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Battle
cry: Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers.
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The
Price of War
By
Laura Leon
Flags
of our Fathers
Directed
by Clint Eastwood
Growing up, we spent every July 4th parked on the lawn of
the country club, sitting on blankets atop big Buicks, anxiously
awaiting the big fireworks display. My father would stand
next to the car, his arm protectively guarding me from toppling
down off the top. Usually calm, he would be uncharacteristically
rigid during these times, like he could barely stay within
his skin, his arm and jaw tensed to the breaking point. It
wasn’t until years later, when my mother mentioned in passing
that Dad could barely stand the sound of firecrackers, that
the reality of his memories of his four years of active service
in the Pacific during World War II hit me. Here was a normal
guy, living a normal life with wife, children, and job, and
he was haunted daily by the horrors of what he had seen and
done.
I bring this up because it encapsulates perfectly the heart
of Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers. Based on
the book by Thomas McCarthy and Ron Powers, and adapted for
film by William Broyles, Jr. and Paul Haggis, the movie tells
the story of three of the raisers of the flag at Iwo Jima
(one of the more brutal battles in the Pacific), their ensuing
fame, and, most important, the aftereffects of battle. Joe
Rosenthal’s accidental shot of the flag raising—actually,
the second such raising that day—created an iconic image that
spoke of heroism, hope and determination. Not incidentally,
the picture became a rallying point for the government to
raise much-needed money to continue to finance and finish
the war, and so, flag raisers Doc Bradley (Ryan Phillippe),
Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford), and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach) were
plucked from battle and sent home to embark on an ambitious
war-bond drive.
The movie goes back and forth in time, following three narratives.
The weakest of these is the attempt by Doc’s grown son James
(Thomas McCarthy) to piece together the story of what really
happened on Mount Suribachi and to the men who were there.
The other two narratives are strong enough that we, the audience,
don’t need to hear the aged veterans in the son’s story tell
us things like, “You don’t die for a cause, you die for your
friends.” As the servicemen traverse the country, being feted
by politicos and fawned over by adoring females, they experience
anguish over what they’ve witnessed, and a profound sense
of loss for their dead comrades and those left behind to finish
the battle, which took several more weeks. The flash of a
camera bulb, or an ice-cream mold of the flag raising, can
immediately transport them back to the nightmare that was
Iwo Jima. Ira, in particular, can barely function in the face
of such loss, and increasingly relies on alcohol to get him
through.
By far the most effective moments are in the battle scenes,
aided by Tom Stern’s outstanding, stark cinematography. While
bravery is certainly acknowledged, the underriding element
is that soldiers do what they have to do in order to survive;
what is so often mistaken as heroism is, more often, dumb
luck. Doc, Rene and Ira know this all too well, but it’s a
truth that the people back home, then as well as now, don’t
really want to know.
If there’s something wrong with Flags of our Fathers,
it’s that there is no emotional payoff, perhaps because the
movie wanders too far into the story of Tom’s search for the
truth. The servicemen have their moment in the sun, they do
the job of raising the necessary money needed to supply our
troops both in the Pacific and in Europe, and then, they go
home, or back to the front. Doc and Rene end up living normal
lives, whereas Ira, shattered by his memories, limps along
for years. As the saying goes, old soldiers never die, they
just fade away, and in this, the movie is true to the spirit
of countless other veterans who came home and tried to resume
“normal” life. That said, the actual photographs that appear
on the screen during the closing credits bring home, almost
more than anything that went on before, the extent of the
price we extract from the men we send to fight.
Tasty
Pastry
Marie
Antoinette
Directed
by Sofia Coppola
Sofia Coppola’s candy-colored film about the doomed 18th-century
French queen looks good enough to eat. Almost every shot is
an explosion of reds and blues and golds and greens as extravagant
as the wealth of the era being re-created. Of course, there’s
also the not-incidental point being made that the brilliant
hues of the clothes, food and décor are as irresistible as
many of the people whose lives they are meant to ornament
are repellent.
But the latter category does not include the title character,
because Coppola clearly admires and—being Hollywood royalty
herself—empathizes with her protagonist. Coppola’s sympathy
for Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst, as perky and pleased
with herself as a head cheerleader) and her lump of a royal
husband, Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman, amusingly dull), isn’t
new; the 1938 MGM version, just out on DVD, is one long, tedious
orgy of sucking up to royalty and privilege.
What is new is an absolute absence of judgment on their obscene
wealth. There are no cutaways to the suffering masses; the
only suffering is Marie’s, at the hands of her court rivals.
It could be argued that this is sort of grotesque, but having
the film hew so closely to Marie’s point of view gives us
an insight into and sympathy for her character that feels
fresh.
The bare outlines of Marie Antoinette’s life are familiar:
An Austrian princess is married off to the heir to the French
throne; becomes queen; lives it up for a couple of decades;
and, finally, loses her head to a revolution she neither foresees
nor understands. Coppola covers this territory dutifully,
but playfully: Her cheeky blending of ’80s pop by the likes
of Bow Wow Wow and New Order with gorgeous period music by
Jean-Philippe Rameau is only the most obvious provocation.
Coppola revels in the insane minutia of French court procedure.
Marie gets her first taste of this when she first arrives
at the French border, and is forced to strip naked and change
her clothes, so as not to pollute France with the presence
of Austrian-made garments. This is very amusing, but Coppola
soon establishes that there is as much terror as humor in
the rigid rules for royals—and it doesn’t hurt that the finger-wagging
comtesse hovering over Marie is played by the coolly fearsome
Judy Davis.
In addition to the leads, there are entertaining performances
by Rip Torn as randy old Louis XV and Asia Argento as his
mistress, DuBarry; Molly Shannon and Shirley Henderson as
vicious court ladies; and Steve Coogan as the well-meaning
Austrian ambassador.
The real star, however, is the director herself. While some
may find this too-long-by-20-minutes biopic a bit too indulgent
to its subject, it’s hard to imagine the filmmaker taking
this criticism to heart. Coppola might even suggest that her
detractors eat, well, cake.
—Shawn
Stone
Now You See It
The
Prestige
Directed
by Christopher Nolan
In the opening narration to Chris topher Nolan’s astonishing
new puzzler, The Prestige, a theatrical engineer named
Cutter (Michael Caine) explains the three parts to a successful
illusion. The parts are the Pledge (promising the trick),
the Turn (performing the trick), and the Prestige, in which
the trick is honorably transposed, and which has multiplying
meanings within the film. Even more so than in Memento
(also co-written by Nolan with his brother Jonathan), The
Prestige is a puzzle box of a film that takes on added
resonance with each twist of the plot.
Based on the novel by Christopher Priest, the film reveals
those twists with escalating speed. The plot revolves around
a magic trick called the Transported Man, an illusion that
requires the magician to enter one door and exit from another
door in an inhumanly short amount of time. Alfred Borden (Christopher
Bale) invents the trick but doesn’t have the showmanship to
perform it to its fullest potential. Rupert Angier (Hugh Jackman)
is a consummate showman, but his repertoire doesn’t have the
originality of Borden’s tricks. Their obsessive rivalry will
devour almost everything in their path, and that’s saying
a lot: Set in turn-of-the-century London (a time when magicians
were among the most famous celebrities of the day), The
Prestige summons and transforms this era of convulsive
change with mesmerizing aplomb.
Cutter’s opening narration is delivered from the witness box
in a murder trial. The film then flashes back to the early
in the careers of Borden and Angier, who work as stagehands
for an aging magician. Prophetically, they argue over what
knot to use on the stage assistant, who is Angier’s wife.
The story then covers their alternating rises to fame and
misfortune, during which Borden marries an impoverished Cockney
girl (Rebecca Hall) and Angier hires a gorgeous assistant
(Scarlett Johansson). Though slightly obvious as symbols of
Victorian romanticism, both women are fully realized emotionally.
Much of the film’s appeal comes in the discussion and presentation
of historic tricks such as the Bullet Catch (a trick so deadly
Houdini wouldn’t perform it); each act serves as a setup for
ensuing developments, even as the storyline doubles back on
itself.
Several historical people (Chung Ling Soo, Thomas Edison)
walk on the cusp of the magicians’ dizzyingly psychological
vortex; of them, Nikola Tesla (David Bowie, in a terse gem
of a performance) makes the most dramatic entrance, walking
unscathed through bolts of alternating electric currents at
his laboratory in Colorado. Tesla’s involvement allows the
filmmakers their most haunting imagery (a field of light bulbs
glows like irradiated seedlings) and dialogue: “Tesla isn’t
a magician,” says one character, “he’s a wizard.”
Elegantly atmospheric, the film captures the arrival of a
new era in applied science with subdued panache. An extraordinary
feat of filmmaking, The Prestige ends with a denouement
that serves as a reminder that “prestige” is Latin for illusion.
—
Ann Morrow
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