Flags of Our Fathers

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While I have the greatest respect for the talent, determination and sheer audacity of both Clint Eastwood (Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby) and Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby) I speculate, as I leave the theater, about . . . why I’m speculating. Instead of marveling over the incredible action sequences, the gore, the moments when something touched my heart, or the history, I keep asking myself “Why did these guys make this movie this way?” Of all the questions that should or could be asked as one leaves the theater I don’t believe this is the best one.

Adaptation can be the trickiest of films to construct, and it’s success or failure is nearly always in the script. Though Haggis is one of the finest screenwriters working today, the best-selling book Flags of Our Fathers, by James Bradley, escapes his abilities to present a cohesive narrative of the flag raising of Iwo Jima. Heavy handed use of flashbacks and flash forwards is not the real problem. The story attempts to weave three contiguous timelines together. The first is the present, where Bradley finds his father’s war memorabilia and undertakes the job of writing the book. Then, two past timelines. In one the young marines of Easy Company are engaged in the battle of Iwo Jima, and in another we follow three of the six survivors of the flag raising through the marketing of the war to raise money for the war effort. Then there are threads of other time lines as well that poke out through the cloth of the film in an effort to tie down loose ends. There are the stories of “Doc” Bradley and Rene Gagnon, two of the three survivors, and what happened to them later in life. Then, there is a continuous effort to remind us of the sad end of Ira Hayes, the quiet Pima Indian who insisted on being sent back to the Pacific to join his company, and died alone and desolate years later. This story alone could have been a brilliant movie.

I did find myself getting past the clunky stops and starts to enjoy numerous moments in the film. Adam Beach (Smoke Signals, Skinwalkers) gives an absolutely heart-wrench performance as Ira Hayes. And both Ryan Phillippe (Doc Bradley) and Jesse Bradford (Rene Gagnon) give solid accounts as the three are whisked from the terror of war into national attention and dizzying hero worship. Here is the real core of the story as each of the three struggles with their own reservations about being called hero’s.

The battle sequences are as real as Saving Private Ryan, and Eastwood’s use of desaturated colors during these scenes, gives us a palette nearer to our memory of that conflict. Thankfully, he doesn’t use the erratic motion of handheld cameras or fast-cuts in the editing to move the action, but relies on the impact of what we are seeing to force us through the tense moments.

Muddled as it may be, Flags accomplishes two of the filmmakers objects. First it deconstructs the process of making hero’s out of young men who kill other young men in nationalistic conflict. Second, it demystifies the question that has plagued the most famous photograph in history. Even during the war there were those who claimed that the photograph was posed. This is clearly debunked, but there is more to the story, and though I have spent a great deal of this column thrashing the film, I encourage those with a strong stomach to see this for the history and the real story of the photograph.