“A lot of people don’t realise that this film is ultimately a dream for me.” From the lips of any other industry player this would seem like saccharine promotional patter, but from Adam Beach, the star of Clint Eastwood’s superlative new Second World War movie
Flags of our Fathers, this is nothing short of gospel truth.
“The film closes a circle for me which began when I started making movies,” continues the 33-year-old Native American actor. “I always wanted to be part of a film that worked on a huge level, an Eastwood or a Spielberg film, but also one that concerned Native American people, where the perspective was all about the qualities of the human being and had nothing to do with the colour of our skin.”
Eastwood’s film, possibly his best to date, is thoughtful, mature, meditative and spectacular. Its bravura non-chronological narrative is constructed around the fate of the six American soldiers captured by the photographer Joe Rosenthal in the act of raising the flag on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima in February 1945, five days into one of the most savage battles of the Second World War. But the emotional heart of the film is provided by Beach, who stars as Marine Ira Hayes, a steadfast soldier whose psychological battle scars were only aggravated by the oppressively staged hero’s welcome he received on home soil.
Beach, who previously starred in the John Woo movie Windtalkers and is a Salteaux Indian (from Manitoba, Canada) by birth, knows that the legacy of celluloid Native Americans has previously been pitiful. For most of the 20th century they were depicted as scalp-hunting pidgin-English speakers, stony-faced savage foils to the Western heroics of John Wayne in dubious classics such as The Searchers. When they occasionally became the story subject itself, they were edged out of frame by mainstream Hollywood actors caked in brown-face — witness Burt Lancaster in the risible Apache, or Burt Reynolds as Navajo Joe. There were noble attempts to redress the balance in the revisionist westerns of the 1990s (Dances with Wolves, Grey Owl), but even these movies refused to allow the Native American to take centre stage, relegating them instead to cuddly co-starring roles and quirky character parts.
Flags of our Fathers, however, is about to change all that. Beach presented the film last month to 600 Native Americans from across the US in Scottsdale, Arizona, near the tribal home of the real Ira Hayes. “And they were shocked with emotion. Because finally here’s a film that represents the true spirit of a human being who just happens to be Native American. They loved it!” Beach says that even before shooting began he had to face up to the responsibility of playing Hayes, and of carrying the expectations of the Native American community on his shoulders. “Ira is one of the most respectful roles I’ll ever play,” he says. “Every Native American knows about Ira Hayes. He’s one of the few people who’s a role model to us from that era, the Forties.”
He adds sardonically: “Because for some reason, in history, we don’t exist anywhere.”
In Eastwood’s film, as in life, Hayes was one of three surviving flag-raisers sent back to the US to help raise much-needed funds for the war effort. At the time Rosenthal’s instantly iconic image had become hugely popular, transforming the reluctant Hayes and his fellow Marines John Bradley (played in the film by Ryan Phillippe) and René Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) into quasi celebrities, in hot demand for autographs and champagne toasts as well as stirring speeches and patriotic breast-beating. It’s this kind of eerie contemporary resonance that permeates Eastwood’s movie and makes it such a dense and subtly affecting experience.
It’s a movie that’s defined, among other things, by the multiple narrative voices of Citizen Kane, by the choppy structural chicanery of Quentin Tarantino and the full-bore battle hysteria of Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg is the movie’s producer).
And yet it never once loses sight of its goal, which is (unlike Spielberg’s movie) to consistently puncture holes in cardboard notions of heroism and simplistic understandings of patriotism. “In most war pictures I grew up with there were good and bad guys,” says Eastwood. “Life is not like that and war is not like that. This movie is not about winning or losing. It’s about this war’s effects on human beings and those who lose their lives before their time.”
And right in the front line of those human beings is Ira Hayes. The young Marine’s initial reluctance to partake in the fundraising tour quickly sours into alcoholism and eventually into recalcitrant self-destruction. Here Beach has a devastating scene, an emotional climax of sorts, certainly an epiphany, where he sits quietly on a hotel bed and bemoans his fate. “I can’t take them calling me a hero,” he says, with profound echoes of Brando’s famous lament in On the Waterfront. “All I did was try not to get shot.”
The Brando comparisons are perhaps not too fanciful at all. On screen Beach has the same simmering intensity, the same softly hooded eyes, even the same outward curl on his upper lip. Thanks to Flags he has been placed firmly in the Oscar rumour mill for Best Actor and was recently honoured with the Rising Star award at the Palm Springs Film Festival.
“I shouldn’t even be here,” he says, adding that he only started acting as a teenage distraction from a dead-end life. When he was 8 he had to cope with the shock, first of his pregnant mother being killed by a drunk driver then, two months later, by his father drowning while under the influence of alcohol and antidepressants. “I was an angry kid,” he says. “I grew up in the worst neighbourhood in Canada. I was involved in gang activity. I’m supposed to be in jail now!” Beach, who works with community organisations such as United National Indian Tribal Youth (Unity), says that he wants to capitalise on his success in Flags, and to galvanise the dramatic talents of a new generation of Native Americans. He hopes that audiences “will look at my performance and say: ‘Yeah, I wanna be like him.’ We need more Native American actors. There’s not enough of us out there.”
His career trajectory is now at a critical juncture. He’s been a murderous brave in a western from the pen of Larry McMurtry (Brokeback Mountain) called Commanche Moon, and is now filming a mini-series adaptation of Dee Brown’s best-selling American history told from the Native American’s point of view, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
