Flags Of Our Fathers

Synopsis: During the battle of Iwo Jima in World War 2, six servicemen raised a flag on the top of Mount Suribachi. The photograph of it became one of the defining images of the war. This is the story of that moment and the men who raised the flag.

It's quite a surprise, but in watching this film I realised I didn't really know much about what was behind the image of the flag raised at Iwo Jima. I've seen the picture a thousand times, in textbooks, in articles in magazines, even ripped off and referenced in computer games and movies, but I never knew anything about it. And now comes Clint Eastwood, easily one of the most versatile and interesting U.S. directors alive, with a film that pretty much explodes any romantic notions that might surround the image. Of the six men who raised the flag, only three of them were still alive a month later. And those three men, John "Doc" Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach) were thrust into a world of celebrity for the sole purpose of preventing America from going bankrupt. It took its toll, and while Ira Hayes was immortalised by Johnny Cash, the stories of the other two men have never really been given their due.

The film takes us through the whole story, from basic training to the battle of Iwo Jima then back home and finally to life after the war. Crisscrossing time and space, the editing effectively connects experiences and events to show the complexity of the emotions the men go through, slowly revealing more and more until the full weight of what has happened to them sinks in. They were made into heroes for doing something incredibly mundane, while their friends who died remained ignored or worse, were deliberately excluded from the story. One of the more interesting things about the situation was that the U.S. was near broke when the image of the flag being raised created a new wave of patriotism across the country. And once a story was established it had to be protected for fear that cynicism would re-enter the country and nobody would buy war bonds. So the truth of the situation went out the window. And the three surviving men were forced to lie in the course of doing what they were brought back to do, travel the country and tell people to buy war bonds.

The issue of being taken away from the front is central to the men's stories. Ira just falls apart, seemingly unable to cope with the idea of abandoning his friends. Rene just jumps at the chance to escape from it all, while Doc simply takes it as part of his duty and continues. But the home front is no less a struggle. The racism of the time is never actively addressed but it's always there. Everyone calls Ira "Chief" and makes all manner of bad jokes about his being a Native American. It's a fascinating character arc as he goes from the genuine camaraderie of the marines through the horrors of battle and the trauma of being removed from the war. Deeply affected by the experience, spends out the rest of his days drunk and poor. Rene doesn't seem that affected, but he suffers in other ways. Yesterday's hero, he's unable to capitalise on his fame and spends the rest of his life as a janitor. Doc soldiers on, just does what he has to, and seems to really have it all together. It's only at the end of his life that you see how much it has wounded him. The men were all considered heroes for a moment, but once they served their purpose they were forgotten and discarded. Eastwood asks the hard questions about why we elevate people into heroic figures and why, having put them there, forget them.

As drama Flags Of Our Fathers suffers from the fact that it is telling a true story, one that, like most stories in life, does not have an epic ending. There are several moments in the film that feel like a narrative end-point, but that's not the story being told. Eastwood looks at the whole of the lives of these three men and the extraordinary events that overtook them as a result of doing nothing but their duty. So the film closes not with some grand gesture, but with a slow tapering off that leaves you feeling slightly confused and unsettled, probably the most appropriate response to a mythic event beneath which lie truths that are deeply disturbing.

 

 

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