By Ed Koch
“The Painted Veil” (-)
This is the third time that W. Somerset Maugham’s novel of the same title has been brought to the screen.
In 1925, a young English bacteriologist, Walter Fane (Ed Norton), proposes to a society girl, Kitty (Naomi Watts). Although she doesn’t love him, she accepts his proposal. They marry and move to Shanghai where Kitty soon meets and begins an affair with the charismatic Charles Townsend (Liev Schreiber). When Walter learns of their affair, he and Kitty move to a remote village in China leading separate, unhappy lives until cholera enters their world.
During an interview on the Charlie Rose Show, Norton spoke of how hard he and Watts worked on the film, conveying that he thought it was a masterpiece. In her New York Times review, Manohla Dargis wrote that the film “isn’t Maugham, but it’s mildly steamy and pleasurable.” I disagree with both of them. The story is interesting and Norton and Watts are fine actors but the film is one big bore. PA, with whom I saw the film, agreed with me and said, “I drifted off to sleep,” although PB said, “I liked it.”
“Letters From Iwo Jima” (+)
This is surely one of the great and historical depictions of World War II in the Pacific. It rivals the opening scenes of “Band of Brothers” in showing the beginning of the Allied onslaught against Nazi Germany on June 6, 1944 — D-Day on the beaches of Normandy. It was on Iwo Jima that the U.S. Marines began the most costly battle in casualties to Americans and the Japanese in anticipation of the American invasion of the Japanese mainland.
The island of Iwo Jima is actually included in the area governed by the Governor of Tokyo and the Japanese army command made a special effort to hold it.
The Japanese had an able commander, Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), who decided the way to hold the island was to honeycomb Mount Suribachi with tunnels and have a direct line of fire on the beaches below where the Marines would ultimately gather to take the island. The entire movie is in Japanese with English subtitles, except for a brief scene in Washington in a flashback before the war when Lt. Gen. Kuribayashi, then a young officer in the Japanese army, is being toasted and hosted by his American Marine friends with whom he has been working. Everyone is friendly, not expecting the war to soon take place.
The ferocity of the Japanese code of honor preventing surrender is depicted with the punishment of those who try. The deaths, primarily of Japanese personnel through suicides and enemy fire, are clearly what happened on that island. There is an air of authenticity that runs through everything including the conversations between the officers and the soldiers.
Notwithstanding the admiration and respect one has to feel for the Japanese and their courage when they are shot down by the Marines, I silently cheered, thinking, better them than us. Director Clint Eastwood, to keep it all historically correct, depicted atrocities committed by the Japanese against one another, against the Marines, and by the Marines against the Japanese.
The New York Times review listed the massive casualty figures, which I am borrowing: “20,000 Japanese infantrymen defended Iwo Jima; 1,038 of them survived. (The Americans sent 77,000 Marines and nearly 100,000 total troops, of whom close to 7,000 died and almost 20,000 were wounded.)”
This film, like Eastwood’s earlier “Flags of Our Fathers” on the same battle from the American side, is brilliant. Its depiction of the battle from the Japanese side is perceived by all of the critics, including me, as a better picture of the war. The view from the American side in “Flags of Our Fathers” was more than a war picture, it took on the portrayal of individual characters and their going home activities, rather than limiting the action to the bloody battlefield. It too is well worth seeing.
