Clint's nothing if not a dasher of expectations, though, and in Flags he and screenwriters William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis come at Bush's war not via direct analogy or partisan platitudinizing, but by suggesting that modernity's enthrallment with perception over reality renders even a "just war" untenable. If that doesn't quite jibe with his populist persona—to say nothing of his confounding, Republican-lite libertarianism—rest assured that Flags is also an angry, near-reverent defense of warriors.
To that end, it tells the story of the soldiers who planted the flag—or, rather, flags—on Iwo Jima's Mt. Suribachi in a series of temporally fluid recollections and flashbacks. The bulk of the action is split between scenes of the grueling battle itself and a protracted publicity tour that follows, in which Navy corpsman John "Doc" Bradley (Ryan Phillippe, who's unexpectedly fine) and Marines Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes (the heartbreaking Adam Beach) are deified by the war office in order to coax more bond dollars from the public. All three are haunted by the war and don't feel especially heroic, and only Gagnon (who, ironically, wasn't among the six men captured in Joe Rosenthal's famous photo of the second flag-hoisting) warms to the spotlight. It drives sensitive loner Hayes to alcoholism, obscurity and an early death.
Citizen Kane-like structure notwithstanding, Flags adds little narrative or visual innovation to the war-movie genre. That's not meant as a slight—Clint's stylistic leanness is part of his directorial appeal. The camaraderie among the troops is right out of a John Wayne vehicle, but somehow comforting rather than risible (perhaps because the warm-fuzziness is offset by the constant racial slurs Hayes, a Pima Indian, is forced to endure even from his buddies, and the fact that battlefield death isn't experienced at a comfortable action-flick remove, but up close and lingering). The combat scenes, too, employ the same punishingly interactive CGI effects as Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg is one of Flags' producers and a likely consultant), but lack that movie's self-conscious bravado or boilerplate heroics; indeed, Eastwood's film is blunt in its assessment of heroism as a wholly manufactured condition.
If Flags' point—that war is waged by flesh-and-blood people, and expecting soldiers to function as symbols is just one more shitty, impossible job we force on them—was timely 60 years ago, it's doubly so in the midst of a war with infinitely shittier motives. Eastwood, who's nobody's dummy, clearly grasps this. Maybe the most distressing thing about his film is the realization that we need to be reminded of it at all.
Nevertheless, something sticks in my craw about the timing of Flags of Our Fathers' release. Like all influential public figures, Eastwood's had nearly four years to make the case he makes here; why the wait? We've come to expect and even revere his artistic conservatism, but this lapse implies something more calculated and thus a little disappointing.