Eastwood's battles

By Max Goldberg

One can be forgiven for thinking that Clint Eastwood seems late with his entwined combat films, “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters from Iwo Jima.” Last year, after all, was marked as the year of the war movie, with Iraq documentaries hitting their fever pitch, dramatizations like “Jarhead” plunging into the quagmire, and George Clooney heralding the return of the activist/actor. Clooney was on the cover of the war-themed Times Sunday Magazine “movie” issue; this year, the focus was on comedy, with a deadpan Will Ferrell as coverboy. Then there’s the fact that “Flags”/“Letters” are World War II combat films, not exactly the sexiest genre to be resurrecting since, after all, isn’t part of the problem in Iraq precisely that we’re still depending on outmoded WWII archetypes of a “stand-up” fight? And yet, while Eastwood’s films lack some of the in-the-guts currency of other recent war movies, they will almost certainly be more lasting than most of the pack, in no small part thanks to their informed genre play. The advantage of situating very specific ideas in mythic, archetypal stories is that you’re able to maintain a degree of universality: something obviously on Eastwood’s mind in his obsessively balanced dual-portrait of Iwo Jima.

Although Tom Stern’s smoldered cinematography unquestionably links the two films, it’s quickly apparent that “Letters from Iwo Jima” is much more of a linear, traditional combat film than its predecessor, and, as has been noted by most critics, this is generally to the benefit of the new film. Where “Flags of Our Fathers” was radical in its form

01.02.2007