Forgive me if this sounds hokey, but I've just seen Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima, and frankly, words fail.
It's going to take some time to process this. Time, and the repeated viewings this work simply demands. And time to piece this together with its companion film, Flags Of Our Fathers, which this echoes, repeats and takes off from. They are two seperate films, with similar yet distinct tones, and yet together they form a whole, a canvas on which Eastwood has unquestionably painted his masterpiece.
And yet they are not radical departures for this filmmaker, whose work I've admired literally since I was a kid; before I even knew what a director did, I knew High Plains Drifter, Eastwood's second film as a director, was not like any western I'd ever seen before, even the Sergio Leone westerns it somewhat resembled, the films that made Eastwood a star. Those were baroque, self-consciously stylish affairs. Eastwood, though always underrated as a visual stylist, preferred to depict things--violent things, tragic things, funny things--straightforwardly, to show you and move on, never dwelling for effect, never showboating.
He's still working that way, a master craftsman who only through an astonishing accumulated body of work is now being called an artist. There's nothing self-conscious about Letters from Iwo Jima, no camera set-ups that call attention to themselves, no flashy editing patterns that take you out of the moment. There is only a slow, steady build-up of tiny details, an accumulating sense of dread, and finally there is violence and despair.
But above all there is life, humanity, a sense that all of us everywhere matter, a belief that is embedded in every frame of film.
