Masterpiece theater

Soren Andersen, for the Northwest Guardian

Clint Eastwood’s incredible ‘Flags of Our Fathers’ honors the men who fought at Iwo Jima. The film shows the difficulty of being a hero. “Flags of Our Fathers” is above all an honorable picture.

It honors the sacrifice of the American fighting men who died in the battle of Iwo Jima, and it honors as well the survivors. By extension it also honors the fallen and the survivors of all battles in World War II, and by further extension the sacrifice of all those who have fought and died in our country’s wars: past and present.

And – and this is far rarer for a Hollywood war film – it honors the parents of the fallen, portraying them as stoic in their grief, yet devastated to the core.

The picture is honorable because director Clint Eastwood does not gush over these men and their sacrifices. Like Eastwood himself, his movie has a certain reticence. In the overpowering battle scenes, in the same league with the Omaha Beach sequence of “Saving Private Ryan,” chaos and slaughter are everywhere. Men fall, and their comrades cannot pause to mourn or reflect. They must push forward, intent on their mission, which is to stay alive, focused and fighting.

The whirlwind of battlefield emotions is brilliantly captured in a scene in which a Navy corpsman, played by Ryan Phillippe, is treating a horribly wounded Marine when a Japanese infantryman lunges out of the smoke intending to spear him with a bayonet. In an instant, the healer pulls his own bayonet and stabs his attacker, twisting the blade and inflicting the same sort of dreadful wound he was just treating. With his enemy bleeding to death beside him, the corpsman turns, all business, back to his American patient, a healer once again.

Eastwood’s masterful picture, written by William Broyles Jr. (“Jarhead”) and Paul Haggis (“Crash” and Eastwood’s “Million Dollar Baby”), based on the best-seller of the same title by James Bradley and Ron Powers, is a meditation on heroism and mythmaking. Central to it is the famous Joe Rosenthal photograph of six Marines raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945. The iconic photo is one of the most recognizable images from the war and inspired the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Va.

On the home front, people embrace the image and think it marks the defeat of the island’s Japanese defenders. It didn’t. The battle rages on for a month afterward, during which time three of the flag-raisers, Franklin Sousley (Joseph Cross), Harlon Block (Benjamin Walker) and Sgt. Michael Strank (Barry Pepper), are killed.

The three survivors, Marines Ira Hayes and Rene Gagnon and Navy corpsman John “Doc” Bradley (the father of author James Bradley), are promptly sent back to the States to be the centerpiece of a war-bond drive. Eastwood moves back and forth in time, from the battle to the States, where the survivors, plagued by memories of the horrors they’ve witnessed, must present brave faces and try to act like heroes. Hayes and Bradley are very uncomfortable with the adulation. Gagnon, portrayed as a glory hound, revels in the attention. All say repeatedly that it’s not them, but rather the men who died in the battle, who are the true heroes.

Hayes, played by Adam Beach, is the most tormented of the three, refusing at first to acknowledge he was one of the men in the picture because he wanted to stay in the fight with his buddies. Ordered home by higher-ups, he scorns the process by which he and the others are being turned into salesmen for a patriotic myth. Demeaned throughout by the pervasive racism of the time (an American Indian, he’s called “chief” and he’s refused service in a bar because he’s an Indian), he descends into despair and alcoholism.

The confusion of the battlefield gives way to a different, and at least as disorienting, confusion at home. Gagnon mistakenly tells the brass that Marine Hank Hansen was part of the flag-raising team, confusing him with Block. Hayes tries to set the record straight, but the Washington PR machine is going full throttle, Hansen has already been identified in the press as a flag-raiser and the truth is brushed aside. Hansen, who also died on the island, is lionized and his family honored. Block’s family is forgotten.

Mythmaking trumps reality at every step. Ignored also is the fact that the flag in Rosenthal’s photo was actually the second raised on that day. The first one was a smaller banner raised by other men, which was photographed by another photographer and cheered by the troops on the island and on the invasion fleet offshore. In a flash-forward, an old vet recalls that no one on the island even noticed the raising of the second flag.

The public eagerly embraces the myth of battlefield heroism, and its accidental symbols (Rosenthal clicked the shutter in haste and didn’t really know if the picture would be any good) because they don’t know what it entails. The heroes know, and that’s why they never want to talk about what they have done, and seen. Eastwood understands their reticence, and honors this most heroic of qualities.

“Flags of Our Fathers” is the first of two films Eastwood has made about the battle. The second, “Letters from Iwo Jima,” due out next year, tells the story from the Japanese side. The heroism on both sides will thus be acknowledged, and honored.

Flags of Our Fathers

Director: Clint Eastwood

Cast: Ryan Phillippe, Adam Beach, Jesse Bradford, Barry Pepper and John Benjamin Hickey

Running Time: 2:12

Rating: R; battlefield carnage, language