Flags of Our Fathers

I look forward to seeing Letters from Iwo Jima, which I’m sure will affect my judgment of the Clint Eastwood diptych, so I refrain from rating this first half, which should have been seen in a theater rather than on a tv anyway. Though Eastwood as director does not rank as high for me as for many, he does put the film in the can, and it is very watchable stuff. In this case a good story (and film) is folded over in its time sequence, and stuffed into a post-dated envelope. To get the message, you have to discard the envelope and unfold the pages. One day it may simply be interleaved with the Japanese perspective, and Eastwood can edit a whole, in the manner of the “Godfather Saga,” that will have scale, scope, and impact. Such is intimated in parts of this jagged half. Certainly this film does for the Pacific Theater what Saving Private Ryan did for the European, and then some. The black sand island of Iwo Jima (with Iceland subbing) makes a perfect landscape of hell for battle. And the whole afterstory -- of the famous flag-raising picture and the enlistment of its surviving subjects in an immense bond drive to keep the war going against Japan while concluding against Germany -- adds essential dimension and continuing relevance. So this is quite a good movie that may come to be seen as part of a great one. Its confusions can be taken as the fog of battle, since the three leads do emerge effectively -- Ryan Phillippe, Jesse Bradford, Adam Beach -- and the story sweeps from battlefield to White House to Yankee Stadium with visual dash. And if you can sort out the overlapping narrations, it does have something to say. (2006, dvd, n.) *NR* (MC-78.)