Everyone has seen Joe Rosenthal's photograph of six American servicemen raising the American flag at Iwo Jima. But contrary to popular belief, the flag was raised at the start of the brutal weeks-long battle. After the Americans had taken the island and Rosenthal's picture had become a great patriotic symbol, three of those immortalized had been killed. The remaining three—Navy Corpsman John Bradley (Ryan Phillippe) and Marines Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach)—were persuaded (perhaps intimidated) to return to the United States for a nationwide tour to convince Americans to buy war bonds. Clint Eastwood's ""Flags of Our Fathers,"" based on the bestselling memoir by James Bradley and Ron Powers, is about the emotional toll this took on these three men.
The three see nothing heroic in being photographed raising a flag—and identify the ""real heroes"" as those dead on Iwo Jima. Yet each deal differently with what they perceive as misplaced praise. Ira slips into alcoholism and suffers horrific flashbacks. Rene enjoys the opportunity to return home, and openly acknowledges those more deserving. And John—whose son narrates the film—remains composed while forming a moral judgment. The overarching theme of ""Flags of Our Fathers"" is the inseparable relationship between war and propaganda. It asks whether this reality represents legitimate patriotism and respects military personnel. The three sudden celebrities know they are only useful for a time, and spend the film coping with that fact.
In his twilight years, Clint Eastwood's craft has deepened and matured. ""Mystic River"" is one of the best films of this decade, and ""Million Dollar Baby"" was an elegant, poetic character study. ""Flags of Our Fathers"" has several scenes of inspiration, but it lacks the depth or craft of those films. Eastwood meanders between the dry and the perfunctory, and in his constant unwillingness to stay focused, he cannot channel the emotion of great war films. The movie should not have a third-person narrator. It is about personal feeling, which the characters themselves should speak for. That the narrator is Bradley's son adds a trite, sentimental flourish which doesn't jive with Eastwood's raw approach. For that matter, Paul Haggis' entire screenplay is a sloppy, boring rambler—far from his usually crisp work.
For a movie about propaganda and reality, ""Flags of Our Fathers"" doesn't strive toward realistic depth. In fairness, Eastwood was probably going for irony, basing his world off propaganda and showing characters asserting their humanity inside it. Or something like that. It's an ineffective technique, as the movie jumps randomly between patriotic flourishes and harsh realism until the very end. Eastwood has things he wants to say about patriotism, propaganda, and heroism. If he says them clumsily, he should at least say them coherently—but he doesn't.
It is too easy to praise ""Flags of Our Fathers"" for avoiding the juvenile impulses of ""Flyboys"" and ""Pearl Harbor."" But seriousness, no matter how prolonged, has never meant greatness.
