Joe Rosenthal

There wasn't a tree or blade of grass on Iwo Jima, just black sand and volcanic rocks. But it was the first piece of Japanese soil -- the sacred homeland itself -- invaded by American forces, who desperately needed its airfields for B-29 bomber strikes on the main islands.

		'Flags of Our Fathers' Starring: Ryan Phillippe, Adam Beach, Jesse Bradford. Director: Clint Eastwood. Rating: R for sequences of graphic war violence and for language. Web site: www.flagsofourfathers.com/ Related article Adam Beach felt the pride of Iwo Jima 'heroes' Previous coverage The sister of a Marine in the famed Iwo Jima photograph eagerly awaits the movie

Some 21,000 Japanese troops were dug in during February-March 1945 and told to defend the godforsaken place from their maze of interlocking underground strongholds, fortified caves and machine gun nests -- all cleverly camouflaged.

It took 25 days of fighting, 20,000 U.S. casualties and the deaths of virtually all 21,000 Japanese to win the battle and plant the American flag atop Mount Suribachi -- not necessarily in that order.

It took just one photograph to immortalize that victory for history and rally America around it.

Clint Eastwood's "Flags of Our Fathers" -- the 76-year-old director's most ambitious film yet -- is both a riveting account of one of America's bloodiest World War II engagements and a disturbing exploration of the real vs. hyped heroism in which it was drenched.

The script by William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis focuses on three of the flag-planters who survived the action -- Navyman John "Doc" Bradley (Ryan Phillippe) and Marines Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach) -- and the government's subsequent use of them for propaganda and fund-raising purposes.

There is no shortage of war carnage here: Eastwood and cinematographer Tom Stern provide awesome panoramas of the invaders' vast flotilla, superbly capturing the adrenaline excitement of the landing and disembarkment, followed by the chaotic terror of combat. Waves wash over bodies on the strand. High above, shell-shocked medics wander among the dead and wounded, as often as not joining them.

	Merie W. Wallace Director Clint Eastwood oversees the action on the set of "Flags Of Our Fathers." Click photo for larger image.

But this is not John Wayne's "Sands of Iwo Jima" or Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan." The washed-out color here seems almost as monochromatic as Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal's legendary shot that inspired it. Eastwood's epic is going for historical, not contemporary, impact.

The flag planted by the first small group of Americans who reached the summit was, in fact, taken down. A second contingent of different men (including Bradley, Gagnon and Hayes) replaced it with another -- the one in Rosenthal's iconic image. No faces were identifiable, leading to confusion convenient for the government if not for the surviving soldiers in the picture. Whisked back to the States for a final war bonds drive, their heroes' welcome degenerates into publicity stunts. In one of the film's best scenes -- an enormous rally at Chicago's Soldier Field -- they are made to scale and plant the flag atop a papier-mache model of Mount Suribachi for the crowd.

Gagnon and Bradley deal more or less stoically with their handlers and sudden celebrity, in the expectation of postwar perks. But Hayes, an American Indian of the Pima tribe, falls apart. Convinced it's a tour de farce instead of force, he is guilt-ridden that the real heroes are either dead or still fighting in the Pacific. Plied with liquor, he stumbles from gig to gig, enduring racist insults along the way to obscurity.

Ira Hayes' story was filmed long ago in "The Outsider" (1961), an underrated biopic starring the underrated Tony Curtis. Here, he is beautifully and painfully portrayed by Adam Beach (who played a WWII Navajo codemaker in "Windtalkers").

Bradford and Phillippe are restrained and equally effective, while Barry Pepper is more fiery as the inspiring Sgt. Mike Strank (whose relatives sat in front of me at the preview screening). On the other hand, a non-look-alike Harry Truman is annoying, as is the general difficulty of matching names and faces of the young soldiers to their geriatric counterparts later in the story. But those are minor quibbles.

Is it just me, or will other viewers be struck by a stunning visual parallel between struggling to raise the flag on Iwo and Christ's struggling to carry the cross to Golgotha?

Intentional or accidental, it speaks to a depth in Eastwood that I never suspected before. He'd never be accused of making an "anti-war statement," here or elsewhere, but his film reminds us that it is always old men who send young men to die in war, and manipulate them or their memory -- like Pat Tillman in Afghanistan -- later.

The message that heroes aren't necessarily who or what they appear -- they're something we need and create -- is true enough and clear enough in the intrinsic material. Eastwood should have trusted his storytelling and not pounded the point so didactically into our skulls with his final narration. It will be fascinating to see the "enemy" perspective when Part Two -- Eastwood's Japanese-language "Letters From Iwo Jima" -- is released next year.

For now, I'm much impressed by the complexity and independent vision of a spaghetti-western cowboy turned serious director (who personally composed "Flags'" spare, haunting musical score, by the way). Eastwood has rendered the ferocity of Iwo Jima and the wrenching denouement of its heroes more movingly, and less mythically, than any filmmaker before him.

And the alpha-omega of it was a single photograph.