Flags Of Our Fathers

Flags Of Our Fathers is the third great film Clint Eastwood has directed in just fours years. It’s a brilliant elaboration on the many World War II films that have come before it. Unlike many more traditional films of this genre, it truly humanizes the battle at Iwo Jima and deconstructs the American mythology of its famous photo. It celebrates the messy youthfulness of the soldiers as much as their deeds in war and argues that it is there character as individuals that should be remembered more than their impersonal function in iconography. Heroes, according to the film, are things we make up to help us feel better. The men in the photo considered themselves merely humble soldiers inferior to the ones who died in battle.

The film juxtaposes the truly grisly events at Iwo Jima with the resulting promotional tour that the surviving men from the photo were sent on to raise money for war bonds. This campaign often involved the omission of unfortunate details and occasionally some outright lying to the public in order to keep their hopes up. There’s ambivalence as to whether these deeds should seen as acceptable or grotesque. Eastwood is not much interested in condemnation or attack. He mostly wants to examine the situation in all of its complexities.

What he does decidedly say about the men from the photo is that they were overwhelmed and unready to become national spokesman and public “heroes.” They feel morally aggravated by being treated as though they alone performed acts undertaken by thousands of soldiers (many of whom died) and find that their efforts to voice appreciation for their fallen comrades seems to fall on deaf ears. The public demands heroes and they have been cast in the roles. Ira Hayes (Adam Beach) is least able to accept his title, leading to serious issues with alcohol and a mostly tragic life thereafter. Renny Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and John “Doc” Bradley (Ryan Phillippe) are more comfortable in the limelight, but both find themselves settling for menial jobs when the public quickly forgets their names and faces and moves onto the next salable spectacle. The epitome of hollow gratitude comes when Hayes is stopped in the middle of plowing a field later in life to take a photo with a family of tourists. “That’s a hero kids!” says the father as they drive off and leave him to his meager life.

The flashbacks of the battle and the events of the bond tour intersect in this overlapping and time jumping narrative framed by Bradley’s son’s interviews with veterans while researching his book (Tom McCarthy plays the author here but James Bradley is the actual coauthor of the book upon which the film is based). Their greatest intersection comes at a highly exploitative stadium show in which Hayes, Bradley, & Gagnon are told to reenact their famous planting of the flag poses atop a paper-mache mountain. The three men are haunted my horrible memories as the crowd cheers for their victory with no real understanding of the lives it cost.

Grade: A