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‘Flags of Our Fathers’

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Clint Eastwood distills a wartime story of epic proportions and personal truths from the worst single engagement of World War II on the island of Iwo Jima. From the brutal reality of the bloody 40-day battle to the way a group of its soldiers were made famous and taken advantage of by their government before being discarded, the movie gives context and personality to the soldiers whose faces were hidden in the war’s most famous image. Based on James Bradley’s best-selling book about his personal journey into his father John Bradley’s wartime achievements, screenwriters William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis (“Crash”) craft a carefully organized script that breathes with poignancy, emotion and relevance without ever succumbing to sentimentality.

Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal took the iconic “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” picture on Mount Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945, just five days after hundreds of battleships delivered 30,000 soldiers to the shores of the small but heavily fortified Japanese island covered in black sand and volcanic ash. Far from the photo’s perceived significance of triumph, it privately revealed a more prosaic reality beneath the surface. For the picture, the photographer actually recorded a second flag raising, performed in order to ensure that the original banner did not end up “tacked on some politician’s wall” after a covetous troop leader demanded it for his own.

Of the six men in the photo, only three survived long enough to be returned to America for the government’s Seventh War Loan Drive fundraising tour to sell war bonds to the American public. The battle for Iwo Jima came at a time when the U.S. military was broke, and only the sale of war bonds could keep the combat effort afloat. The news media’s widespread embrace of Rosenthal’s picture enabled an unprecedented phenomenon of hero/celebrity culture around the country that overshadowed the many sufferings and deaths still taking place on Iwo Jima and elsewhere. 

The three surviving flag-raisers, Marine Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford), Native American Ira Hares (Adam Beach), and Navy Corpsman John “Doc” Bradley (Ryan Phillippe) resist personal issues of guilt as they appear before ardent fans to explain that the real heroes of the battle are the men killed in action or still fighting the war. Doc Bradley is the group’s spokesperson, who ends his humble statement with a plea for the public to purchase war bonds. James Bradley said that the goal for his book was to break down the hero myths about the men in the picture. Clint Eastwood helps achieve Bradley’s ideal by interweaving recreated interview sequences with retired soldiers that Bradley spoke to at length when writing his book.

Just as the film follows the somber fate of the three soldiers propped up as war bond hawkers, it also chronicles the fates of the other three soldiers in the photo who died on the battlefield. The deaths of Sgt. Michael Strank (Barry Pepper), Pfc. Harlan Block (Benjamin Walker) and Franklin Sousley (Joseph Cross) give poignant context to the fireworks spectacle at home where Bradley, Gagnon and Hares reenact their flag-raising effort atop a giant paper-mache hill in the middle of Chicago’s Soldier Field stadium. 

“Flags of Our Fathers” is a tremendous film about the very beginning of celebrity worship, and our need to invent and memorialize brave men. It is a deeply heartfelt and highly original war movie that takes time to get your head around — days, weeks, or months. Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers” companion film “Letters From Iwo Jima” will continue to provoke contemplation of the battle for Iwo Jima, except as viewed from the Japanese perspective. CV

‘Marie Antoinette’

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The word “soft” summarizes the world of Sofia Coppola, perfectly. Each film she has made has the tenderness, vagueness and, ultimately, the sensibility of a fluffy white cloud in the middle of a blue sky. With two near-perfect films on her resume, 1999’s “The Virgin Suicides” and 2003’s majestic “Lost in Translation,” Coppola’s third film should have been an easy play. Instead, we are given the beguiling “Marie Antoinette.”

There’s the famous Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst): the one who so insipidly said “Let them eat cake” upon learning of the famine and starvation of the French people, and the one who had her head cut off and displayed, with ample delight, to the same people she told to eat said cake.

Then there’s the private Marie Antoinette: the one who was forced into a French marriage (she was Austrian originally) by her brutish mother and who would eventually lose a newborn baby just as her kingdom was crashing down. Coppola seems very confused as to which side she wants to show in “Marie Antoinette.”

The film begins as Marie is being married off to Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman), who will take over for his grandfather, King Louis XV (a particularly boisterous Rip Torn) when he passes on. In the film’s first third (roughly until Louis XV dies), Coppola paints the world of Marie Antoinette like the original Paris Hilton: the little dog constantly in her arms, the frivolous clothes and the constant pouting over the traditions of French royalty.

There is a dreaminess to the first half of the film that sets off a mesmerizing sense of dazzle. It doesn’t even seem weird that ’80s post-punk heroes Gang of Four, Siouxsie & the Banshees and The Cure share the same arena as classical composers like Rameau.

Far from a social commentary, “Marie Antoinette” seems to cast off any sense of history or class war in favor of the daze of womanhood. The scenes of Antoinette frolicking around with her daughter with sheep in a garden and the shot of her giggling uncontrollably after finally having sex with her husband seem much more important than scenes where the poverty-stricken people of France rally outside the royal palace. This is all for the better, since all of Coppola’s previous films exist in a certain dreamscape while dealing with the emotional plights of their heroines.

Trouble rears its ugly head in the film’s last quarter when, seemingly out of nowhere, Coppola starts searching for Antoinette’s soul on the physical plane. The brilliant cinematographer Lance Acord (“Lost in Translation,” “Adaptation”) keeps the imagery wondrously whimsical, but plot elements, like the death of her child and the French people forcing Antoinette and Louis to leave their palace, brashly drag the film into a fake sense of reality.

Coppola’s second-guessing of her treatment turns the end of this otherwise breathtaking pastel wonderland into a shockingly uninvolved dramatic stab at insincere integrity, and it becomes almost impossible to give in to the featherbed that Coppola lays out for us. Call me a softy. CV

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