Two years later, Clint Eastwood continued his streak of successes, offering up the most ambitious work of his entire career. Building on the interest shown in Unforgiven regarding heroism and truth, these companion pieces deal with this issue in a couple of really interesting ways. First, there’s the American perspective detailed in Flags, which seeks to unpack the real story behind the iconic image and propaganda tool of the American troops raising the US flag at the Battle for Iwo Jima in World War II. The men involved in the photo are fleshed out as complicated figures with conflicted views, and one scene in particular depicts the artificial nature of the photograph that was accepted as a candid account of what really happened.
Then there’s the Letters film, which takes this notion of truth that has been called into question by the previous film, and expands it even further, showing the battle as it’s perceived from the opposite end of the spectrum, the Japanese perspective. An even greater task than humanizing or complicating the American men hailed as heroes in the war, here Eastwood succeeds in humanizing those decried as the Enemy at the same time, providing an almost completely absent perspective on a barely understood conflict. It’s not often domestic audiences are put in the trenches with the individuals their country was fighting against, but Eastwood does precisely that in this movie, and to profound effect. It was ballsy. But it resulted in what may be the greatest work of his career.
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