The Power of an Image Drives Film by Eastwood

By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
Published: September 21, 2006

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 20 ? Oscar season is only just getting under way, but on credentials alone a presumptive front-runner would have to be Clint Eastwood?s ?Flags of Our Fathers,? the World War II epic about the men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima, which began screening for selected journalists this week in New York.

Mr. Eastwood?s last two movies, after all, were ?Mystic River,? which picked up best picture and best directing nominations in 2004, and ?Million Dollar Baby,? which won in both categories in 2005. Paul Haggis , who wrote the shooting script for ?Flags of Our Fathers,? also wrote ?Million Dollar Baby? and was a co-writer of the Oscar-winning screenplay for last year?s best picture, ?Crash.? To top it off, the movie?s producers include Steven Spielberg, whose battlefield decorations include Oscars for ?Saving Private Ryan? and Emmys for the mini-series ?Band of Brothers.?

Whether ?Flags? ultimately connects will be up to the audience and Oscar voters. But it is already emerging as a candidate for best back story.

A big, booming spectacle that sprawls across oceans and generations, ?Flags of Our Fathers,? which opens on Oct. 20, was anything but a simple undertaking. With much of film following the surviving flag raisers as they crisscross the country in the spring and summer of 1945 pitching war bonds for a government in desperate financial straits, it is neither a pure war movie nor, given its sweeping and harrowing combat sequences, merely a wartime drama. It examines the power of a single image to affect not only public opinion but also the outcome of a war, ? whether in 1945, in Vietnam or more recently.

Above all it is a study of the callous ways in which heroes are created for public consumption, used and discarded, all with the news media?s willing cooperation. And it is imbued with enough of a critique of American politicians and military brass to invite suspicions that Hollywood is appropriating the iconography of World War II to score contemporary political points. Yet just when it verges on indicting the people responsible for exploiting the troops, the movie comes round to their point of view.

What is more, in a rare and audacious feat of moviemaking and distribution, ?Flags? was produced back-to-back with a companion film, ?Letters From Iwo Jima,? also directed by Mr. Eastwood, that is told entirely from the Japanese perspective, and in Japanese. The two movies will be released, a few months apart, by two competing studios and the remnant of a third: Paramount, because it bought DreamWorks SKG last year, is releasing ?Flags? domestically, while Warner Brothers is to release ?Letters? in North America and both films overseas.

Mr. Eastwood actually tried to option ?Flags of Our Fathers? after the widely read book by James Bradley and Ron Powers was published in May 2000. But Mr. Spielberg had snatched up the movie rights that summer, and in early 2001 he assigned its adaptation to the screenwriter William Broyles Jr., a former marine who also adapted ?Jarhead.? The two spent more than two years collaborating on four drafts, Mr. Broyles said, before Mr. Spielberg, still unsatisfied, put the project aside in 2003.

The following February, on the night of the 2004 Academy Awards, Mr. Eastwood and Mr. Spielberg fell into a conversation at the Governors Ball afterward, and Mr. Eastwood came into work the next morning saying that Mr. Spielberg had invited him to take over the project, said Rob Lorenz, a producer at Malpaso, Mr. Eastwood?s production comany.

Mr. Eastwood was then in preproduction on ?Million Dollar Baby,? and he asked Mr. Haggis to tackle ?Flags of Our Fathers? in his down time, Mr. Lorenz said. Mr. Haggis said he hit upon a way to tell three stories: of the months of training leading up to the invasion and battle for Iwo Jima; of the stateside bond drive and its life-altering effects on the surviving flag-raisers; and of James Bradley?s discovery of his late father?s well-concealed past as one of the three most famous heroes of World War II.

?I wanted to talk about the toll it takes on a man, on a person, when they?re labeled a hero, and how that can destroy a person,? Mr. Haggis said in a recent interview. ?Especially now, when we seem to have a need for heroes, and we seem to be creating heroes and villains of our own men and women.?

Mr. Haggis turned in a first draft in late October 2004, and with scant revisions, Mr. Eastwood shot that script. But Mr. Eastwood, who read everything he could about the battle, grew eager to tell more about Iwo Jima. ?He wanted to show both sides, thus the Japanese perspective,? Mr. Haggis said.

When Mr. Eastwood learned of Lieut. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the Japanese commander whose letters home revealed a man certain he would die before ever seeing his family again, he proposed making a second film. Mr. Spielberg and executives at Warner Brothers, Mr. Eastwood?s studio, quickly gave their support.

Mr. Eastwood, who declined to comment for this article, at first even wanted to shoot both films at once, Mr. Lorenz said, but timing and other practical concerns made that impossible. Yet the producers did achieve some small economies of scale. ?Flags of Our Fathers,? which cost $90 million to make, was shot mainly in Iceland in 2005, where the black-sand beaches are an adequate substitute for those of Iwo Jima. And ?Letters From Iwo Jima,? a much more modest film at $20 million, will include some of the invasion scenes staged for ?Flags.?

While much of ?Letters? was filmed in Southern California, Mr. Eastwood arranged a scouting trip to Iwo Jima in April 2005. The island was too remote to allow for a full-scale production. But he received permission to return this past April with a small camera crew and Ken Watanabe, the actor portraying General Kuribayashi in ?Letters,? to film at the foot of Mount Suribachi, Mr. Lorenz said.
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Mr. Haggis said that he and Mr. Eastwood had treaded quite carefully in making this war movie, given the continuing war in Iraq. ?I was most concerned that the movie would be seen as somehow justifying this war,? Mr. Haggis said.

He said Mr. Eastwood wanted to avoid romanticizing World War II as so many older movies have. One result of that was the decision to cast younger actors, few of them household names. ?What Clint wanted to explore was the fact that these kids were 18, 19 years old, and having to make terrible decisions. And that even in good wars, the horrors one had to witness, and one had to perpetrate, would just stick with you forever.?

For the same reason, Mr. Haggis said, the combat in ?Flags of Our Fathers? is particularly grisly, with many scattering limbs, spilling intestines, Japanese soldiers blowing themselves up rather than surrendering, and a flying severed head.

That brutality was largely concealed from the American public then, just as it is now, he said. ?We don?t see the bodies. It?s sanitized.?

Mr. Lorenz cautioned against viewing the film through a political, let alone a partisan, lens. ?I don?t think we were trying to make any sort of political statement, or had any sort of agenda,? he said. ?I do think it so happens that it?s a movie that the country can use right now.?

Mr. Broyles said he saw plenty of resonance between the story and current events, up to a point. ?Look at Jessica Lynch ,? he said. ?What really happened to her didn?t fit the story line. There are lots of stories that don?t make the press, but the kids out there are real heroes.? He added, ?The important thing is to present it in the truth of what happened in 1945, without winking about what?s happening in 2006, and people can draw their own conclusions about what?s parallel.?

Mr. Haggis said he had made certain in his script to subvert any one-dimensional depiction of the politicians and generals as unfairly exploiting the returning marines. So in a crucial scene, a politician tells the surviving flag-raisers that their crass re-enactments of the flag-raising, however unfaithful to the memories of their fallen comrades, were vital in rallying the nation at a moment when the government was nearly broke.

The rest is history: President Harry S. Truman challenged them to raise $14 billion in two months. They raked in nearly double that.

For the same reason, Mr. Haggis said, the combat in ?Flags of Our Fathers? is particularly grisly, with many scattering limbs, spilling intestines, Japanese soldiers blowing themselves up rather than surrendering, and a flying severed head.

Mr. Haggis said he had made certain in his script to subvert any one-dimensional depiction of the politicians and generals as unfairly exploiting the returning marines. So in a crucial scene, a politician tells the surviving flag-raisers that their crass re-enactments of the flag-raising, however unfaithful to the memories of their fallen comrades, were vital in rallying the nation at a moment when the government was nearly broke.

Showering praise doesn't mean the film is perfect. The last reel is dragging, with too many endings, some of which sentimental in a way that Eastwood's films usually are not. Structurally, too, the film may be too fractured, with too many and flashbacks, some of which very brief while others inserted in obvious and conventional way.

Flags of Our Fathers is one of Clint Eastwood's best films. To my mind, Flags if one of the few BIG OSCAR MOVIES that is about something IMPORTANT. It is a film older Academy members will understand and will be moved by (how could you not be). But also, younger audiences will be drawn in by Ryan Philippe (who is excellent in the leading role) and the young cast in general. All tech nominations ought to be considered across the board, from sound to editing to art direction to costume design, etc. Eastwood and the pic look strong for nominations and if all goes well, a win.

Here are a few keys to Flags one must understand when thinking about predicting it. As a publicist recently told me, the Academy is full of very senior seniors. That's a nice way of saying they're old school. This could work for Flags but against upstart movies like Departed or Running with Scissors, etc. They don't typically go for black comedy - rather, they like (or seem to, based on their voting history) straight up and down dramas, which Flags is nothing but.

Flags is a film for people with appreciation of World War II, war in general, and people who've lived lives of varied experience, meaning, they've had kids, they suffered, they've been disappointed by their own roles in the world -- if you've not gone through anything like that you might feel like the film doesn't fill you up all the way. For me personally, it hit me hard. Blew me back and created an experience I'll never forget.

This is one person's opinion - it should not be taken for anything other than that. As always, Oscarwatchers, be warned. Remember King Kong? Nobody knows anything.

For my money, though, Flags is a strong contender. It is a story that needed to be told to a generation that might not remember or even think about WWII. Also, I believe it is a strong commentary on the situation we're in right now, in Iraq. It's about the soldiers. It isn't about the screaming liberals or the hysterical republicans; it isn't about careers in the White House being made or broken. It isn't about anything other than those guys out there in field, fighting every day, serving our country. If you don't get that basic premise, you're not going to be moved by the film.

If the critics go for it, the Academy will go enthusiastically towards it. If they pan it, it will have to do with one or two noms and we'll have to make way for another BP frontrunner.

For now, though, it remains my number one. Ryan Phillippe is a standout. As is Adam Beach, who will break your heart...

^



I'm a whore for WWII films. Oct 20th can't come soon enough.

Which reminds me, I'm watching Saving Private Ryan and writing a mini review before the sun comes up.

can't wait.

But I will say this. Flags of Our Fathers is more than a disappointment. It is a bad movie.

But this much is clear… there wasn't a wet eye in the house when I saw it. And there was no applause at either screening. And there may not be wild applause for a lot of films. But no applause for an alleged crowd rouser? The thing most likely to flag is your interest.

The first true shock of the Oscar season has landed. And much to the amazement of many, it is Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers.

Simply put, the film is a Midnight In the Garden of Good & Evil level swing and miss by a very fine director and creative force. It is thematically muddled, emotionally simplistic (if not retarded), and it commits the worst sin of all… it is a dead bore.

As Mav pointed out, Levy's piece isn't exactly an A, and Sasha's article also feels subdued and more respect than love. This certainly isn't The Departed or Million Dollar Baby type of "oh, my goodness, what a fucking great movie" type of raves. Could be more divided like Little Children or Munich.

Flags of Our Fathers Variety Review by Tood McCarthy

Ambitiously tackling his biggest canvas to date, Clint Eastwood continues to defy and triumph over the customary expectations for a film career in "Flags of Our Fathers." A pointed exploration of heroism -- in its actual and in its trumped-up, officially useful forms -- the picture welds a powerful account of the battle of Iwo Jima, the bloodiest single engagement the United States fought in World War II, with an ironic and ultimately sad look at its aftermath for three key survivors. This domestic Paramount release looks to parlay critical acclaim and its director's ever-increasing eminence to strong B.O. returns through the autumn and probably beyond.

Conventional wisdom suggests directors slow down as they reach a certain age (Eastwood is now 76), become more cautious, recycle old ideas, fall out of step with contemporary tastes, look a bit stodgy. Eastwood has impertinently ignored these options not only by undertaking by far his most expensive and logistically daunting picture, but by creating back-to-back bookend features offering contrasting perspectives on the same topic; the Japanese-language "Letters From Iwo Jima," showing the Japanese side in intimate terms, will be released by Warner Bros. in February.

One way to think about "Flags" is as "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" of this generation. That 1962 John Ford Western is famous for its central maxim, "When the truth becomes legend, print the legend," and "Flags" resonantly holds the notion up to the light. It is also a film about the so-called Greatest Generation that considers why its members are, or were, reticent to speak much about what they did in the war, to boast or consider themselves heroes.

Skillfully structured script by William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis throws the audience into the harrowing action of the Iwo Jima invasion as a personal memory that can never be softened or forgotten. But the brutal fighting is eventually juxtaposed with the government's use of the celebrated image of the Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi for propaganda and fund-raising, with scant ultimate regard for the "heroes."

Reflecting its origins in the bestselling 2000 book by James Bradley (son of one of the central figures) with Ron Powers, tale is framed around a son's search into the wartime exploits of his father John Bradley, one of the six men pictured raising the flag. The I.D.ing and matching of some old-timers to their younger selves is never the easiest thing to do, and the same goes for getting all the names immediately straight for a bunch of young soldiers wearing identical uniforms and very short hair.

But the camera focuses on a handful of the 30,000 troops that landed on the inhospitable spec of volcanic ash and tufa that is Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945 to dislodge some 20,000 well-fortified Japanese.

Among the men are John "Doc" Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), the only Navy man in a group that otherwise includes Marines: Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford), Native American Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), the highly capable leader Sgt. Mike Strank (Barry Pepper), Hank Hanson (Paul Walker), Iggy Ignatowski (Jamie Bell), Harlan Block (Benjamin Walker) and Franklin Sousley (Joseph Cross).

Such is the carnage at the initial landing (the Americans suffered 2,000 casualties that first day alone) that there will be some temptation to compare the scene to current co-producer Steven Spielberg's justly celebrated D-Day invasion sequence in "Saving Private Ryan." But Eastwood does it his own way, impressively providing coherence and chaos, awesome panoramic shots revealing the enormity of the arrayed armada and sudden spasms of violence that with great simplicity point up the utter arbitrariness of suffering and death in combat.

The visual scheme Eastwood developed for the picture is immediately arresting. Perhaps taking a cue from the island's black sand, as well as from WWII's status as the last war shot, from a filmic p.o.v., in black-and-white, pic is nearly as monochromatic as anything shot in color can be. Dominated by blacks, grays and olive greens, cinematographer Tom Stern's images have a grave elegance, a drained quality that places the events cleanly in history without diminishing their startling immediacy.

On the fifth day of fighting, some Americans reach the summit where a great deal of the Japanese firepower is concentrated, and six soldiers plant a small stars-and-stripes. Shortly after a larger flag is sent up and, in an event only shown in the film considerably later, six different men, Bradley, Gagnon and Hayes among them, responding to a photographer's half-joking question of, "O.K., guys, who wants to be famous?," put their muscle behind pushing up the new flag held in place by a heavy length of pipe.

At once, AP photographer Joe Rosenthal's shot became arguably the most iconic image of the American war. No faces were identifiable in the photo, leading to some confusion as to who was even in the shot, and three of them were killed soon after.

But the surviving three are spirited back to the mainland to spearhead a final war bonds drive. Bradley, Gagnon and Hayes are treated like gold-plated heroes everywhere, all the while being confronted by replicas of the flag raising made of papier-mache or even ice cream.

Of the three, Gagnon embraces his sudden celebrity, gallivanting around with his fiancee and expecting great things to stem from it. Already haunted by the horrors he witnessed, Bradley copes in a subdued way. But Hayes, whose story was dramatized onscreen in 1961 as "The Outsider" with Tony Curtis, of all people, portraying the Pima Indian, can barely hold it together.

Feeling from the outset that their participation in the tour is a "farce," that the real heroes are the guys who died or are still out there fighting, Hayes drinks heavily, embarrassing himself while having to stomach the everyday casual racism of being called "chief" or being refused service.

And once they've done their bit raising billions for the government, they're left on their own to put their lives back together. It's not an easy road, particularly for Hayes, who in one moving, genuinely Fordian moment, treks a long distance for a brief visit with the father of one of his fallen comrades.

Given this dramatic, wrenching arc, Hayes' story becomes the heart of the movie, and Beach, who previously played a Native American in the Pacific campaign in "Windtalkers," unquestionably takes the acting honors with it, delivering a full sense of the character's pain and sense of entrapment in an absurd situation. Other perfs are thoughtful, credible and deliberately unspectacular, although Pepper supplies special power as the leader the young men need as they come face to face with the enemy.

The director and editor Joel Cox find an effective and comfortable rhythm for the drama's parallel tracks. Spectacle is by no means limited to the battle scenes; one major setpiece is an enormous rally at Chicago's Soldiers Field where the men are expected to scale a large model of Mount Suribachi and plant the flag. Perhaps the most felicitous of the film's many outstanding visual effects is the elimination of the recently built flying saucer-like addition to the venerable stadium.

The film's themes are so thoroughly embodied in the drama as it's told that there is no need for explicit statement of them, which makes the final bit of narration about the nation's need for heroes seem unnecessary. Another minor flaw is a Hollywood backlot look to a couple of Chicago street scenes.

Otherwise, "Flags of Our Fathers" is exemplary in its physical aspects. Combination of exteriors shot on the black beaches of Iceland with CGI work conveys a vivid and comprehensive feel of the godawfulness of Iwo Jima.

This and the forthcoming "Letters" represent the final work of the late, great production designer Henry Bumstead; no one could wish to go out on a better note. Pic is dedicated to him and two others who died during production, Eastwood's longtime casting director Phyllis Huffman and flag-raising photographer Rosenthal.

The director himself composed the spare, effective musical score.

Flags of Our Fathers

By Kirk Honeycutt

Bottom line: A complex, fascinating take on the concept of heroism in war.

Opens Friday, Oct. 20

Clint Eastwood's "Flags of Our Fathers" does a most difficult and brave thing and does it brilliantly. It is a movie about a concept. Not just any concept but the shop-worn and often wrong-headed idea of "heroism."

The movie performs this task amid the fog of war on Iwo Jima in 1945, when the Associated Press' Joe Rosenthal took the iconic photograph of six American servicemen raising Old Glory on Mount Suribachi. The movie deconstructs that moment, shattering it into a jigsaw puzzle of flashbacks and flash-forwards, to explore how that photograph turned into a major prop of the U.S. government's war bonds campaign and how the government designated the three surviving flag raisers as "heroes."

From a boxoffice standpoint, this might be a rare instance of having your cake and eating it, too: The film also takes a hard, unblinking look at the cynicism and PR manipulation that went into the war bond tour and what we today recognize as the nascent fluttering of the cult of celebrityhood, when the three surviving flag-raisers were among the most famous men in the U.S.

Yet Eastwood packs the movie with action as tough and bloody as such benchmark films as "Saving Private Ryan," "Black Hawk Down" and "We Were Soldiers." Nor does he ever deny the sacrifice and achievements of the men who fought and died in the battle for Iwo Jima. So the movie should attract viewers across the political spectrum. Critical acclaim and year-end awards can only expand its potential boxoffice.

The film is based on a book by James Bradley (with Ron Powers) about his father, Navy Corpsman John Bradley, one of the flag-raisers who nevertheless would never discuss that or any other aspect of his war experiences with his family. William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis' screenplay has a complex structure that takes awhile for audiences to read.

A soldier runs alone in a bleak landscape that looks like the lunar surface, then awakens in a cold sweat in his bed, his wife comforting him, many years later. Three soldiers, scaling a mountaintop with explosions everywhere, reach the summit and survey a sea of faces in a football stadium, roaring approval for this re-enactment of their experiences of only weeks before. Meanwhile, a man in more recent times -- we later realize this is the son, James Bradley (Tom McCarthy) -- interviews key people who knew his father.

In this manner, the movie moves back and forth in time to watch people come to grips with the question of heroism and how that flag raising became a symbol Americans desperately clung to as the war in the Pacific hung in the balance. "If you can get a picture, the right picture, you can win a war," a retired captain (Harve Presnell) tells Bradley.

The film introduces the six servicemen as U.S. warships steam steadily toward Iwo Jima. Initially it's hard to tell who's who, but Eastwood and his writers probably do this deliberately as they want us to consider these young men as ordinary Joes doing a job in combat. It is totally random how fate chooses the six -- and actually it's three as the others are killed not long after the photo is taken.

Within days the U.S. government calls the surviving flag-raisers back to the mainland: Doc Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), a Navy Corpsman called upon to help the Marines raise the flag; Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford), a "runner" who happened to bring the flag to the mountaintop; and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), an Indian who is the most uncomfortable at finding himself a national hero.

For most of the war bond tour, the trio's "minder" (John Benjamin Hickey) has double duty. He must overcome the men's resistance to playing heroes, a label they feel belongs to others more deserving. And he must keep Ira sober. War has kept the Marine's alcoholism in check; back home he fears banquet halls more than the blood-stained soil of Iwo Jima.

Then the background to the photo itself undermines the men's sense of purpose. The fact is that Rosenthal's famous photo is of the second flag-raising that day. The first occurs before Rosenthal made it up the top. When he does arrive, he finds soldiers, who had been laying a telephone line, preparing to raise a second, larger flag the moment the first one comes down. And that photo, taken blindly at the last moment, is the one that hit the wires worldwide. This leads to confusion, cleared up only years later, as to the identities of the soldiers in the photo since none of their faces is visible.

Cinematographer Tom Stern shoots in washed-out colors, much like old color film long faded so that only blues, grays, browns and flesh tones prevail. This situates the film in a hallucinatory no-man's-land between Iwo Jima and a peaceful U.S., where no one has any concept of the horrors these men endured.

There are many astonishing moments. A Japanese soldier lies dying next to a critically injured Yank, the two men now linked in death. A search of caves deep within the island causes American soldiers to realize the surviving Japanese are committing suicide with their grenades. The persistent racism Ira faces is so casual that everyone is blithely unaware of the demeaning nature of their remarks.

Eastwood's own musical score, infusing the film with understated valor and light melancholy, and Henry Bumstead's fine sets and period design are crucial components of Eastwood's vision of a world that needs "heroism" to help it understand and process the incomprehensible cruelty and sacrifice of war. Says one vet, "We need easy-to-understand truths and damn few words."

Poland's on crack.

This REALLY is giving me a Crash vibe in the sense of how theres the group that will just completely adore the film and the group that the film just doesnt do anything for. The thing is, which group will dominate?

So far all the top critics are raving, so im hoping the loves it crowd dominates.