’t a big box-office success; according to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), it earned a domestic gross of slightly more than $33 million.
War films, by and large, don’t do well in times of war, at least, in times of post-World War II conflict. With American military forces in action not just in Iraq but also Afghanistan, not too many moviegoers wanted to spend their entertainment budget on a film that, although supportive of the men and women who served from 1941 to 1945 with honor and distinction, isn’t an escapist action-adventure flick with simplistic heroics and Hollywood stereotypes.
Still, Eastwood has done the World War II generation and the nation a great service by making the Iwo Jima Duology. It has its tragic and even bitter scenes, of course, but its soul is clearly in the right place.
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