Golden Globe and Academy Awards LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA: Golden Globes' Best Foreign Film

It's awards season. The Golden Globe Awards cover both film and television whereas Academy Awards focus soley on film. And, since I am a film buff, I will focus on Golden Globe winners for that genre.

Three films I reviewed here have won Golden Globe Awards for 2006. Most noteably, director Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu's "Babel" starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, reviewed on this site November 27, 2006, which won for Best Picture. "Letters From Iwo Jima" reviewed on the 17th of January won for Best Foreign Film. Shy, humble Forest Whitaker won Best Actor for his striking portrayal of the mercurial, sadistic, meglomaniacal Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in "The Last King of Scotland" which I reviewed for this site on October 12. Helen Mirren received a Best Actress Award for her sterling, humanizing portrayal of the current Queen Elizabeth in "The Queen" a film I have just seen but have not reviewed. However, when both "Last King" and "The Queen" first came out months ago, I presciently predicted to friends and family that both Whitaker and Mirren would win Best Actor and Actress Awards - - for the Academy Awards, not giving the Golden Globes a thought. It has been the pattern, though, that films and actors who've won awards for the Golden Globes will win Oscars in the same categories, except for the year that "Crash" won the Oscar for Best Picture. It was ignored in the Globes. Director Martin Scorcese received his second Globe award for "The Departed", a film that hies back to his days as director of the violently eloquent "Mean Streets" and "Goodfellas" after misfires like "Gangs of New York" and "The Aviator" (also starring DiCaprio).

"The Departed" out-gores both the above early films, yet its story is crisp, unpredictable, and complicated. You really must pay attention. (I confess I had to turn away from some scenes. ) I'm not a huge fan of Matt Damon's, maybe one day I can get beyond his corn-fed looks. Still I have to say, he was admirable in his dual roles as a Boston "Statie" (state cop) and an informer for crime boss Jack Nicholson. Nicholson can't help how he looks whether sitting ringside at the Globes or bellying up to a sleazy Boston bar. He does a good job (or Scorsese does), however, of portraying the flop-sweat of a once powerful bad guy on his way out. Leonardo Di Caprio, at this time of his career, can do no wrong. He was stellar in "Blood Diamond" and nails his role in "The Departed" as a wanna-be cop (with connections, no less) who flunked out of training only to be hired as a snitch for head police detective Martin Sheen, who's aiming to bring down the Big Guy. It all works beautifully. Boston accents and all. Shamefully, Martin Whalberg did not even get a nod.

Other winners: Best Supporting Actor Eddie Murphy as the James Brown-like character; American Idol reject, Jennifer Hudson, Best Supporting Actress both in "Dreamgirls"; Meryl Streep for "The Devil Wears Prada", and Sasha Baron Cohen for "Borat" who in his speech gave a surrealistic, comic ode to his co-star Azamat Bagatov, referencing the latter's "globes." Prince won for his theme for the animated film, "Happy Feet". Tom Hanks gave the most embarrassing tribute to Warren Beatty and his life-time of work, mentioning Beatty's balls at least a half-dozen times (as in "moxie"). Then Beatty, in turn, had to get up there and drone on and on. With this, an evening that began with a bang threatened to end in a whimper, was saved by the surprise win for "Babel" as best picture and Iñárritu's gracious acceptance speech, recognizing his stars. and giving glory to his native country, Mexico.

See these films and "Little Children", "Notes on a Scandal", "Pan's Labirynth"; "The Painted Veil", and especially, "Children of Men" before the Academy Awards coming in February.

LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA, directed by Clint Eastwood, written by Iris Yamashita and Paul Haggis, starring Ken Watanabe, Tsyoshi Ihara, and Kazunari Ninomiya, Cinematogapher, Tom Stern

Director Clint Eastwood released "Letters from Iwo Jima" on the heels of his poorly received, but no less important "Flags of Our Fathers." "Flags" is told from the American perspective and concerns the soldiers who planted the flag on the top of Mt. Suribato, whereas "Letters," in Japanese with English subtitles, is a look at the battle of Iwo Jima from the Japanese viewpoint.
The film begins in 2005 with Japanese excavators digging out the miles and miles of tunnels soldiers had dug from one end of the island to the other, branching off in all directions. It then seamlessly segues back to 1944 to a scene of soldiers digging trenches in the sand along the beach. The General in charge is soon replaced by General Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), from an institution akin to the US’s West Point. He goes against the previous orders, saying that the strategy would be best to fight the Americans from the hills around the island. Thus the tunnel building starts. There is conflict among the brass about the new general’s direction, but Kuribayashi has the last word. Kuribayashi had lived in the US and hobnobbed with highly-placed individuals in society and the military. He had an insight into the American psyche.

Twenty thousand Japanese soldiers divide into battalions stationed in tunnel bunkers all around the island to protect it from an imminent attack by the Americans. Saipan has already been taken and is being used to stage an attack on Iwo Jima. One awesome scene is an aerial view of hundreds of ships streaming towards Iwo Jima across the ocean, trailing wakes like silver ribbons. The island, we learn, is a place where nothing grows and water has to be shipped in as there’s no natural supply.

Eastwood does a masterful job of humanizing the war by focussing on the backstories of a couple of grunts: One is Saigo, a former baker (Kazunari Ninomiya), with a pregnant wife back home. As the film progresses, he and Kuribayashi develop a heartwarming relationship; the other grunt is a soldier who had been in an elite military unit that stayed behind to police the populace. We learn later that he’d broken a law and was sent to Iwo Jima as punishment. All in all, "Letters" which is based on actual letters to and from wives and sweethearts of the soldiers that the excavators dug out of the tunnels in 2005, is an anti-war film. In one scene, a Japanese soldier reads aloud a letter he’s found on a dead American soldier they had tried to help. It was from his mother. "It sounds like my mother," he says. As in "Gallipoli" "Apocalypse Now," "The Deer Hunter," to name a few, Eastwood, with an understated, austere hand illustrates the utter futility of war. No one wins when tens of thousands of young men are slaughtered, families torn apart, destroyed, along with towns, cities, countryside and flora and fauna, like what’s ongoing in many parts of the world: Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East.

There is a disturbing scene in the film where two Americans left to guard a couple of prisoners (one is Saigo’s friend). They arbitrarily kill them after slinging racial epithets, alluding that they are not even human. Eastwood does not show Americans in a good light. We recall the propaganda spread about the barbarity of the Japanese, forgetting that we rounded up US citizens, stole their land, and herded them into concentration camps; firebombed Tokyo which alone gave us no reason to drop atom bombs on Hiroshimo and Nagsaki, but we did, anyway. We forget too that we also firebombed Dresden, killing tens of thousands of civilians. When all is lost and there’s no water, no ammunition, no food, and even an attempt at being a suicide bomber fails, and the Americans are entering the tunnels with flame throwers, many soldiers blow themselves up with hand grenades. Only days ago, before each battle, they had stood in a circle, raised their rifles, and shouted, "Banzai!"

What is striking about this film from the first frame is its color, or lack of it. It is as though Eastwood depicted the mood of war in cinematographer Tom Stern’s palette of grays, muddy greens, and black. Color is seen only in the reds that suddenly appear when soldiers’ limbs are blown off and in explosions as gray smoke billows into the sky, with flares of white yellow and red. Clint Eastwood puts a human face to a war that’s six decades old, half-forgotten, and already the subject of many films. Why two more? Only Eastwood could have pulled it off. Critics place "Letters" at the top of their ten best films of 2006. I am one of them. I was pleased to see that "Letters" won Eastwood a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film.