Flags of Our Fathers

In order to demonstrate how different Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers is from just about ever other war movie in recent memory, it’s worth comparing its “bookend” scenes to another big-budget Hollywood film about World War II: Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998).

The final scene of Ryan finds protagonist James Francis Ryan, now an elderly war veteran, standing before the military gravesite of the man who saved his life in Normandy, Captain John H. Miller. He gives an emotional speech about the sacrifice Miller made and the debt he owes, and salutes the grave. Patriotic music swells. Credits roll.

The opening scene of Flags of Our Fathers, on the other hand, takes place in an empty, desolate battlefield. Protagonist John “Doc” Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), his breathing ragged, runs into the center of the frame. The camera tracks around his dirty, frightened face as heavy artillery explodes in the distance. Someone shouts, and he runs in another direction, only to come to a halt, staring again at the camera. Slowly, devastatingly, as his face turns into a mask of horror, the camera dollies in, Phillippe’s features becoming muddied and abstracted, the frame turning black. Then we cut to Bradley, now an elderly war veteran in bed, jolted out of his sleep, sweating, panting. His wife, comforting him, asks what’s wrong, and he sinks back into his pillow, silent. Fade out.

This comparison to Saving Private Ryan is worth making for more than just binary judgements. For one thing, Ryan is the most famous World War II film in years, and as such, despite its focus on the European rather than the Pacific Theatre (assuming one cares about such things), undoubtedly the film against which Flags of Our Fathers will be judged. And for another, Ryan’s director (Spielberg) is also a producer of Flags; but where Ryan compromised its genuinely horrific and realistic images of warfare with the above ending, a jarring concession to war-movie convention and patriotic rhetoric, Flags does no such thing. Instead, it’s that rarest of war films: one which neither uses the reputation of WWII as a “just war” to defend contemporary conflicts (Franklin J. Schaffner’s Patton, 1970), nor outright condemns war as an evil unto itself (most Vietnam films). It is a film which gives no easy answers; thankfully so, because its subject makes the concept of “easy answers” seem patently absurd.

Of course, another film with which Flags will inevitably be compared is Unforgiven, Eastwood’s 1992 “revision” of the Western as a gritty, raw and morally ambiguous essay in violence. But in retelling the story of the soldiers depicted in Joe Rosenthal’s iconic “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” photograph, Eastwood takes his abilities in postmodern genre-reinvention one step further, making Flags of Our Fathers less revision than deconstruction. Sure, all of the usual genre conventions are present and accounted for. There’s battle footage – astonishingly shot, too, with the colors bled so white that everything but the explosions look almost monochrome, suggesting the classic war movies of Hawks and Ford or the Iwo Jima photo itself come to life – and scenes of brothers-in-arms camaraderie, and even the inevitable reunion between the G.I. and his girl at the train station. But Eastwood’s construction systematically interrupts these conventions, cutting between the battlefield and the soldiers’ bittersweet homecoming in a manner which leaves the viewer not fully comfortable with either, while suggesting the implicit connections between the two.

In one remarkable segue which recurs throughout the film, the sound of explosions on the beach of Iwo Jima becomes the sound of fireworks popping over the heads of the flag-raisers, as they travel the country selling war bonds on the back of their newfound fame; a task with which none of them – the ill-fated Ira Hayes (Windtalkers‘ Adam Beach) in particular – were very comfortable. This seamless transition of image and sound tells us eloquently that for these men, the war was far from over. As we have seen from the film’s first moments onward, it was a nightmare from which they could never quite awaken.

Indeed, representations of war as nightmare pervade the film, and are the real reason why Flags of Our Fathers stands apart in the war-movie canon. Yes, as a movie about the Iwo Jima flag-raisers and the historical “truth” behind their achievement, the film has some fascinating things to say about the construction of “heroes” during wartime. The details of the flag-raising itself – that the one captured in Rosenthal’s camera was actually the second time the flag had been raised, the first flag having been taken down at the request of Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal; that this supposedly pivotal event actually occurred only five days into the battle, with 35 more to go before Iwo Jima was actually “taken”; and not least that one of the men depicted in the photo had actually been misidentified as another soldier, who had participated in the first flag-raising – are all foregrounded as proof of the falsifying, glamourizing process of “official” history, and raise questions about the use of such easily digestible “heroism” in recent times: particularly Thomas E. Franklin’s literal homage to the Iwo Jima photo, taken in the wake of 9/11, and the controversial use of prisoner of war Jessica Lynch as an icon early in the Iraq War.

But the script (co-written by William Broyles, Jr. and Paul Haggis, whose work here more than makes up for his maudlin and obvious, if Oscar-winning, 2005 directorial debut Crash) keeps coming back to the effects of war on its characters, and so that, to me, is the heart of this film. After the battle ends, both in “real life” and on screen, we see each of the three surviving soldiers cope with the things they saw, and the friends who didn’t come home, in different ways. Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford of The West Wing) plays along with the bond tour, only to be left jobless and ignored once his fifteen minutes are up. Hayes, the most tragic character of the film and its history alike, is torn between unwanted accolades for what he feels is an unearned “heroism” and stigmatization due to his Native American heritage (in one troubling scene, a senator joshes, “I hear you used a tomahawk on those Japs – is that true, chief?”); he descends into alcoholism and ultimately dies of exposure, face-down in his own vomit. And Bradley, though arguably the best-off of the three, remains haunted by the war and the horrifying death of his friend “Iggy.”

None of these stories are played for heavy-handed “Statements,” though, and therein lies one of Flags‘ greatest strengths: never do Eastwood, Broyles and Haggis allow their subjects to be depicted as the “heroes” history has made them. They are not crass enough to suggest that World War II was out-and-out “wrong”; nor are they naive enough to claim that its big-picture justifiability was enough to excuse the damage it did to these three young men and so many others. Those who see the film as a blow against the current presidential administration’s military policy (why waste 55 million dollars and two-plus hours of screentime for something as simple as that?), and those who accuse it of anti-war, anti-American proselytizing, are missing the point. Flags of Our Fathers is a proud achievement in war cinema and American cinema history alike; a film which successfully interrogates its subject, its genre, and the writing of history itself. It may not provide the simple, palatable answers which most war films give us. But in the end, causing us to think for ourselves – and about far more than just the pictures on screen – may be its greatest achievement of all.

Unfortunately, if Flags of Our Fathers itself stands as a great achievement, its recent DVD release falls far short. To put it simply, Paramount’s DVD gives new meaning to the word “bare-bones”: the only options on the title screen are “Play” and “Set Up,” without even a chapter menu for us to navigate (and in case you’re wondering if there’s a chapter list inside the case itself, nope – the packaging is as empty of inserts as the disc is of special features). Granted, the film still looks great, and I’ll admit to being one of those people who hoards special-edition DVDs without actually paying much attention to the bells and whistles. But if you’re a special-features junkie, you might want to keep an eye out for the inevitable expanded edition…maybe when Letters from Iwo Jima comes down the home-video pipeline.

- Zach Hoskins

Flags of Our Fathers Official Site
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