Column: 'Letters' only for Academy
Published Jan. 26, 2007
Clint Eastwood's "Letters from Iwo Jima," which opened in Columbia on the heels of its Academy Award nominations, takes place from the point of view of Japanese soldiers. The movie's pre-release buzz focused almost exclusively on this fact, and for good reason: It doesn't have much else to offer.
Like most war movies, we're given a foot soldier to focus on, a hangdog ex-baker named Saigo, and a noble commander to idolize, the general from whose letters the movie was constructed, played by Ken Watanabe in full understated dignity mode. As the characters begin to realize that they're fighting a hopeless battle, we see the cultural differences take hold.
At one point, Saigo and his unit find themselves trapped in a cave, faced with an order to retreat. American movie soldiers would receive a pep talk from the general — about the girls they left back home, apple pie, freedom, etc. — and either fight their way forward or fall back and regroup. In "Letters," the ranking officer disregards the order and holds a live grenade to his chest. The rest of the group follows one by one, and Eastwood's camera drifts past every sobbing, detonating soldier. Their ideal is not to fight, but to fight and die, a difference that Eastwood illustrates to great effect.
Unfortunately, that's the high point of a movie that is mostly overlong and sagging, filled with subplots that end in grisly, unsatisfying explosions. Eastwood's one goal seems to be to portray the Japanese as human, and having accomplished that, he fails to provide anything else to make this movie a worthwhile experience. All 140 minutes wallow in the same insistent tone of preachy, solemn depressiveness. Whenever there's a glimpse of humanity from underneath the morass, "Letters" remembers it's about a war and does something unspeakably horrific to somebody. At one point, a Japanese soldier surrenders, only to be shot dead by two Americans who don't want to bother guarding him. It's an ignominious end for a relatively important character, and it comes after the movie spends hours building these soldiers up as human beings.
The characters, emoting in Japanese, are interesting to watch but difficult to relate to. We don't have a frame of reference for them, and Eastwood does nothing to make the transition easier.
War movies were, at one point, about people. People died and war was hell, but there was still a movie there, and humans at its core who changed and grew. That has become unfashionable, and in "Letters," the star is a hopeless, bleak loop of dying extras and frustrated dreams. "Letters" forgets it's a movie at times, but always remembers it involves war. With its preachiness and steadfast refusal to wallow in movie tropes that haven't been wallowed in for years, "Letters" has reached its target audience, the Academy, but there's not a lot here for anybody else.