My uncertainty was compounded by the unpleasant suspicion that the filmmakers shared this same confusion. "Flags of Our Fathers" starts with a single iconic image -- the raising of the American flag on Mount Suribachi at the battle of Iwo Jima -- and ends in a tangled knot of subplots and half-baked characters. It's not really a bad movie, per se; it's more like the scattered shards of six or seven good ones, reassembled into a whole that is far less than the sum of its parts.
During World War II, a platoon of soldiers climbed atop a pile of rocks to hoist an American flag over a war-torn battlefield, inspiring a few half-hearted cheers from the bloodied men who fought below. Eventually the flag came down, and another weary troop was sent up to replace it. A photojournalist casually snapped a few shots of this relatively mundane moment and found back home in the darkroom that he had created what would quickly become one of the most enduring images of the 20th century.
Six soldiers, struggling together to hoist up Old Glory, its stars and stripes dancing against the sky -- a fleet of propagandists couldn't have staged a better moment. Before long the photo was everywhere, lighting a fire in the bellies of war-weary Americans who responded by opening their hearts and pocketbooks for Uncle Sam. The photo became one of the greatest public relations coups in American history, and it is with no small degree of cynicism that "Flags of Our Fathers" recounts the story behind the image.
The film focuses on the three surviving soldiers who helped hoist that fateful flag, following their journey from the war-torn isle of Iwo Jima to a glitzy homeland campaign, where the men, imported by the U.S. government, peddled war bonds to a nation in love with their fame.
Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) embraces his newfound celebrity with alarming enthusiasm, but his fellow soldiers, John "Doc" Bradley (Ryan Phillippe) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), have a bitter taste in their mouths -- why do they keep calling us heroes, they wonder, when all we did was shoot people and hoist a damn flag? And why are we wearing tuxedos while our buddies are dying on the battlefield?
Such questions are meant to act as screenwriters' cattle prods, nudging the audience to interrogate the nature of American heroism. But it's a dodgy method at best; we can't in good conscience wish for these men to return to combat, but their efforts to sell the war back home seem understandably hypocritical.
For that matter, it doesn't help that the men in question are essentially blanks -- Ira is drunk and weepy, Rene is one big grin, and Doc is so moody and stoic that I wanted someone to remind Ryan Phillippe to blink. Each time Doc set his jaw and stared off into the distance, I sighed and prepared for the next in what quickly became an interminable parade of war flashbacks.
Indeed, the war itself is recounted almost entirely in the form of recollection -- the battlefield is cast in the ethereal silver-gray tones that can only come from reminiscence, or just very poor lighting. There are those who will praise the combat scenes, with their oppressive mud-and-blood aesthetic, as "raw" and "gritty," but there is hardly anything tangible beneath all the sound and fury.
Unable to find time for character development amidst its bloated narrative, "Flags of Our Fathers" falls prey to the common mistake of the mediocre war movie, filling the screen with cardboard characters then blowing them away one by one. Talented young actors like Jamie Bell and Joseph Cross are tossed maybe a dozen lines of dialogue at most, then go down with such tragic solemnity that you hate yourself for not caring.
The ending of "Flags of Our Fathers" is an unabashed cheese-fest -- some nonsense about Doc's son (Tom McCarthy) trying to unearth his dying father's past -- but by then what little momentum the film possessed has been lost to the slog of the narrative. Ultimately, "Flags of Our Fathers" proves too sincere to make light of and too well-crafted to wholly dismiss: it's the kind of grim prestige picture that bullies you into appreciating it, even as you fantasize about all the other things $8 would have bought.
