Flags of Our Fathers

Directed by Clint Eastwood

When AP photographer Joe Rosenthal captured six soldiers erecting a pole in mountainous terrain during the U.S. military’s successful battle to overtake an isolated Japanese stronghold in 1945, the Pulitzer Prize-winning image was a mythological goldmine. “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” became an essential ode to American patriotism, flaunting the country’s insignia as national agitprop with smug triumphalism bested only by George Washington’s emblematic crew crossing the Delaware. Rosenthal’s picture fielded more critical eyes early on, but accusations of theatricality were moot.

Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers makes no apologies for its status as a dramatization. An innately compelling war saga, it celebrates World War II iconography and critiques its exploitation in the American government. The script, by Paul Haggis and William Broyles, Jr., draws from James Bradley’s book of the same title, which demystified the lives of the Iwo Jima flag raisers (one of which was his father). The central themes deal with small men and big politics: Following the publication of the photograph, the White House glorified its young conquerors, bringing the three surviving subjects home to instant fame. As a director, Eastwood loves to tug heartstrings, but he also plays along with the cynical nature of the material. 

The story follows the befuddled youths, competently portrayed by Ryan Phillipe, Jesse Bradford and Adam Beach, as they wrestle with unexpected fame in the wake of an understated catastrophe (the battle continued for more than a month after the flag was erected). The main voice of reason is Native American Ira Hayes (Beach), who rejects the trio’s unquestioned heroism. Unable to shake his role in the illusion of victory, he turns to booze. 

“No sense in being a hero if you don’t look like one,” says a perceptive soldier, and indeed, Hayes has to end up in a ditch before the public finally forgets him. 

Working within a genre that demands that the audience sees some action, Eastwood cuts between the homecoming experience and flashbacks of combat. He doesn't distinguish the destruction on Iwo Jima from countless other battles, but the intoxicating big screen canvas allows for a potent collage of chaos. As bodies fall and blood flows, coherence becomes secondary to conveying the horrific experience. The main screen predecessor is Allen Dwan’s 1949 John Wayne vehicle Sands of Iwo Jima, which spent more time on straightforward action and unabashedly glorified the climactic flag raising (in both cases, the Japanese are nearly invisible antagonists). Eastwood smartly strips that sequence of its romanticism, but he seems inevitably drawn to sentimentalism in the final scenes, which awkwardly incorporate Bradley’s interviews with the veterans. 

Dancing this unseemly jig across time boundaries, Flags of Our Fathers is a structural cousin of Saving Private Ryan. This is no surprise; it’s an Eastwood creation but a Steven Spielberg product, since the lovable Hollywood mainstay serves as a producer. Both movies feel obliged to show the veterans in the present, as though their age heightens the consequence of their experiences. There’s nothing wrong with that assertion, but using it as an epilogue creates the illusion that memories of the dead are overpowered by testimony from the survivors—the same propaganda embodied by the contested photograph.