Saint Clint.(FILM)(Clint Eastwood's movies)(Flags of Our Fathers)(Movie review)

BY now almost everyone knows the story. Once upon a time Clint Eastwood made brutal, violent, and implicitly right-wing movies like Dirty Harry. Now he makes brutal, violent, complicated movies like Unforgiven and Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby--movies that subvert America's sunny ideas about itself; movies that demythologize our culture of violence; movies that win Academy Awards. He used to be Harry Callahan, doling out vigilante justice from the barrel of a gun; now he's Saint Clint, teaching us about the costs of bloodshed.

This means that the reviews of Eastwood's films more or less write themselves. Quick, which one did the New York Times call "a parable of incurable trauma, in which violence begets more violence and the primal violation of innocence can never be set right"? Which was hailed, by the same paper, for its vision of the world as "a violent and unforgiving place, in which the only protections against nihilism are the professional regulation of brutality ... and the mutual obligations of friendship"? Which was praised by New York magazine for being designed to make "violence, even in self-defense, seem soul-killing, and to expose the gulf between reality and myth"?

The answers, in order, are Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, and this fall's Flags of Our Fathers, Eastwood's adaptation of the bestseller about the Marines who raised the iconic flag on Iwo Jima. Flags is both a war and a postwar movie: It's The Longest Day meets The Best Years of Our Lives, framed by the kind of encounters with Greatest Generation veterans that Steven Spielberg pioneered, to mawkish effect, in Saving Private Ryan. In the present day, the son of John Bradley, a Marine medic and one of the six flag-raisers, interviews his late father's comrades. In flashback, Bradley himself (a stoic Ryan Phillippe) and the two other flag-raisers who survived the battle (Rene Gagnon, played with a chipper smirk by Jesse Bradford, and a weepy Adam Beach as Ira Hayes, the alcoholic Pima Indian immortalized by Johnny Cash's "Ballad of Ira Hayes") are paraded around the United States to sell the war bonds that keep the struggle in the Pacific going. And then in another flashback, the Marines fight their way up Mount Suribachi and plant a flag--which is promptly claimed by the secretary of the Navy, leading to a second flag-planting and the famous photograph that followed.

Sadly, the narrative isn't nearly as clean as even this messy summary makes it sound. The late-in-life Eastwood has three main tricks ...