I recently went to see Clint Eastwood's new World War II film, Letters from Iwo Jima. As mentioned previously, I was curious to see this film for a number of reasons, not least of which was to see how a "pre-Baby Boomer" would portray the Japanese in a film ostensibly told from their side (the screenplay was written by Iris Yamashita, a Japanese-American). While not a film critic nor a film historian, I have done some research into portrayal of the "other" in Japanese and American war films and so was very much interested not only in the portrayal of the Japanese, as mentioned above, but in how an American director would portray Americans in the film as this would represent an "othering" of his own countrymen.

In any event, I found the film to be quite good, though it did not cause me to rethink the Top 5 ranking of war films presented here previously. Eastwood did coax excellent performances out of Japanese actors that I have seen in other, forgettable performances. Kazunari Ninomiya, who portrays the baker/soldier Saigo, was especially surprising if only because he is a member of the wholly forgettable Japanese boy band Arashi (one of the Johnny's Jimusho groups along with SMAP, V6, TOKIO, NEWS, etc., for those interested) and in this film turns in the first "anti-Johnny's" style performance I have ever seen from someone from that production house. On the other hand, Sidou Nakamura pretty much played his part in exactly the same way he plays every other part I have ever seen him in: brooding, doing his best to channel Sean Penn, but mostly yelling a lot.

Two scenes were particularly striking. First, a scene in which an American soldier is wounded and a Japanese commander orders his men not only to pull the man off the battlefield, but to use the last of their medicines to treat him. A letter from the American boy's mother ends up showing the Japanese solders who hear it read to them that the Americans are "just like us." In a later scene two American soldiers are ordered by their commander to guard a pair of Japanese who have surrendered. Eager to rejoin their unit in the fight, the Americans execute the Japanese soldiers in cold blood. In a sense, this could have been a terribly shocking scene for American audiences that had been brought up hearing only about the virtue and valiant behavior of our men in uniform. My Lai, Abu-Ghraib, and other attrocities committed by American soldiers, though, took some of the sting out of this scene.

The end of the movie also interested me. Eastwood had an opening for a very Hollywood ending along the lines of "Saving Private Ryan," leaving two soldiers, one we had come to like and one we had come to dislike, alive at the end of the story, he resisted the temptation to give us a happy reunion of Saigo the baker/soldier with his wife and child he had never seen. Likely, they died in bombings of the Kanto region and Saigo returned home to nothing. That Hollywood ending might just have been too far fetched for the tone of the film.

So, after all that, I certainly do recommend the film for its study of both the human and the Japanese soul. But, if you really want to see a great war movie, I still say you should go and rent the director's cut of "Das Boot."