"Flags of Our Fathers" is a well-made, well-acted movie that still feels curiously amorphous and perfunctory. As a director, Clint Eastwood has been the master of elegantly scripted, small movies that transcend their own humble roots to become larger than life ("Bird," "A Perfect World," "Mystic River"). Here, he has made a fundamental miscalculation by taking on a script that is directionless, simple and, to a large extent, lacking any real point of view. In an attempt to combat this, Eastwood overreaches and pummels us with a wide variety of war movie clichés, none of which really sticks or picks up any added significance. Everybody is trying, but the material just does not command attention.
This is not to say "Flag of Our Fathers" is a bad movie, it is merely an inert one. Compared to Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" (which Eastwood tries to replicate here in both tone and look), this seems like something that was passed down second-hand.
On a technical level, Eastwood — never considered the most visually or stylistically adventurous director — proves himself to be pretty much on par with Spielberg when it comes to shooting gritty battle scenes with hand-held cameras. This presents a whole new set of problems. It's been eight years since "Saving Private Ryan" and "The Thin Red Line" first appeared, and one can't help but shake the feeling Eastwood is late to the WWII party. He does not add any new tricks to actually filming combat, and his regrettable decision to have his movie mimic the washed out newsreel photography of the '40s by employing ghastly, washed-out colors (no doubt done to keep the film's budget and set costs down, and also to obscure the fact that it is Iceland instead of Iwo Jima), feels more like the kind of stylistic tic the normally disciplined Eastwood would avoid.
At the bottom of everything, the premise upon which this film rests is not all that interesting. Eastwood and his duo of top-drawer screenwriters, Paul Haggis ("Crash") and William Broyles, Jr. ("Cast Away"), endeavor to investigate the circumstances surrounding the iconic image of the U.S. flag being raised on the island of Iwo Jima.
Their approach is curiously haphazard — the action cuts back and forth between four distinct time-frames: the nervous days leading to the battle, during which the movie plays like one of those stock RKO war movies from the '50s (complete with characters named Mac, Doc and Ace), the actual battle itself (well-done, but overlong), the barnstorming tour across America with the three surviving soldiers who lifted the flag and, finally, a curious jump forward in time as a baby-boomer writer tries to uncover his father's own involvement in the flag-raising.
In all four of these time frames, it is three men who survived the battle and were pulled out of combat to be the face of the war effort — the foppish and cowardly Rene (Jesse Bradford "Bring It On"), the loyal, yet immensely flawed American-Indian, Ira (Adam Beach,"Smoke Signals"), and the steady-handed, introspective Doc (Ryan Phillippe "Crash") — who are at the center of the movie.
The editing cuts back and forth between each man and his role in the lead-up to the battle and in the actual battle itself, but these scenes are so frenetically paced that we get little of their essence. Instead, almost everything has to be learned by the way they act back at home, and how they deal with their sudden burst of fame. Not surprisingly, Rene and Ira have trouble understanding why people are so worked up about a silly picture — Ira because he's a drunk, and Rene because, well, men like Rene never give deep thought to anything. Only Phillippe's character seems to appreciate the duality of their roles as American saviors, despite the fact that they didn't really do anything of great importance.
Phillippe's performance is spot-on and is by far the best thing in the movie. He should emerge with a shot at a Best Actor nomination. However, Eastwood makes an error that goes against everything in his movie and tries to push Ira on the audience as the emotional center of the film. As a character, he isn't well written enough, and Beach's performance is too broad for this to work. All of this suggests Eastwood never really had a grip on what this movie was about.
And who can blame him? Broyles and Haggis have created a script that is dense and confusing, without ever being interesting or involving. The movie is by turns frustratingly simple and nearly impossible to decipher because of the way the script plays fast and loose with the narrative flow.
Most perplexing of all is the fourth layer of the narrative, the story of Phillippe's baby-boomer son (Tom McCarthy) trying to put together the details of his father service in the Pacific Theater as the old man is on his deathbed. All of this leads McCarthy's character — who has received no character development to speak of throughout the majority of the film — to deliver an amazingly wrongheaded soliloquy about the nature of heroism that basically repeats everything the film has been saying for two hours.
This speech is so amateurish and awkward that I have no idea how two professional screenwriters and one of the best directors in America were willing to put their names on it. Did they think the audiences wouldn't be able to put two and two together? Or was it merely for their own benefit, trying to convince themselves that they had said something important, or even just to convince themselves that they had said anything at all? By the end of this movie, the only thing Eastwood seems to be missing is anything that resembles a point of view.
Grade: 3 out of 5
