Letters From Iwo Jima (15)

Letters From Iwo Jima has a classic war movie premise. It's 1945, and the heroes are stationed on a small island of vital strategic importance. They know that in a matter of weeks they'll be vastly outnumbered by an invading army. As they dig tunnels and get ready for the onslaught, none of them expects to survive, but the island is all that stands between the enemy and the folks back home on the mainland, so they're willing to fight to the death. It's stirring stuff. After an hour of watching their plucky preparations, we see the attacking armada dotting the ocean from the shore to the horizon, and the first tiny figures jump from their boats and swarm up the beach. It was all I could do to stop myself shouting, "Kill them! Mow them all down right now!" The twist, as you well know, is that in Letters From Iwo Jima, the faceless aggressors are American and the men on the island are Japanese, so it might seem to be a radical film for Clint Eastwood to be making. You'd certainly assume it would be more groundbreaking than last year's Flags of Our Father, which saw the same clash from the American perspective. But don't be deceived. However unusual it might be for the grand old man of Hollywood to make a subtitled homage to the opposition, the message of Letters From Iwo Jima is much easier for Oscar voters to swallow than Flags of Our Fathers' was.

It was while Eastwood was researching that film that he became intrigued by the Japanese commanding officer, Lt-Gen Tadamichi Kuribayashi, and decided to make a companion piece. He can't have imagined that Letters From Iwo Jima would go onto to be the more acclaimed of the twin projects, but it's been been nominated for best picture, screenplay and director in tonight's Oscars, while Flags of Our Fathers has to make do with a couple of nods in the technical categories. What's even more surprising is that Letters From Iwo Jima got all those nominations even though it's a sprawling, shapeless film which never quite conveys how long the conflict is lasting or how badly it's going. The colour has been drained out of the footage, so almost everything is grey except for the blood, the explosions and the sun on the Japanese flag. And yet, for all the arty dinginess of the cinematography, the script doesn't hold back on clichéd characters, all of whom gets misty-eyed flashbacks to the days before the war. The dignified Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) remembers his trips to America. A young baker, Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), recalls his tearful parting from his pregnant wife. And a reserved military policeman, Shimizu (Ryu Kase), admits that he was sent to Iwo Jima because he was too soft-hearted to shoot a dog.

In short, it's a traditional film wearing the uniform of a revisionist one, which could explain why it got the Oscar recognition and not Flags of Our Fathers. The best films of Eastwood's later years have come about when he's revisited the genre movies he starred in when he was younger, and sandblasted off their mythic coating to reveal the dark reality underneath. He applied this method to Westerns (Unforgiven), cop thrillers (Mystic River) and sports movies (Million Dollar Baby), and then, with Flags of Our Fathers, he did the same with war films. In telling the true story behind the iconic photograph of the stars and stripes being raised atop Mount Suribachi, he scorned the hypocrisy of labelling every soldier a hero, and he condemned the US Government's treatment of veterans. The surviving flag-raisers of Iwo Jima were paraded around the land when there was money to be raised, but after the war they were dumped on the scrapheap. Flags of Our Fathers would have been making a bold statement at any time. Making it when there's a war on, Eastwood was lucky not to be arrested for high treason.

Letters From Iwo Jima doesn't have much to say except that Japanese are human beings, too. Its message is that the troops are conscripts who would rather be at home with their families, and that while there are one or two zealots among the officers, most of them are capable of being decent, caring fellows, just so long as they've spent some time in the United States. Maybe it's inevitable that if an American director pays tribute to the bravery of foreign forces he'll end up with a timid, circumspect film. As a respectful guest in the house of Japanese history, Eastwood couldn't examine their war crimes, for instance, without defeating the point of the patronising exercise. All he's done is prove that Hollywood can be just as mawkish about other country's soldiers as it can about its own.

n.barber@independent.co.uk