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| A
proud leader: Watanabe in Letters From Iwo Jima. |
Blood
of Our Enemies
By
Ann Morrow
Letters
From Iwo Jima
Directed
by Clint Eastwood
You needn’t have seen Flags of Our Fathers to appreciate
its companion film, Letters From Iwo Jima. Directed
by Clint Eastwood in the same restrained, classical style
(the movies were filmed back-to-back), Letters tells
the story of the crucial battle for Iwo Jima from the side
of the Japanese defenders (partly adapted from memoirs, the
screenplay is by Iris Yamashita, with Flags’ author
Paul Haggis). A Golden Globe winner for Best Foreign Language
Film, Letters can assuredly be described one of the
most objective, gripping, and affecting war films ever made.
Though it doesn’t go into the carnage of the battle—one of
the deadliest of the war—its build-up to the American invasion,
and the defenders’ desperate attempts to do what’s right in
a hopeless situation, are just as horrifying as a full-scale
massacre.
The film opens in the present day, with the excavation of
one of the caves that served as a Japanese holdout. Bodies
are found, and during the course of the film, we find out,
dismayingly, whose bodies they are. After the discovery of
a knapsack, the film fades to 61 years ago (the evocative
cinematography retains a muted, timeworn palette throughout),
to the sight of grunts digging trenches in the rocky beachfront.
Baby-faced Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya) is complaining bitterly
to his comrade about the bug-infested, disease-ridden island.
He will be beaten for his unpatriotic bitching—though the
first casualty will die from dysentery. Saigo and the other
grunts (worthless “peasants” to their lieutenant) have little
understanding of the island’s strategic importance, and their
isolated commanders, who revere the volcanic outpost as part
of Japan’s “sacred homeland,” have only the sketchiest information
of the larger war effort. One of the many, many aspects the
film gets exactly right is how cross-purposes and miscommunication
between the commanders—the island is under the jurisdiction
of both the army and the navy—contribute to its eventual defeat.
Hope arrives with a new commander, the modern-thinking General
Kuribayashi (the great Ken Watanabe). But the general’s optimism
is quickly tempered by a tour of the facilities: What few
tanks there are can’t be repaired until spare parts arrive.
Educated in the United States, the general remembers (in one
of several masterfully integrated flashbacks) how there were
“cars everywhere,” an indication of America’s superior industrial
might.
The logistics of the doomed defense, and the hubris of imperial
directives, are brilliantly interwoven with the characters
involved, whom we get to know—and care about—through narration
taken from the letters they write home. Mostly, the story
centers on Saigo, a young baker with a wife and baby, and
the worldly Kuribayashi, whose courage is daunted more by
the suicidal honor system (chillingly enacted) of his underlings
than by the impending American juggernaut. In between the
ditch diggers and the high command is a fascinating array
of personalities, such as the general’s confidant, Baron Nishi
(Tsuyoshi Ihara), an Olympic gold medalist in equestrian show
jumping, who is regarded as a dashing beacon of Japanese chivalry.
Though most of the action occurs in ditches, tunnels, and
volcanic-rock dunes, the lean cinematography (not a word or
image is wasted in Eastwood’s characteristically spare but
nuanced style) strikingly opens up at times, with images that
serve as narrative shorthand. Most memorable is the arrival
of the American fleet, which appears in the serene waters
like the harbinger of a Greek tragedy. Yet amid the film’s
sympathetic treatment of the Japanese, the actions of the
Americans (whether venal or honorable) are more intensely
realized. Letters From Iwo Jima is equally an enthralling
war movie and a landmark document in the cinema of World War
II.
Bloody-Minded
Children
The
Last King of Scotland
Directed
by Kevin Macdonald
After receiving a brutal beating at the hands of Idi Amin’s
goons, Dr. Nicholas Garrigan bubbles through bloody lips at
the Ugandan dictator, “You’re a child; that’s what makes you
so scary.” This pronouncement is the moral linchpin of the
movie and the key to both its artistic success and its frustrating
shortcomings.
Garrigan (James McAvoy) is Amin’s personal physician, a position
the young Scot earns with an impressive display of ethical
pique during a chance encounter with the new president, played
by Forest Whitaker. Garrigan has traveled to Uganda in a fit
of aimless adventurousness, leaving behind a staid upper-middle-class
family and, one assumes, the shadow cast by his own physician
father. His Oedipal recklessness is reiterated by his attraction
to, first, the wife of a doctor at the rural clinic where
he begins his Ugandan residence and, later, one of Amin’s
several wives. (Spectacularly bad idea, that.) So, Amin is
established as a surrogate father—a relationship made explicit
by Amin himself, who claims Garrigan as his son—and a grim
classical tragedy unfolds.
Director Kevin Macdonald’s background in documentary filmmaking
serves him well through much of the movie. The Last King
of Scotland is as much the story of a particular place
at a particular time—Uganda in the early ’70s—as it is about
particular characters. Without bogging down in tedious exposition,
the movie effectively situates the viewer: convincingly presenting
the disorienting combination of Uganda’s stunning natural
rawness and the artificial, almost surreal, opulence of its
corrupt political class. The documentary feel (and the viewer’s
knowledge that Amin is a historical figure, though the film
is based on a novel) lends an air of inevitability to the
story.
However, something in this approach robs the characters of
agency: They act as they act because they have no choice,
it seems. Inevitability is an appropriate—even a required—aspect
of classical tragedy, but in a film it can be unsatisfying.
Whitaker has been highly praised for his portrayal of Amin,
justifiably. Resisting the temptation to play the fabled fiend
like Hannibal Lecter in khaki, Whitaker instead plays him
like an unruly child. His Amin is charming, expansive, funny
and prone to solipsistic tantrums. Unfortunately, this child
has an army—and as Garrigan points out, that does make him
scary. Garrigan, too, is a child—and scary in his way. He
readily succumbs to the blandishments of a man he must know
is incredibly dangerous, even sociopathic. He actually facilitates
some of Amin’s ruthless decisions. He suffers, and grotesquely,
for this participation, but at movie’s end the viewer is left
to wonder what lesson there is to be gained: There is evil
in the world? Hubris will be punished? Boys will be boys?
It’s a fair point that movies needn’t have a lesson: You want
to send a message, call Western Union. But the The Last
King of Scotland’s tragic structure cries out for a catharsis
that the film does not wholly produce.
—John
Rodat
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Classifieds
