Film Review: Flags of our Fathers

Clint Eastwood has been on a hot streak with critics with films like Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby. His latest project to garner overly generous praise is Flags of Our Fathers, which has been christened the favorite to win the Oscar for Best Picture. Yet Flags is mired by the same problems that plagued his past directorial efforts: an indulgent, self-righteous screenplay overwrought with didacticism.

The film begins with a nightmarish flashback to Iwo Jima, evoking a landscape of desolation and hopelessness. It then cuts to present-day interviews beset with clunky narration.

The film is structured around a random assortment of interviews with unusually sagacious veterans who don't tell stories so much as lecture about principles, for example the lack of any real heroism in war. That's all fine and well, but Eastwood's sepia-toned war action suggests the opposite- that war consists of an uncomplicated and oversimplified binary of heroes and villains. How else can we interpret scenes that attempt to emotionally connect the viewer with Americans while the Japanese remain faceless and inhuman?

Although Eastwood strives to breakdown the mythology of the famous Iwo Jima photograph, he inadvertently romanticizes soldiers as naive and inexperienced men who speak in an "aw-shucks" and "golly-gee" dialect, and dream about the glory of war.

The few effective scenes in the film poignantly expose the ways in which politicians use the shell-shocked soldiers for their own means. But the film only touches on the hollow return of the soldiers to the real world, and these moments lack the emotional immediacy needed to affect the audience. Even the most resonant moment in the film-an instant of spontaneous grief shared by two people of different races and generations-seems oddly contrived.

Flags leaves little room for the viewer to do anything but nod in complicity as the final scenes and credits sentimentalize the fraternity of the soldiers in Iwo Jima. How's that for mythology?