He is as well acquainted as any American director (or actor) with the language of cinematic violence, but he has no equal when it comes to dramatizing the ethical and emotional consequences of brutality. There is nothing gratuitous in this film, nothing fancy or false. There is the humor and the viciousness of men in danger; there is the cool logic of military planning and the explosive irrationality of behavior in combat; there is life and death.
As in Flags of Our Fathers, nearly all the color has been drained from the images, a technique that makes the interiors of the caves and tunnels look like Rembrandt paintings. The anxious faces seem to glow in the shadows, illuminated by their own suffering. At other times, in the hard outdoor light, Tom Stern's cinematography is as frank and solemn as a Mathew Brady photograph.
A few scenes serve as hinges joining this movie to Flags of Our Fathers. While Letters From Iwo Jima seems to me the more accomplished of the two films — by which I mean that it strikes me as close to perfect — the two enrich each other, and together achieve an extraordinary completeness. They show how the experience of war is both a shared and a divisive experience, separating the dead from the living and the winners from the losers, even as it binds them all together.
Both films travel back and forth in time and space between Iwo Jima and the homelands of the combatants. In Flags of Our Fathers the battle itself happens mainly in flashback, since the movie is in large measure about the guilt and confusion that survivors encountered upon their reluctant return home. In Letters From Iwo Jima the battle is in the present tense, and it is home that flickers occasionally in the memories of men who are certain they will not live to see it again.
RSS