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FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS

From its post-Saving Private Ryan/Band of Brothers footage of combat on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima to its bland home front drama of soldiers coping with the inner conflicts of their celebrity heroism, the film is so stultifying generic that it is hard not to see it as less about World War II and more about wars in general. Or maybe it is simply the condescending script adapted by Paul Haggis and William Broyles Jr., which, in its exploration of the mythos of the Iwo Jima flag raisers, evokes the soldiers only as nothing more than by standers. The latter seems a specialty of Haggis, and Adam Beach’s one-man-as-all-of-America’s-Indians (or even as-all-non-whites) character Ira Hayes seems definitely in tune with the kind of broadside social criticism ; here we scoff so easily as soldiers call him “Chief” and a Senator asks him if he used a tomahawk on the Japanese, but far be it for the film it actually interrogate this racism or show its odd clash with battlefield tactics and friendship. And it is just as easy to be irritated with the other two surviving raisers of the flag, Ryan Phillippe’s everyman-good guy Doc and Jesse Bradford’s everyman-coward/fame-seeker Rene Gagnon. These characters, and even more specifically, their story, are so wrought with blandness, so full of the requisite and the tired nostalgic recollection of World War II that has its American soldiers only performing as witnesses to the action and never as full-bodied participants, of offering faux-sage, nostalgia-dripping advice for the honor-ignorant current generation that one assumes the screenwriters and director Clint Eastwood must have something else in mind for Flags
In fact, in about the middle of the film that thing seems to be revealed. First one has to contend with the film flipping back and forth through as many lurching flashbacks, flash-forwards and present-days as inarticulately and illogically as possible....