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They were expendable

Flags salutes the greatest damaged generation
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
March 28th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
And Then There Were Three. Ryan Phillippe, Jesse Bradford and Adam Beach in Eastwood's powerful film.
Only Nixon could have gone to China, and perhaps only Clint Eastwood, that rugged former action hero and Republican politician, could have directed one of the most powerful statements against war for Hollywood.
Flags of Our Fathers, as with Eastwood’s even braver follow-up, Letters from Iwo Jima, puts the lie to the war porn of 300. Both films plunge into the waste and brutality of battle. But Flags’ primary mission is to chronicle its aftermath, where quickly disposed-of heroes must struggle against physical and psychological pain, as well as being forced to face the hypocrisy and profiteering that inevitably follows war like shovelers after a cavalry parade.
The film is based on James Bradley and Ron Powers’ book of the same name, which tells the story of the three surviving soldiers who hoisted the American flag atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima in World War II during the bloody campaign to wrest that volcanic outcrop from the Japanese (whose side of the battle is covered in Letters from Iwo Jima).
Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph of the flag-raising became the great iconic image of the United States’ involvement in the war, something immediately appreciated by the war’s PR flacks back in the States. With money draining away from the country’s war coffers, a decision was made to bring back the picture’s soldiers and put them on a War Bond drive. By the time the order reaches the brass in the field, three of the six men in the photo have been killed. The remaining three, John “Doc” Bradley (author Bradley’s father), Rene Gagnon and Ira Hayes, are rounded up and sent home.
Eastwood’s film is episodic. The traumatic memories of Iwo Jima haunt the three men as they are force-marched through the Army’s publicity campaign. Tortured with memories of cradling the screaming remains of friends, Bradley, Gagnon and Hayes must perform burlesques of their heroism, from climbing papier-maché replicas of Suribachi in cheering sports stadiums to publicly eating cakes molded into the shape of Rosenthal’s captured moment, dripping with the parodic red of strawberry sauce.
KURT VINION/THE PRAGUE POST
Action man made war critic.
The three men were a true cross-section of American society. Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), the educated Wisconsinite who will quietly suffer from survivor’s guilt into old age; Gagnon (Jesse Bradford), the immigrant’s son who tries to build a career on his moment of fame, only to become embittered; and Hayes (Adam Beach), the Pima Native American, an honorable man who sinks into a fatal alcoholic stupor.
Eastwood’s restaging of the battle for Iwo Jima in both of his films contains all the horror and shock of Saving Private Ryan’s first 20 minutes — though, unlike Spielberg’s film, Eastwood continually forces our attention back onto the blood and spilt viscera staining the island’s sand. Juxtaposing these nightmares with the homefront’s willful incomprehension makes Eastwood’s effort far more painful and poignant than Spielberg’s (though that director served as Eastwood’s producer for both of these films).
Flags of Our Fathers

Directed by Clint Eastwood
With Ryan Phillippe, Jesse Bradford, Adam Beach, Judith Ivey

The central performances are all finely honed, particularly Beach’s. His Hayes survives much, from the casual racism of his fellow grunts to the ignominy of becoming a sideshow attraction for war’s circus. Eastwood has also packed his cast with excellent support from veterans Judith Ivey, George Grizzard, Len Cariou, Harve Presnell and the marvelous Beth Grant.
If there’s a criticism, it is, finally, with the structure with which Eastwood chose to frame his story. What had seemed to be told from Bradley senior’s perspective, suddenly, halfway through the film, becomes his author son’s, a character that the director failed to introduce us to until that moment, causing some momentary confusion.
Of the two films, Letters from Iwo Jima is the better crafted, giving one the impression that Eastwood’s passion (and righteous anger) for the story behind the flag on Iwo Jima might have occasionally distracted him.
Still, Flags of Our Fathers is a searing and majestic critique of war’s heinous folly. Bradley, Gagnon and Hayes were, ultimately, expendable on history’s march — something they, and their Japanese counterparts in Letters, came late to realizing. And something that is probably just now being realized by other damaged men at Walter Reed hospital.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (28/03/2007):

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