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Clint Eastwood's take on war propaganda
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It would take names as big as Clint Eastwood and Steven Spielberg to risk addressing a topic as controversial as war propaganda. It's not an easy thing to discuss, especially if the conflict is as complex as World War II.
Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers had a unique impact on me - as I watched it last week, I couldn't help but think of my first visit to the World War II Memorial on the National Mall just last month.
The Battle of Iwo Jima is the subject of the film, a historic struggle most people associate with the famous flag-raising photograph. What most people don't realize is there is a very disheartening tale that unfolded in the aftermath of that picture's nationwide publication. At the same time that the soldiers in the photograph had been taken from the battlefield and cast in a national tour to pitch war bonds, their lives were actually unraveling and their faith in everything -- their leaders, their country, the war itself -- was slipping.
The film unfolds in trifold-chronological order, with flashbacks to the battlefield interspersed between narrative scenes of the soldiers on the war-bonds tour across America. All the while, WWII veteran Keyes Beech, (Len Cariou) recounts the story from his present day perspective, with wisdom of an elder 60 years later.
John Bradley (Ryan Phillipe), Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach) portray the touring trio who must cope with the conflicting realities between the battlefield and home soil.
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