Flags of Our Fathers (2006)

Before I share my thoughts on this film, which I finally managed to see yesterday, I will republish something I wrote last year elsewhere:

Locations.

I was surprised to read that Flags of Our Fathers used Iceland to represent the Japanese island of Iwo Jimo. The same country was used, I discovered, for Asia in parts of Batman Begins.

I suppose producers are always looking for new places to film, bearing in mind cost, logistics, weather as well as appearance and novelty. A James Bond film would hardly qualify for the name if it didn't used exotic and glamorous locales. It's part of the recipe, even in the grittier Casino Royale.

In The Russia House, Liverpool was discovered grim enough to be used for Moscow. Dundee played the same role in the TV play, An Englishman Abroad. In these cases it was budget and politics that precluded using the real place, but there are times when the real place is available but unacceptable. TV's Maigret had to be shot in Prague because Paris didn't look like itself any longer.

From the sixties onwards Mexico was increasingly popular as a Western location. Labour was cheap, the unions were weak and you get away more easily with being nasty to horses. In any case, as Tector Gorch says in The Wild Bunch, 'Just looks more of Texas to me.'

There would be a case for claiming that the use of Mexico as a Western location actually altered the themes and style of the genre itself. That theory is complicated, unfortunately, by the rise of the Spaghetti Western, where Spain doubled for Mexico and the US. Incidentally, Billy Two Hats was filmed in the Negev desert, Israel.

Filmgoers generally will accept this because one desert looks like any other, but even the casual viewer will know that Tombstone, Arizona, is nowhere near Monument Valley, as My Darling Clementine would have us believe. Director John Ford, of course, was above such considerations, although he made the concession of importing one or two Arizona cacti. Even that, I suspect, was to help him frame the composition of his shots.

In the old days of Hollywood, California could pass for anywhere: Merrie England in Robin Hood, Wales in How Green Was My Valley?, Africa in the Tarzan films. Just stick in a few library shots of elephants or London buses and you're there.

Ireland has been England in Henry V and Excalibur, and Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan. On the other hand Ireland was represented by the Isle of Man in Walking Ned.

England has had its moments. The most recent blockbuster I can bring to mind is Gladiator, where the opening battle in the German forest was staged near Farnham, Surrey. Probably top of the English locations is Black Park country Park in Buckinghamshire, home to Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, the Mummy and the Gorgon.

My personal favourites: The Isle of Dogs as Hue in Full Metal Jacket. And Snowdonia as the Northwest Frontier in Carry on up the Khyber.

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Back to Flags Of Our Fathers.

Directed by Clint Eastwood. Starring Ryan Philippe, Adam Beach, Jesse Bradford.

Clint Eastwood has been directing pictures for nigh on 40 years now and has produced an impressive body of work. It’s varied, usually successful commercially and increasingly acclaimed critically. Actors like his laid back authority on set, and producers like his efficiency. But would you watch a Clint film and recognise it as such if you didn’t know it? I tend to think of him as a modern Raoul Walsh.

I’m not trying to damn him with faint praise, because I have great admiration for both men, and sometimes I get fed up with a director like Kubrick sometimes, constantly trotting out his ‘themes’.

Flags of Our Fathers, for example, is a magnificent, powerful film, but could it not be a Spielberg film? It was originally his project and he remains co-producer. I’m thinking of the staging and photography of the battle scenes, the parallel questioning of the morality of war, the flash-forwards to the characters in old age.

The opening scene sets out the theme and the tone. A retired photographer muses on the power of a single snap that can win or lose a war. Soldiers climb up a rocky incline in darkness. You think that the hill does not look very realistic and then you realise that it’s a mock-up in a football stadium, filled with cheering crowds who wildly applaud as Old Glory is raised for the umpteenth time. We will return to this scene when we are able to gauge the feelings of the three men involved.

We move back to the landing on Iwo Jima, a tour-de-force of film-making. The incredible size of the fleet, steaming relentlessly on, leaving a man overboard to drown; the murderous bombardment, watched like a firework display by exuberant marines; our first sight of the hill which will figure so large later; the gut-wrenching violence when the men engage with the hidden enemy; the routine heroism.

The sour note sets in when the photo of the raising of the flag becomes such an iconic image, and a cash-strapped government sees an opportunity. So what had been a casual event is turned into a media circus. There is grim comedy in the confusion over who raised which of two flags. If I’m still confused, that can only be appropriate.

Frankly I cannot be outraged, as I think I’m intended to be, by this selling of heroism to the American people. If we can accept that the war is necessary, even with atomic weapons, why get hot under the collar about the cynicism exploiting the two marines and the sailor sent on the bond-raising tour? And it doesn’t ring true that it is all the cause of Ira Hayes’ decline into alcoholism. The man is already on the brink of breakdown, suffering from daily casual racism and fear of death. On the other hand, perhaps only fighting with men who just might come to accept him as just another comrade might have been his redemption.

The film is of epic length, but I doubt its theme can carry it. The taking of the island was the epic story. The flag-raising was just one of many shameful, but necessary incidents in that story. Moreover, it wouldn’t be so long if Eastwood had known where to end it.

I feel I’m being over-critical. So let me say that I think it’s a wonderful piece of work. The acting of Adam Beach and Ryan Philippe is outstanding; the photography excellent – note the near monochrome of battle with the garish colour of the tour at home; Clint’s own music wistfully unobtrusive; editing efficient and exciting; the special effects outstanding.

I just feel it’s less than the sum of its parts and misses out on greatness.