With the release of Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima two months after his Flags of Our Fathers, one of the most remarkable projects in American film history is complete. It astonishes me to think that even a producer-director of Eastwood's influence could carry it off: making two complete films about the battle for Iwo Jima, one from the point of view of the American servicemen and the other from the Japanese viewpoint, with an all-Japanese cast speaking their own language. The ambition is impressive in itself, but what's laudable is how that ambition has been realized, with dignity, compassion and a filmmaker's equivalent of plain-spoken eloquence.

Flags of Our Fathers (reviewed December 4) re-creates the past by exploring a document of the war: the famous photograph of the American flag-raising. Letters From Iwo Jima adopts the same narrative strategy but uses as its documents the correspondence (both delivered and unsent) of Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima. So the American film is about visual images and the manufacture of public meaning; the Japanese film, about words and personal convictions. Here is a paradox: Although the great majority of the characters in Letters From Iwo Jima believe they must offer their lives for their emperor, their manner of making that sacrifice turns out to be highly individual.

Two figures predominate in the large cast: the aristocratic commanding general, Tadamichi Kuribayashi (played by the godlike Ken Watanabe), and a sardonic, sly, hapless conscript named Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), who was a baker in civilian life and would just as soon turn the island over to the Americans. With an ease and grace more suited to the general than the foot soldier, Eastwood and his screenwriters (Iris Yamashita and Paul Haggis) slowly draw together the fates of these two. Saigo turns into a fighter, not through love of his country but from personal loyalty to the general. He clings to Kuribayashi because the general, though steeped in the code of the Japanese warrior, is himself idiosyncratic. He breaks with tradition, to the outrage of his subordinate officers, by conserving his troops' strength and falling back into underground bunkers rather than plunging into glorious battle. Worst of all, he forbids his men to commit suicide when they lose a position, ordering them instead to escape and go on fighting. Kuribayashi brushes away the charge that such behavior is a disgrace. He has lived in the United States, admires Americans and knows that the force coming his way is overwhelming. With surrender unthinkable, he and his men are already dead. The best they can do is to keep up whatever spirit they can muster.

Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima together form an enormous diptych that has all the grandeur these stories demand. There are crowd scenes, chaotic battles (filmed in the contemporary style, with most of the color drained away), vistas of vast fleets of warships and airplanes. What emerges most powerfully, though, is an intimate sense of sorrow, and of decency. If there is any chance that popular American cinema will continue to be an art form--a very slight chance, I'd say, looking back over the past year's major studio releases--then I bet Eastwood's Iwo Jima films will stand as a monumental achievement, and an enduring one.

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