Watching Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers took me back to my childhood and the time I asked my American dad how he got that big lump on his forehead. This is what he told me: “Well, son, during the war in the Pacific, me and my buddies were trying to raise the American flag over Iwo Jima, and one of the guys — a drunken Indian — kept letting go of the damn flagpole, and it kept hitting me on my forehead.”

Years later, I discovered that my dad had never been in the army;: he had flat feet. But his bit of comic mythologising fits perfectly with the iconoclasm of Flags of Our Fathers. Eastwood’s new film is all about boys discovering out what their fathers did — or didn’t do — during the war in the Pacific.

What frames Eastwood’s multi-narrative tale of war, heroism, truth and lies is the famousiconic photograph of six soldiers raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima, in 1945. (Looking at the men’s posture and their mighty push, you’d think they were erecting the Statue of Liberty and not a thin pole.) Anyway, they say that every picture tells a story: Flags of Our Fathers is the real story of that iconic picture. If you didn’t know the film was directed by Clint Eastwood, you’d think it was the work of some anti-war, pinko pacifist and not a lifelong Republican patriot like “Dirty Harry” Eastwood.

His film sets out to expose the sham heroism that the photo embodies. It attacks the lies of the army, and of the government, and even takes a covert swipe at the American public for applauding a man when he’s in uniform and forgetting him when he’s out of it.

BACKGROUND

• Flags of our Fathers

• Letter from Iwo Jima

• The unheroic face of war

• Eastwood war film 'waves flag of bleeding hearts'

• Clint Eastwood

Ken is Clint's main man

Letters from Iwo Jima looks like becoming the main attraction

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

The action takes place on two fronts simultaneously: there’s the story of the battle for the Japanese island of Iwo Jima, and there’s the smaller, more intimate tale of three men — all were featured in the photo — fighting a battle of their own back home in the USA.

Eastwood has never directed a film on this large a scale before, and he handles the difficult task of showing a vast landing of American troops without coming off second best to Steven Spielberg’s opening scene in Saving Private Ryan. But it’s not the grand spectacle of American might or men in the heat of battle that is most impressive, but the small incidents that say the most about the reality of war.

Aboard an American ship bound for Iwo Jima we see one of the soldiers falling overboard. His mates all laugh at his misfortune — until they realise that nobody is going to stop and pick him up.

It’s the battle back in the USA that provides the emotional heart of the story. That photograph of the raising of the flag proves to be a great morale-booster for a war-weary American public.

Three of the men in it — John “Doc” Bradley (Ryan Phillipe), a navy corpsman (medic); Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford), a kind of glorified messenger boy; and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), a native American Indian, — are yanked out of the Iwoa Jima battle and sent back home to take part in a bond-selling tour to raise money for the war.

We see them in action at a stadium full of hero-hungry Americans, having to re-enact the flag-raising moment by climbing a papier-mâché Mount Suribachi as fireworks light the sky. The tragedy of war repeats itself as the farce of propaganda.

If war is hell, so is fame. The three men wander around, shell-shocked under the friendly fire that comes with their newfound celebrity. The pressure of playing a phoney hero and the guilt thatit induces in Hayes — along with the daily racism he faces — drive him to drink. “I can’t take them calling me a hero,” he says. “I just tried not to get shot.”

Flags of Our Fathers is a well-crafted and sturdy piece of no-nonsense American cinema, but its dramatic punch is diluted by too many story lines. The main strandstory, of the three ordinary men conscripted into playing the roles of heroes, should be the stuff of Shakespearian tragedy, but the only hint of this comes from the sad fate of Hayes. The Bradley character is decent but dull, and the moral dubiousness of the publicity-loving Gagnon is never fully explored.

This isn’t an anti-war film; it’s an anti-bullshit-about-war film. Eastwood is trying to show us that these men weren’t heroes, but just ordinary men doing their bit for their buddies. He wants to give them back their humanity by stripping away their “heroism”. But isn’t it rather late in the day for a film-maker to start challenging the idea that war produces heroes? Don’t most modern war films say that?

Flags of Our Fathers might seem to come as a timely warning, though, given American involvement in Iraq and the sophistication of the media spin and propaganda at the US army’s disposal. There have been no images of American heroism coming out of that war. On the contrary, the iconic shots so far are of prisoners being tortured at Abu Ghraib.

In fact, there hasn’t been an image of American military heroism since the AP photojournalist Joe Rosenthal took that flag-raising picture back in 1945. Now, thanks to Eastwood, the last remaining image of American military heroism has finally died too.

Flags of Our Fathers
15, 132 mins
Three Stars