Day two of our Oscar extravaganza brings us to Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima, his powerful companion piece to Flags of Our Fathers, this time telling the story of the famous battle from the perspective of our Japanese enemies.
Just to mix things up a bit, I'm going to start by telling you why Letters probably won't win the Best Picture award. First of all, it is bravely filmed almost entirely in Japanese, and for better or worse, subtitles haven't lent themselves to many Best Picture winners in the past (off the top of my head, I can't remember how much of The Last Emperor was subtitled, but that's the only one that springs to mind). Much like the inherent British-ness of The Queen, you can argue that this helps the authenticity, and therefore impact, of the film, at the same time as it hurts it with the Academy.
The second and third strikes against Letters go hand-in-hand. Box office has yet to crack ten million, and like it or not, that matters. But part of the reason for that is that Brad Grey and the Dreamamount people put most of their Oscar faith into Flags, which was only a modest success critically and commercially. In fact, they weren't even planning to release Letters in time to qualify for this year's race until they realized that it had the better shot. But it may have been too late by then, with too much money already spent in other directions. So whatever the film's qualities, the business end of things is really hurting its chances.
But even with all that going against it, Letters has some things going for it as well. First and foremost among those is Clint Eastwood. The audacity of the whole Flags/Letters endeavor could only have been greenlit under maybe five directors in the world, and one of them is the producer, Steven Spielberg. Eastwood spent years at Warner Bros., but they gave him such a hassle over Million Dollar Baby (a film I don't think he ever expected to accomplish what it did), even after the success of Mystic River, that he took this next project to Spielberg (for whom he once directed an episode of Amazing Stories) and somehow got Paramount to finance it.
Of course, Eastwood brings more than pedigree to the table. His simple, unobtrusive directing style continues to elicit brilliant performances from his actors and enlighten a gradually emerging theme in much of his recent work as a director, that being the complex gray area between good and evil. Starting with Unforgiven, with the ethical struggles of its central character, then with A Perfect World and Mystic River, Clint keeps trying to show us that the world is not as black and white as Dirty Harry Callahan would have us believe. He wants us to see ourselves, or at least some part of ourselves, in William Munny and Little Bill, in Butch Haynes and Jimmy Markum. I get the sense that he's trying to atone for all those dead faces we can't remember from his early westerns and cop films, and whatever you think of the actual quality and content of his films, I think everyone has to admire what he's trying to say.
But Letters from Iwo Jima takes this idea to another level. Having already shown us the Americans storming the beaches of the small island, to turn the camera around and show us the same event in which we are the enemy puts the ground level of war in a perspective that is truly haunting. First, though, we meet General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (brilliantly played by Ken Watanabe), sent to take over command of the increasingly restless Japanese troops on Iwo Jima. Kuribayashi is an unconventional leader who has spent time in the United States, and some of the commanders under him question his tactics and his devotion. His fair and even-handed command style does win him the support of the troops, particularly a former baker named Saigo who desperately wants to return home to his wife and newborn child rather than die for his country.