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Raising Glory: the sham behind the glam., 16 November 2006

Author: dunmore_ego from Los Angeles, California

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Director Clint Eastwood's waving-flag film is, ironically and thankfully, the farthest from a Flag Waving maroon-necker as a post 9-11 American movie can be. When I learned of this film's production last year, I admit to fears that the apolitical movie-making maverick, Eastwood, might have succumbed to public consensus in his autumn years, opting to go the cheesy route of delivering unto the knee-jerk patriots a red-white-and-tried-and-true formulaic, Old Glory-salutin' burbler.

Instead, *Flags of Our Fathers* explores oft-neglected truths behind the accepted legends surrounding the most famous photograph of World War II – Joe Rosenthal's shot of six soldiers on February 23, 1945, raising the stars and stripes on a steel pipe atop Mount Suribachi on the sulfur-sanded, Japanese Pacific island of Iwo Jima.

Movie's opening monologue is brutally delicious: "Every jackass thinks he knows what war is – especially those who haven't been in one" - taunting the movie itself to be not just intelligent, informative film-making, but a jagged, bile-inducing horror canvas of killing atrocity; it now has to show us what it accuses others of misapprehending.

Up to this point in film history, Steven Spielberg (who co-produced *Flags*) has held the championship belt for the most realistic war experience purveyed on celluloid, with the tendon-slicing grit of his *Saving Private Ryan* (1998). But *Flags of Our Fathers*, in its combat savagery, out-Ryans *Ryan*, with Spielberg's producer palm prints a dead giveaway in this film's ashen, shrapnel-sharded battle scenes, filmed in khaki grays and greens, with the visceral clout of a hammer to the kneecap.

*Flags* follows flag-raisers John "Doc" Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach, in an Oscar-nodding performance) prior to their flag-raising and after their herded return to the States to sell War Bonds on FDR's 7th Bond Tour. Along with Barry Pepper (straight out of *Ryan*) as Sergeant Mike Strank, Robert Patrick and Neal McDonough as ranking officers and Paul Walker in a small role (where he uncharacteristically doesn't make an ass of himself), the courage of this film is not in promulgating yet another saber-rattling hero-fest, but in its depiction of the flag-raisers as unremarkable to the point of mediocrity. Bradley, Gagnon and Hayes could not parlay their celebrity into lucrative post-military careers, Bradley becoming a funeral director, Gagnon, a janitor, and Hayes – a Pima Native American, disillusioned and disgusted with the military's hypocrisy and duplicity - a heartsick drifter until his death from alcoholism.

They were great men – but only from a certain perspective.

What eventually brings a tear is not the "patriotism", "heroism" or flag-raising, but the lies, hypocrisy, bigotry and pain that the "heroes" were made to endure when their lives were overtaken by the war and exploited for nationally endorsed murder.

*Flags* is yet another Clint Eastwood movie dealing with the nature of Heroism, but not in that childish aspect American war movies have adopted to mollycoddle the simple-minded populace who now lump every American involved in foreign conflict, however tangentially, a Hero. Rather, Eastwood dares to purvey that there is no inherent heroic action, that "heroes are something WE create," portraying the flag-raising as the inadvertent milestone it actually was. Yes, American troops ultimately plan to raise a flag at the highest point on any battleground, but the U.S. Iwo Jima forces attained the summit of Suribachi so quickly (four days after their beach landing) that the raised flag – though a source of inspiration for the troops pinned around the island by Japanese fire – was more a premature declaration of victory (the battle would last 31 more days) than the definitive killing stroke it was sold as to the American public.

Though there is the barest shadow of uplifting music during the two flag-raising moments, it is not manipulative or tear-jerking; it is as controlled as all Eastwood's directorial efforts. Photographer Joe Rosenthal's photograph became a government tool to leverage revenue from the gullible masses, duplicated profligately on posters, stamps, statues, ice cream shapes, etc. as a symbol of American victory - a fiction abetted by the disdainful politicians who marketed the snapshot soldiers like inanimate products. The "heroes" themselves were the last accommodated cogs in the war machine that exploited their celebrity for its own agenda.

A disturbing scene encapsulates the dichotomy of war that brings "heroism" into question: a medic tries to save a man whose guts are spilling out, whilst twisting his knife into the guts of an enemy beside them. And if that still seems rational to the knee-jerk patriots, how to rationalize the abandonment of a Marine who falls overboard during the journey to the battleground? At first, his mates banter over his clumsiness, until they realize the miles-long armada of battleships is going to leave him to die in the brine rather than impede their killing schedule by rescuing him. As one soldier grimly observes, "So much for No Man Left Behind." The longer we contemplate war, the more blurry the line between hero and villain…

*Flags of Our Fathers* wisely eschews the insufferable "Based on a True Story" tag at film's opening, yet touches on more corroborated facts than most acclaimed biopics, the closing credits featuring real pictures of the Iwo Jima tableaux, including the flag-raisers themselves, ironically reminding us that this fiction pertaining to Iwo Jima's Flag Shot is closer to fact than all the propaganda swilled during its actual occurrence.

(Movie Maniacs, visit: poffysmoviemania.com)

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