Movie Review: Flags of Our Fathers ***
"Maybe there are no such things as heroes..." the character James Bradley muses in the concluding scene of "Flags of Our Fathers," which sums up the movie's message perfectly. The movie is based on the best-selling book by James Bradley, son of one of the men in the most famous photograph in American history. After his father's death in 1994, he researched the lives of all six men in the picture, three of whom the Japanese killed on Iwo Jima in subsequent fighting. The format of the movie version follows the book relatively closely, involving flashbacks and cuts between the soldiers' training, the Battle for Iwo Jima, and the war bonds tour on which the War Department sent the three survivors as spokesmen.
The movie gets 3 stars because the battle scenes are outstanding. The way the Marines move onto Iwo Jima, they look much like the real footage of that battle that I have seen. Clearly, the director of this film, Clint Eastwood, paid very close attention to showing the scenes as they really looked. Even little things - Ira Hayes hanging his poncho off the back of his belt and Hank Hansen's baseball cap - get the correct portrayal. At the outset, the Japanese did not contest the beach, instead shooting from hidden bunkers after a large body of Marines had landed. The viewer never sees the Japanese soldiers unless they are driven into the open, creating the perfect mystique of the unseen enemy. The capture and gruesome butchery of Bradley's best friend receives very sanitized treatment. They could not have shown Iggy's corpse and maintained an R rating - he was mutilated beyond recognition - but Bradley's character might have described the scene, as is recorded in the book. He does not because this movie is not about Japanese brutality - it is about American lies about heroism - and the crew never loses sight of this point.
The segments portraying the bond tour reveal an ax to grind on the part of the creators about the improper exploitation of heroic images. They show mostly accurate events, but they insert a few episodes that are not in the book and change events from the way they really happened. When one survivor initially mis-identified one man in the picture, they hosted one bond tour event with the wrong gold star mother. That Marine, Hank Hansen, had entrusted his personal effects to John Bradley as he died and Bradley took advantage of Mrs. Hansen's presence at the event to give her Hank's personal effects. In the movie, Bradley has no relationship with Hank and does not give his effects to his mother, but only lies to her about Hank being in the picture. The speech that they give on the bond tour bears no resemblance to the speech that James Bradley records in the book. The real John Bradley told the people attending the events that he and his comrades had done their part by serving on the battlefield and the home front needed to do its job to bring the war to a conclusion. In the movie, he gives a modest message about the real heroes being the ones who died and he entreats the people to buy bonds in their honor. Bonds are hereby turned into memorials to the dead, rather than tools for the troops to finish the job. When a screenwriter has a speech word-for-word and uses none of it, I have to wonder why. Obviously, we all know today that nothing happens in war except people dying, so there is no appropriate use for war bonds except memorials. The war bond drive succeeded, but the movie does not mention this because it is not a movie about success.
The screenwriter, Paul Haggis, also wrote "Million Dollar Baby" and "Crash," which teach that there is no reason bad things happen and that people are racist. I think most of us regard our history of racial strife as bad enough without adding instances of racism that did not happen. Unfortunately, Haggis had only one racial minority, Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian, with which to work. His comrades deride him as a "redskin" and call his girlfriend a "squaw," neither of which appears in the book. How likely is it that a bar in Chicago in 1945 would have a policy of not serving Indians? That scene is simply absurd. Ira Hayes had a drinking problem, but why turn him into Rosa Parks fighting a Jim Crow system that did not exist? It is the little modifications inserted into an otherwise accurate portrayal that give this film a deceptive air. The real John Bradley was a devout Catholic, but the movie character neither crosses himself, nor says a Hail Mary nor carries a rosary because Paul Haggis' movies do not have devout characters. 99% of the viewers will never know that John Bradley received the Navy Cross, the second-highest medal that any sailor can earn for valor. His son pulls a medal out of an envelope, but never tells us what it is because this is a movie about made-up heroism, not real heroism. I would say, "Our heroes are more human than we make them out to be and we should remember their human sides." This movie teaches "there are no heroes," but only invented scenes that people create as heroic so that we can understand wars. I don't recommend this movie and I will not see it again.
The movie gets 3 stars because the battle scenes are outstanding. The way the Marines move onto Iwo Jima, they look much like the real footage of that battle that I have seen. Clearly, the director of this film, Clint Eastwood, paid very close attention to showing the scenes as they really looked. Even little things - Ira Hayes hanging his poncho off the back of his belt and Hank Hansen's baseball cap - get the correct portrayal. At the outset, the Japanese did not contest the beach, instead shooting from hidden bunkers after a large body of Marines had landed. The viewer never sees the Japanese soldiers unless they are driven into the open, creating the perfect mystique of the unseen enemy. The capture and gruesome butchery of Bradley's best friend receives very sanitized treatment. They could not have shown Iggy's corpse and maintained an R rating - he was mutilated beyond recognition - but Bradley's character might have described the scene, as is recorded in the book. He does not because this movie is not about Japanese brutality - it is about American lies about heroism - and the crew never loses sight of this point.
The segments portraying the bond tour reveal an ax to grind on the part of the creators about the improper exploitation of heroic images. They show mostly accurate events, but they insert a few episodes that are not in the book and change events from the way they really happened. When one survivor initially mis-identified one man in the picture, they hosted one bond tour event with the wrong gold star mother. That Marine, Hank Hansen, had entrusted his personal effects to John Bradley as he died and Bradley took advantage of Mrs. Hansen's presence at the event to give her Hank's personal effects. In the movie, Bradley has no relationship with Hank and does not give his effects to his mother, but only lies to her about Hank being in the picture. The speech that they give on the bond tour bears no resemblance to the speech that James Bradley records in the book. The real John Bradley told the people attending the events that he and his comrades had done their part by serving on the battlefield and the home front needed to do its job to bring the war to a conclusion. In the movie, he gives a modest message about the real heroes being the ones who died and he entreats the people to buy bonds in their honor. Bonds are hereby turned into memorials to the dead, rather than tools for the troops to finish the job. When a screenwriter has a speech word-for-word and uses none of it, I have to wonder why. Obviously, we all know today that nothing happens in war except people dying, so there is no appropriate use for war bonds except memorials. The war bond drive succeeded, but the movie does not mention this because it is not a movie about success.
The screenwriter, Paul Haggis, also wrote "Million Dollar Baby" and "Crash," which teach that there is no reason bad things happen and that people are racist. I think most of us regard our history of racial strife as bad enough without adding instances of racism that did not happen. Unfortunately, Haggis had only one racial minority, Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian, with which to work. His comrades deride him as a "redskin" and call his girlfriend a "squaw," neither of which appears in the book. How likely is it that a bar in Chicago in 1945 would have a policy of not serving Indians? That scene is simply absurd. Ira Hayes had a drinking problem, but why turn him into Rosa Parks fighting a Jim Crow system that did not exist? It is the little modifications inserted into an otherwise accurate portrayal that give this film a deceptive air. The real John Bradley was a devout Catholic, but the movie character neither crosses himself, nor says a Hail Mary nor carries a rosary because Paul Haggis' movies do not have devout characters. 99% of the viewers will never know that John Bradley received the Navy Cross, the second-highest medal that any sailor can earn for valor. His son pulls a medal out of an envelope, but never tells us what it is because this is a movie about made-up heroism, not real heroism. I would say, "Our heroes are more human than we make them out to be and we should remember their human sides." This movie teaches "there are no heroes," but only invented scenes that people create as heroic so that we can understand wars. I don't recommend this movie and I will not see it again.
posted by Bountyhawk at 10:43 AM
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