History Repeats Itself

Flags Of Our Fathers (R) & Marie Antoinette (PG-13)

originally published October 25, 2006

Aren’t movies grand? Anyone questioning the magic of the cinema should look no farther than the local multiplex. Where else can you find one film capable of doing what no textbook and only the rarest of teachers can - make a 200-year-old French queen relevant to Generation IM - and one powered by enough nostalgia and realism to please a generation still sharp enough to recall a battle 60 years young.

Flags of Our Fathers, Clint Eastwood’s elegiac reenactment of the Battle of Iwo Jima and its famous flag raising, is strategically camped between Saving Private Ryan’s graphic, “You Are There” action and The Thin Red Line’s philosophically rambling beauty. Like executive producer Steven Spielberg’s Ryan, Flags’ combat is keyed by the recollections of war veterans, but its true story of WWII’s most lasting image emotionally overpowers Ryan’s made-for-Hollywood rescue mission. Though the structural gambit (a son trying to piece together his father’s war years) is unclear until the end, Flags screenwriters Paul Haggis and William Broyles, Jr. provide Eastwood and his actors with the actions and words of real people, not a platoon of faux Audie Murphys.

The men who raised the flag - the second time - survived to become heroic ammunition in the government’s financial war. John “Doc” Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Native American Ira Hayes (Adam Beach) must face flashbulbs and the mothers of their fallen comrades when they return home as conquering heroes, the deaths of friends Hank Hansen (Paul Walker), Iggy (Jamie Bell) and Mike (Ryan alum Barry Pepper) fresh in their memories. Mortality means something in the film because life and death mean something - often everything - to the young men fighting a war that has become their sole reality, a point backed up by the stylized homefront. Flags questions heroism, good and evil, and what effect war has on good men without answering flippantly or jingoistically. Flags never confuses the ugliness of war with the heroic men forced to fight it. Rather, it tries to explain why so many of a generation’s finest young men sacrificed themselves to secure the freedom of the lucky many. Eastwood’s direction gets better with age, and Flags is his crowning achievement. A filmmaker of images - a soldier framed by a cavern opening, an ocean filled with vessels, a bloody desert - Eastwood composes the washed-out Flags with the eye of a photographer and a slow, steady pace that allows the heavy implications of each and every scene to sink in. The haunting combat photography of the end credits only serves to prove how accurate Eastwood’s award-worthy rendering is.

In this weekend's other historical epic, youth advocate and Academy Award-winner Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation) assaults the haughty sensibilities of the historical biopic with her vivacious account of Marie Antoinette, the young Austrian girl who grew up to become France’s Madame Deficit. The brash Coppola, who also wrote Marie, directs the film as an indi-epic. Wide establishing shots of the humongous Versailles (Coppola was able to film at the actual palace) bounce along to New Order and The Cure. Jumpcuts and frenetically edited montages of specially designed Manolo Blahniks create a kineticism that would’ve nauseated David Lean. Clad in period fashions (costume designer Milena Canonero is a shoo-in for the Oscar), Marie lives like it's 2006. Stripped of her clothing and her beloved dog at the age of 14, Marie finds herself an innocent lost at Versailles. Protocol leaves her cold and naked in front of dozens of women. Her husband, the skittish Louis XVI (a superb Jason Schwartzman) is more interested in making keys (a naughty little metaphor, perhaps?) than he is in his pretty young wife. Yet, like any teenager, Marie doesn’t allow protocol to dictate her behavior. Etiquette may require that she speak to the mistress (Asia Argento, daughter of Italian horror great Dario) of King Louis XV (Rip Torn, royally hamming it up), but Marie will only do it once and grudgingly. Marie, her royal husband and their entourage sneak out of the palace to attend a masked ball in Paris. The demure young Austrian adapts quickly to the irresponsible rockstar life of French royalty. Partying, drinking, gambling, gossiping, shopping and seducing require her full attention. How can she find time - or money - for her favorite charities and unrest in Poland when there’s so much fun to be had?

Coppola wisely entrusts her modern Marie to the definitively contemporary Kirsten Dunst. Dunst’s transformation from huggy, giggly teen to adulterous extravagantress occurs with ease, yet her Marie is sympathetic, a sweet kid flying down life’s fast lane. The young queen is swept up in France’s adolescent rebellion. Hermetically isolated in the bejeweled mayonnaise jar of Versailles, Louis and Marie are ill-prepared to rule, and Coppola smartly finds the humor (there’s a lot of it) in France’s majestic mismanagement. They never see the revolution coming, and her attempts to stave it off - no more diamonds for her young child - are laughably childish. Though we are disappointingly denied Marie’s final guillotining, the film’s rush to conclusion (the seeds of revolution are quickly buried) may have been beneficial. Dunst stretches thin as Marie gets older (she died at the age of 38). This modish Marie Antoinette captures the chi of the times. I have one response for France’s critical dislike of the film: Eat cake.

Drew Wheeler