Published Feb 23, 2007
I don’t see many movies these days. Sure, there are a bunch that look good — heck, even Ghost Rider has my girlfriend Eva Mendes in it — but I never seem to get around to seeing them. Not only are movies too expensive, but they’re in the the theaters for such a short time, and so many of them are complete crap. Expensive, hard-to-find crap is no good. So, the highest praise for a movie might be that it makes me want to see another, specific movie. On that scale, Letters From Iwo Jima scores quite high — if Flags of Our Fathers, which I had intentionally skipped seeing before, were still in theaters, I’d rush over to see it.
Letters from Iwo Jima must have been, as everyone will point out, a challenging movie to make. It’s almost all in Japanese (a few, brief, scenes are in English). The heroes are all people who we fought against in World War II; the guys they kill are all American. The heroes must lose at the end of the movie. It’s not like you see this kind of thing on the big screen all the time; not only was there a need for high-quality execution, but even the conception of the movie must’ve been difficult.
The payoff was big. There were real, sympathetic Japanese characters — we understood what many were feeling and why. Of course, there were also unsympathetic characters, because the war was filled with reckless Japanese militarists who followed a perverse death cult, but at least these stereotypical characters were portrayed accurately. At any rate, it was easy to truly care for a number of the characters.
The plot moved well also. It steadily built to the invasion and tough island fighting, with each scene showing a higher level of strain than the last. We understood the fractured relationship between some of the characters, saw the strength of the island’s defenses grow, and then saw it all smashed by the Americans. My only complaint was that we really did not see a passage of time during the battle itself; most viewers would probably guess that the fighting lasted a few days, rather than the 35 it actually did.
In the end, Letters From Iwo Jima was a real movie, not just a movie in a foreign language. That shows a lot of skill. As real movies go, it was very much a war movie, which is fine, because who actually wants to see someone attempt another Pearl Harbor? Keeping this movie simple probably kept it good. Ken Watanabe deserves the recognition he’s getting in his leading role, Eastwood deserves his nomination for best director — heck, the cinematographer deserved his CFCA nomination.
I’d like to see more movies like this — small, targeted, efficient, effective, cheap, interesting, expanding. It seems like a good shtick. I suggest somebody script-ize Hell in a Very Small Place. Heck, these days, you could shoot that on location too. In the meantime, I guess I have to go rent Flags of our Fathers.