Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) Review

Official trailer

Letters from Iwo Jima ranks among the greatest war films ever made by an American director. Seen twice. The 10+ rating is what it earns. Clint Eastwood directing a Japanese-language film about the Japanese defense of Iwo Jima in 1945. Ken Watanabe as General Tadamichi Kuribayashi. Kazunari Ninomiya as Private Saigo. Companion piece to Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers (2006), released two months earlier. That covered the American perspective. The film won the Academy Award for Best Sound Editing. Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay.

Iris Yamashita wrote the screenplay from a story she developed with Paul Haggis. Based on Kuribayashi’s actual letters home and on Tadamichi Kuribayashi: Picture Letters from the Commander in Chief.

This film wrecks me. Eastwood made a war movie where the Americans are the ones coming up the beach, and by the last act I was dreading every Marine who appeared on screen. Very few American directors would have tried that, and I can’t think of one who’d have pulled it off this well. The 10+ is love without reservation, and my only quarrel is with the Academy’s treatment of Ken Watanabe.

The Setup

General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) arrives on Iwo Jima in June 1944 to command the defense of the island against the anticipated American invasion. Kuribayashi has spent time in the United States. He understands American industrial and military capability. He knows that Iwo Jima can’t be held indefinitely. He also knows that the longer he holds it, the more American casualties he can inflict, and the stronger the hand Japan will hold in eventual peace negotiations.

Kuribayashi orders the construction of an elaborate cave and tunnel system across the island. He abandons conventional beach defense doctrine and prepares to fight from underground positions across the volcanic terrain. The strategy will require his men to sacrifice themselves in extended defensive operations instead of dying in honorable banzai charges. The plan conflicts with traditional Japanese military culture and with the orders Kuribayashi’s subordinate commanders have received from Tokyo.

The American invasion begins on February 19, 1945. The Marines land. The Japanese defenders engage from prepared positions. The film documents approximately five weeks of combat from the Japanese perspective. The battle ends with the death of nearly all 22,000 Japanese defenders and about 6,800 Americans killed. The film closes with modern archaeologists uncovering a bag of the garrison’s letters buried in the tunnels. Kuribayashi’s own letters were the source material for the film.

The Companion Piece Structure

Eastwood directed Letters from Iwo Jima alongside Flags of Our Fathers in 2005-2006.

Both films cover the same battle from opposite sides. Flags of Our Fathers depicts the American Marines who raised the flag on Mount Suribachi and the propaganda campaign that exploited the photograph. Letters from Iwo Jima depicts the Japanese soldiers and officers who died defending the island. The two films were released in 2006 two months apart.

Mainstream American filmmaking had never paired two films this way.

Eastwood spent approximately 14 months on the dual production. He shot most of the material for both films in roughly the same locations using overlapping crew. The economic and creative coordination required was heavy. The combination produced a complete view of the battle that neither film alone could have provided.

Of the two films, Letters from Iwo Jima is the stronger. The decision to make the Japanese-language film at all was Eastwood’s commercial risk. American audiences had limited tolerance for subtitled material. The film made approximately $69 million worldwide on a $19 million budget. The financial result was acceptable. The critical reception was considerably stronger than for Flags of Our Fathers, which the studio had positioned as the primary commercial release.

The Ken Watanabe Performance

Ken Watanabe plays General Kuribayashi at the peak of his career. Watanabe had broken through in The Last Samurai (2003) and Memoirs of a Geisha (2005). Letters from Iwo Jima is his career-defining role. The performance dominates the film entirely. Kuribayashi must convey institutional duty, intellectual sophistication, personal grief about his family in Tokyo, and slow recognition that he’s being asked to die for a war Japan can’t win.

Watanabe holds the performance at the controlled tone the role requires. Kuribayashi doesn’t raise his voice. He writes letters to his family that the film returns to repeatedly. He makes operational decisions that conflict with his subordinates’ expectations. He reads books in English while waiting for the invasion. He carries a Colt pistol given to him by an American friend during his time in the United States. Each detail reinforces the character’s specific positioning. He’s a senior officer who understands the enemy because he’s lived among them.

Watanabe didn’t get the Academy Award nomination the performance deserved.

The Academy nominated Forest Whitaker (winner for The Last King of Scotland), Leonardo DiCaprio (Blood Diamond), Ryan Gosling (Half Nelson), Peter O’Toole (Venus) and Will Smith (The Pursuit of Happyness). Leaving Watanabe off that list was a blunder. I’d have found room for him ahead of at least two of those names, and I think the snub came from the same blind spots behind most of the Academy’s serious omissions.

The Kazunari Ninomiya Performance

Kazunari Ninomiya plays Private Saigo, a young baker conscripted into the Japanese army and assigned to the Iwo Jima garrison.

Saigo is the audience’s everyman entry point. He doesn’t want to be on Iwo Jima, and he doesn’t want to die for the emperor. He wants to return to his wife and his unborn child. He survives by serial accidents instead of through combat heroism.

Ninomiya was 23 during filming. He was already a major Japanese pop star as a member of the boy band Arashi. The casting was commercially calculated for the Japanese market. Eastwood needed Japanese audiences to embrace the film for the production to succeed commercially in Japan. Ninomiya’s pop celebrity drew Japanese audiences who might not otherwise have engaged with the material.

The performance exceeded the commercial calculation. Ninomiya plays Saigo as a man whose ordinariness is the protection. He’s too low-ranking to be punished severely for his desertions. He’s too unimportant to be assigned to the most dangerous positions. He survives because the military system doesn’t pay attention to him. The performance is structurally inverse to the conventional war film protagonist. Saigo is the man who wouldn’t be the protagonist in any conventional war film. The film makes him the audience’s center anyway.

Saigo is the character I care about most in this film. Ninomiya never begs for sympathy. He plays a scared young baker who wants to get home to his wife and the child he hasn’t met, and that plainness moves me more than any battle scene in the picture. I think he’s the man most of us would turn out to be in that tunnel.

The Iris Yamashita Screenplay

Iris Yamashita wrote the screenplay from a story she developed with Paul Haggis. The screenplay process was unusual. Eastwood had become committed to making the Japanese-language companion piece while preparing Flags of Our Fathers. He needed a screenwriter who could work in Japanese cultural context while delivering a screenplay that an American crew could film. Yamashita met the requirements.

The screenplay draws extensively on Kuribayashi’s actual letters to his family. The letters had been published in Japan in 2002 as Picture Letters from the Commander in Chief. The book documented Kuribayashi’s correspondence with his wife and children from his time at Iwo Jima. The letters mixed military responsibilities with domestic concerns. He wrote about his children’s education. He drew small illustrations of household repairs they should make. He wrote about food the family should preserve for the winter. The film uses the letters as voice-over throughout. The letters are the title.

Yamashita earned the Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. The work integrates the historical research with the dramatic structure cleanly. The combination of operational military material, personal correspondence, and ensemble characterization is difficult to balance. Yamashita managed it. The screenplay is one of the strongest war film scripts of its decade.

The Eastwood Direction

Clint Eastwood was 75 during the production. He had been directing for 35 years. The Letters from Iwo Jima production showed capabilities his earlier career had built toward. Patient pacing. Restrained visual style. Trust in performances. Willingness to make commercially difficult choices. All of these qualities the director had been developing across decades.

Eastwood doesn’t speak Japanese. He directed the actors through translators. The arrangement could have damaged the performances. It didn’t. Eastwood communicated the dramatic stakes through gesture, intent, and accumulated trust with the cast. The Japanese actors responded by delivering performances calibrated to the dramatic requirements instead of to language-specific direction. The collaboration produced a film that ranks among the most disciplined of Eastwood’s career.

The Eastwood late period (Mystic River 2003, Million Dollar Baby 2004, Letters from Iwo Jima 2006, Gran Torino 2008, Invictus 2009) is one of the strongest sustained periods of directorial work in American cinema. Letters from Iwo Jima is the most ambitious film of the period and the strongest individual work. Eastwood took the largest commercial risk of his career and produced the strongest film of his career.

The Visual Approach

The film is visually desaturated to the point of near-black-and-white.

Color appears only in specific moments: Kuribayashi’s flashbacks to his American period, certain memories of family life, the brief sequences of Japanese flags. The desaturation matches the visual tone of period documentary footage. The Marines who appear in the film are visually distinct from the Japanese defenders through the color and lighting choices.

Cinematographer Tom Stern worked with Eastwood across most of the late period. Stern’s approach is consistent with the director’s preferences. Available light. Patient framing. Restrained camera movement. Long takes where the material rewards them. The visual style doesn’t call attention to itself. It supports the performances and the narrative.

The volcanic landscape of Iwo Jima itself becomes a character in the film. The black volcanic sand. The cave systems. The Mount Suribachi summit. The visual environment is hostile to human survival. The film documents how the Japanese defenders converted that hostile environment into defensive advantage. The terrain is the story as much as the soldiers are.

The Caves

The film’s signature visual environment is the Japanese cave and tunnel system. Kuribayashi ordered the construction of approximately 11 miles of underground passages. The tunnels connected gun positions, command posts, medical facilities, and supply depots. The system allowed the defenders to work from concealment and to redeploy forces invisibly across the island.

Cave sets constructed at Universal Studios held extensive sequences of the film.

The sets matched the actual dimensions of the Iwo Jima tunnels documented by post-war archaeologists. The cramped conditions force the cast to perform in physically constrained spaces. The claustrophobia of the cave sequences is real. The audience experiences the defensive environment as the defenders experienced it.

I find the cave scenes hard to sit through, and Eastwood wants it that way. The ceilings are low, the light is poor, and the men are packed in with nowhere to retreat. I’d put those Universal sets up against any real battlefield a war film has ever used.

The cave sequences also produce specific dramatic effects.

The defenders can’t retreat or easily communicate across the larger battle. They’re buried in the volcanic island before they die in it. The visual environment is both military advantage and physical metaphor for the larger Japanese strategic position. Japan was defending an island it couldn’t hold against an enemy whose industrial capability it couldn’t match. The caves were the last protection for a defense that had no real protection.

The Ending

The Japanese position collapses across approximately five weeks of combat. The final command bunker is overrun. Kuribayashi shoots himself instead of surrendering. His Colt pistol from his American friend is the weapon. The choice is consistent with his character throughout the film. He’s been the most American of the Japanese officers. He dies using an American weapon given to him by an American who would have been his enemy in a different war.

That Colt is the detail I can’t shake. The film plants it early as a gift from an American friend and pays it off at the worst possible moment, and I think it’s the smartest piece of writing in the whole script. Eastwood doesn’t underline it, and he doesn’t need to.

Saigo survives. The film closes with American Marines capturing him after the last Japanese position falls. He’s been wounded multiple times. He’s barely conscious. The Americans take him into custody. The film’s framing device returns. Modern archaeologists discover the bag of letters Saigo buried in the cave system. Japanese voices read the letters as the closing credits begin.

The ending closes both the narrative and the title. The letters home that the film has been quoting throughout are physical objects that survive the men who wrote them. The men are gone. The letters remain. The film’s argument is that the letters are what matter. The military operation is over. The soldiers are dead. The personal communications they wrote to families they’d never see again are still there, decades later, waiting to be found. Eastwood ends the film on this point and lets it stand.

Craft: Among The Greatest War Films Ever Made

Is Letters from Iwo Jima worth watching?

A 10+, and I don’t hand those out lightly. I can’t find a weak department anywhere in it: Eastwood’s patience, Watanabe’s quiet general, Ninomiya’s frightened baker, Yamashita’s script built on Kuribayashi’s real letters, the caves and the drained color.

Eastwood took the biggest commercial risk of his career on a subtitled film about the enemy and got every piece of it right. My only complaint is with the Academy for skipping Watanabe. I’d put this film at the head of any conversation about American war cinema.

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