 A rave review in the New York Times can often be as influential among Oscar voters as a ton of Golden Globe awards. And Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima landed a doozy today (Wednesday) from lead critic A.O. Scott. "It is," he writes, "unapologetically and even humbly, true to the durable tenets of the war-movie tradition, but it is also utterly original, even radical in its methods and insights." What makes it such, Scott suggests, has much to do with the fact that it is a war movie that ends not in victory but in defeat, presenting, as it does, the Japanese viewpoint of the Iwo Jima battle. "It is hard to think of another war movie that has gone so deeply, so sensitively, into the mind-set of the opposing side," he writes. The film, Scott concludes, is "close to perfect." Letters also receives an equally stunning review from the Los Angeles Times critic, Kenneth Turan, who calls it "daring and significant." Noting that it is intended as a companion piece to Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers, which was released earlier this fall, Turan observes,"While each film reinforces the other, it is Letters that is finally the more remarkable accomplishment, a feat of empathetic cross-cultural connection that Eastwood ... more or less willed into existence." Turan nevertheless suggests that audiences see both films, concluding: "Though war movies traditionally encourage our patriotic blood lust by making the enemy faceless or worse, we realize here, as the fighting begins, that the people we badly wanted dead in the first film are precisely those who we are made to care deeply about here and whose bravery this film so admires." |
