American Rebel (44 page)

Haggis’s (and William Broyles Jr.’s) major cinematic leap was to tell the story in flashback, to keep the story pulsating and maintain a contemporary feel.

With Spielberg in place as one of the producers, Clint and Malpaso were able to bring Warner into the project. Filming began shortly after
Million Dollar Baby
was completed. In typical Clint fashion, the cast lacked a superstar—the biggest “name” in the film was Ryan Phillippe.

Then midway through production, as if to underscore the difference between himself and Spielberg, Clint made a decision to do something no one had ever done before.

Thus was born the notion of making a simultaneous, or parallel, film, the same story seen from the other side, to be called
Letters from Iwo Jima
. Ken Watanabe would play the lead—he was a bigger international star than anyone in
Flags of Our Fathers
. Clint received permission from the Japanese government to shoot some scenes on Iwo Jima. (The property had been returned to them in the early 1960s.) But for economy and accessibility to mountains and underground tunnels, the bulk of both films was shot simultaneously on a volcanic island in Iceland, and they were released within weeks of each other.

After the war ended, it had taken decades for Japanese cinema to get art-house distribution in America because of the hard feelings left behind by Pearl Harbor. Marlon Brando (of all people) had been the first to attempt a sympathetic portrayal of the Japanese, during the postwar occupation at least, in Joshua Logan’s Academy Award-winning
Sayonara
(1957). It was a daunting challenge to try to make Americans believe that the Japanese were human beings, let alone a cultured civilization capable of love, warmth, and dignity. Logan’s and Brando’s Academy Award-winning film opened the door to Japanese cinema’s acceptance in the United States. But forty years later the industry still felt it was unlikely that any sizable audiences would go see
Letters from Iwo Jima
. Characteristically, even if Clint was aware of the whispers, he proceeded as planned.

“Between the two films together, I was trying to make an anti-war statement,” he said. “It’s hard to make any war picture and make it a
pro-war statement.” Strong and perhaps surprising sentiments, ndeed, from someone whose credentials were strewn with films of flagrant violence, messy bloodshed, and the twitchy pleasures of psychotic murderers, and especially along with the likes of Spielberg, whose vicarious-thrill movies were usually filled with fantasies of glory rather than realistic gore.

Flags of Our Fathers
was released on October 20, 2006, amid high hopes it would be the big fall movie. Two months later, on December 20,
Letters from Iwo Jima
was put into limited distribution in the States, after having its world premiere and initial, highly successful run in Japan. Three weeks later, on January 12, 2007, it went into major nationwide distribution.

Shortly before
Flags
was released, Clint went on what was for him a PR spree, agreeing to sit for an interview with
Rolling Stone
magazine, whose resident film critic had, through the years, been up and down about him. But this time Peter Travers was unequivocal in his praise for Clint’s decidedly nonconservative, non-flag-waving view of heroism and its inevitable fallout. He gave the film three and a half stars (out of four):

Richard Roeper, one of the sharper new multimedia critics, wrote in the
Chicago Sun-Times
that
Flags of Our Fathers
“stands with the Oscar-winning
Unforgiven
and
Million Dollar Baby
as an American masterpiece … but it is also patriotic because it questions the official version of the truth, and reminds us that superheroes exist only in comic books and cartoon movies.”

Most of the major critics got it, and said that both films were among the best and most important movies in Clint’s body of work—but neither clicked with audiences.
Flags of Our Fathers
earned about
$66 million, less than
half of Million Dollar Baby
, against $55 million in production costs. Using the standard formula that a film has to gross twice what it cost to break even, the film wound up losing a significant amount of money.
Letters from Iwo Jima
did even worse and exposed the huge miscalculation in Clint’s overview; during one of the most vicious post–World War II wars in modern American history, audiences in this country simply weren’t interested in a sympathetic view of the enemy
—any
enemy.

The films had their social critics, one of the most outspoken being Spike Lee, the African-American filmmaker, who had strong objections to Clint’s take on the events of Iwo Jima. At the May 2008 Cannes Film Festival Lee was promoting his own World War II film,
Miracle at St. Anna
, about the exploits of the all-Black 92nd Buffalo Division, which fought the German army in Italy during the war. There Lee publicly criticized Clint and
Flags of Our Fathers
and
Letters from Iwo Jima
for not having “a single African-American character or actor. There were many African-Americans who survived that war and who were upset at Clint for not having one [in his two films]. That was his version: The negro soldier did not exist. I have a different version.”

In response, Eastwood, who suspected Lee was trying to promote his films by criticizing Clint’s, angrily told the
Guardian:

Lee returned fire.

After Clint publicly warned Lee to “shut his face,” it was Steven Spielberg who finally got both sides to calm down, convincing Spike Lee to back off. “After game three, L.A. Staples Center, Lakers [vs.] Celtics, I’m going to the bathroom and Spielberg’s sitting there with Eddie Murphy and Jeffrey Katzenberg,” said Spike Lee. “And Katzenberg was getting on me about leaving Clint alone. I said, ‘Steven, let me talk to you for a second.’ So we talked. I conveyed a message and he said, ‘I’ll call Clint in the morning.’ And it’s hunky-dory. He said he was gonna make a call, he made it, squashed.” A couple of months later, Lee even sent his new film over to Clint for a private viewing

Despite Lee’s accusations (or possibly because of them—Lee and his films are not exactly laden with Oscars or nominations), the Academy found Clint’s films good enough to nominate, even if its perception of
Flags of Our Fathers
was, inexplicably, one of
über-
patriotism rather than a profoundly vivid criticism of the Bush administration’s war in Iraq.

    
O
n Sunday night, February 25, 2007, the seventy-ninth annual Academy Awards were held once again at Hollywood’s Kodak Theater. This time television talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres hosted, in an attempt by the Academy to give a more modern look to its annual ritual of self-congratulation and to improve its ratings—the Oscars were a TV show, after all, and more often than not hosts were taken from that pool of talent rather than from the world of film.

There was a different feel in the air this year; for one thing, the Academy had moved up the presentation by nearly a month from the previous year to prevent declining ratings for the telecast. Awards programs were becoming a TV genre all their own, between the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild Awards, the People’s Choice Awards, and at least a half-dozen others related to film (and another dozen for music, TV, and theater), so the giving of the golden statuette was somewhat anticlimactic. And, by February, it was felt, a healthy number of the new year’s films, were, at least theoretically, in theaters, making it increasingly difficult to look back at what was essentially old news.

This year’s awards featured a rematch: Scorsese was back with
The Departed
, his sharp, return-to-form street-cred
policier
, a remake of Wai-keung Lau and Siu Fai Mak’s Hong Kong original
Infernal Affairs
(2002); Clint was back as well with a Best Director nomination, but not for
Flags of Our Fathers—
it was, shockingly, for
Letters from Iwo Jima
.
^*

Scorsese’s nomination was easy to understand, in light of his strong film, and that begins to explain why
Letters
was nominated over
Flags
. Clint had once been an Academy outcast, but ever since his explosive leap to prominence in the ranks of the Academy with
Unforgiven
, his public and industry images had melded into each other, and according to
Variety
editor Peter Bart, he had become Hollywood’s elder statesman; meanwhile Scorsese continued to be the industry’s aging and defiantly independent “bad boy.” Like a film-without-a-film, the Oscar
presentations were moral stories as well as economic victories and almost always followed the standard rules that the villain rarely gets the girl, or in this case, the Oscar. This year, however, the feeling ran heavily throughout the industry that Scorsese had made the better film (better than
Flags of Our Fathers)
. While television had taken over the crime genre as its own never-ending source of good triumphing over evil, Scorsese’s movie transcended the usual laboratory-and-clues mundanity to spill over with the dynamics of the human moral condition. Clint, meanwhile, had made just another war movie. As good as it was—and few conservative Academy members thought it was all that good—in a nod of respect to Clint, they nominated his
other
movie, which
nobody
saw, thus ensuring that at least this time around, Scorsese could win. The other films in the Best Picture contest, all considered long shots by the pollsters and the pundits alike, were Alejandro González Iñárritu’s
Babel
, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’s
Little Miss Sunshine
, and Stephen Frears’s
The Queen
.

Three of the most powerful directors in Hollywood, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas, assembled onstage to announce the winner of the award for Best Director. Coppola and Lucas had been part of the seminal 1970s San Francisco film movement that had helped to change the perception of American film from studio domination and toward larger independent films. The three titans gathered around the mike and did some obligatory and predictably goofy patented Academy Award blather (“It’s better to give than to receive … no it’s not!”) and interminably back-patted themselves. Then they finally got around to reading the names of the Best Director nominees. When Coppola read Scorsese’s name aloud, the audience burst into enthusiastic applause, at least twice as loud as they would for anyone else. When Coppola read Clint’s name, the audience applauded dutifully. Ruiz, looking resplendent in a ruby-red dress with earrings hanging from her ears like giant shiny stalactites, smiled at her husband lovingly as she enthusiastically clapped. Clint, lips twitching as he chewed either gum or his lip, never broke his stare, aimed intently and directly at the stage.