For Clint Eastwood, less is more. Eastwood’s best films of the past decade work so well because of his understated direction and the poetry of his stories. Furthermore, strong leads anchor his features with stunning performances: Sean Penn howls for his dead daughter in Mystic River, Hilary Swank fights against all odds in Million Dollar Baby, and Morgan Freeman unites a country in the disappointing but still worthwhile Invictus. Unfortunately, Flags of Our Fathers lacks the quality performances and the graceful simplicity of Eastwood’s best work. Full of trite dialogue and plagued with a half-baked framing device, the first of Eastwood’s two Pacific Front war features is an incredibly messy work that hardly does justice to its themes of American mythmaking.
Eastwood tells the American side of the Iwo Jima story using flashbacks and flashbacks-within-flashbacks. The story of the film is consequently incoherent, and despite explicit statements of themes by characters themselves, it is unclear what the film really wants to do. The central characters are John Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), the three surviving men famously photographed raising American flag on Mount Suribachi. The three of them struggle with their celebrity, especially the American Indian Ira who indulges in alcohol, and they wrestle with their guilt as close-ups of thoughtful gazes predictably cut to footage of the battlefield. The photograph brought hope to so many people, yet none of the public knows the true nature of the image or the actual identities of the men who raised the flag.
The fractured structure of the film attempts to illustrate the psychology of these three men as they are used to sell war bonds, but the characters are completely hollow. They lack nuance, depicted as mere pawns of circumstance than actual people. This can likely be attributed to screenwriter Paul Haggis, also responsible for the atrocity Crash. Like Crash, Flags of Our Fathers depends on a scattered narrative structure and also stereotypes to talk about race. Ira is defined by his American Indian background in the movie, and the prejudice he faces rings false. At a fundraiser event, a gentleman suggests that Ira tells people he killed “Japs” with tomahawks, and later, a superior officer exclaims, “Jesus Christ he’s drunk! Goddamn Indians.” While Ira likely faced racism in reality, such dialogue is contrived and didactic.
Attributing all of the film’s failings to Haggis is admittedly unfair. The performance by Beach as Hayes is particularly atrocious in a film full of at-best mediocre acting. About to be sent back to battle after irresponsible conduct on the war bonds tour, Ira gives a tearful speech about how he is not a real hero. This particular denial of heroism is the typically obvious dialogue Haggis writes, and unfortunately, the acting only makes it worse. Beach portrays Hayes not as the tortured soul he is suggested to be but a cry baby who cannot get over himself. The central irony that could have made Flags of Our Fathers an interesting film is the way in which soldiers so honestly deny their heroism when they are, in fact, truly heroes. When Beach and the other characters talk of their troubles, however, they come off as brats rather than damaged men with demons to work through.
Although the home front scenes make up the heart of the story, the battle scenes in the film also play a central role. Eastwood uses a desaturated color palette, making the battle feel black-and-white. But rather than creating an atmosphere of authenticity, this artistic choice heightens the artifice of the film. The grays do not look photographic but instead feel plastic and hollow. And computer-generated effects for the war carnage only contribute to the emptiness of the images. POV shots from fighter planes feel like they belong in a video game. I still maintain that Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan is one of the most incredibly overrated films of the 1990s, but its combat scenes truly capture the grain and chaos of war. Flags of Our Fathers also utilizes handheld camera shots with water coming at the camera, but juxtaposed with the unnaturally polished CG effects, they feel misplaced.
Flags of Our Fathers had potential. By talking about the Iwo Jima flag-raising photograph, the filmmakers had an opportunity to dissect the unreliability of images and the nature of wartime propaganda. But instead, the film becomes a false portrait of war itself, feeling like a symbol meant to be embraced but is ultimately false and empty. John Slattery’s Bud Gerber of the Treasury Department was an opportunity to delve a little deeper into themes of government deception, but his speech to the three soldiers about the photo as a symbol feels more like an obvious outline of the tension between the “greater good” and the conscious of the characters. One character explains in a voiceover, “Every jackass thinks he knows what war is.” Flags of Our Fathers claims to understand the deeper truth of war heroes, but it lacks nuance in telling its story and ultimately ends up communicating nothing of worth.
