The Colby Echo

Issue date: 3/2/07 Section: Arts & Entertainment

Media Credit: www.rottentomatoes.com

By the time this review comes out, we'll know whether or not Letters From Iwo Jima took home the Oscar for Best Picture or not. My guess as I'm writing this on Oscars Eve: Probably not. Not that Clint Eastwood deserves another one of those golden guys to go along with the 4 he has already, but he deserves it this time more than any other, because Letters is, arguably, his best film to date.

It's a bare bones, unpretentious film that eschews ideals to tell an eloquently simple story about war and the people caught in it.

Eastwood walked a cultural and historical tightrope in the creation of Letters, which is entirely in Japanese (with subtitles) and acted by Japanese actors. For the most part, he manages to avoid falling off either side. Making a movie about soldiers is a tough enough business, making a movie about soldiers from a culturally distant nation in a language you don't know might just be insane. It's hard not to come into Letters expecting it to be full of cultural faux pas and heavy-handed revisionism, and there are moments when you have to wonder how much Eastwood is instilling American values into his Japanese characters. But while it's easy to play cultural connect-the-dots and pretend to see who's being represented as what, Letters digs deeper than allegory, and Eastwood has too much respect for the people in this film to reduce them. Nationalism comes under fire because it twists human nature and has no respect for human life. War is horrible, for anyone in any place, and even harder to bear under the weight of one's nation. Eastwood's sympathies are cross-cultural without ignoring the complicated importance of culture.

While Eastwood's previous films were sometimes serious to the point of being heavy-handed, there's a kind of meditative quality to Letters that lends it gravitas without being grave. The Academy tends to favor films that make their social message before the film has begun. Letters avoids this by being about people, above all else, and through the simple elegance of its craft. This is a stark, minimal and slow film, full of silent drama and tiny, indelible moments unbearably ripe with pain and profundity. The film's not without its stylistic flourishes either, but Eastwood knows how to keep style out of the way of substance. Aside from the startling crimson of blood and fire, the film is mostly monochromatic, filtered in the same color of the soldiers' worn, beaten and dirty uniforms, a kind of exhausted gray that still retains the nobility our age's color-saturated sensibilities find in classic films and photographs. It's a great and new use of an overused color palette, and it lends the film a look all its own.

Letters isn't a perfect film. Like its spiritual predecessor Saving Private Ryan, the film is sometimes a bit long in the tooth, and wants to be over several times before it finally is. And like Ryan, the frame story that provides the context for the main narrative is unnecessary and sometimes preposterous, and veers dangerously toward corniness. Unlike Ryan, however, Letters manages to be brutal without making a spectacle of itself. It's a wise, sorrowful protest poem that could have only been made by a filmmaker with the confidence to let his characters speak for themselves, to let them be people.

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