Given my usual aversion to war and slasher movies, I wasn’t instantly won over by either Letters From Iwo Jima or The Dead Girl. Both films display a fundamental decency and seriousness from the outset, but both are unrelievedly grim and full of booby traps. (At press time I was told that The Dead Girl may not open for another week or so.)
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Letters From Iwo Jima, directed by Clint Eastwood, one of the finest directors alive, looks at the World War II battle of his recent Flags of Our Fathers from a Japanese perspective. Letters From Iwo Jima opened in Japan around the same time its counterpart opened here, evidence of the nobility of his intention to address the people of both countries, not just us. It has few stars familiar to Americans, and it shares with Pan’s Labyrinth the rare distinction of being a mainstream commercial movie with subtitles. The Dead Girl, directed by Karen Moncrieff, who’s made only one previous feature (Blue Car, 2002), confounds expectations as well—about slasher stories and about film narrative in general, in part by being closer to a collection of interconnected short stories than to a novel. The film—whose five segments are “The Stranger,” “The Sister,” “The Wife,” “The Mother,” and “The Dead Girl“—begins with the discovery of the corpse of a young woman (Brittany Murphy) by a troubled single woman (Toni Collette) living with her viperish, bedridden mother (Piper Laurie), and ends with the earliest chapter in the chronology, the dead girl’s initial encounter with the killer. In between Moncrieff explores the significance of the death to a “stranger” (either the single woman or a guy who takes her out, played by Giovanni Ribisi), to a grad student who might be the dead girl’s sister (Rose Byrne), to the killer’s wife (Mary Beth Hurt), and to the dead girl’s mother (Marcia Gay Harden).
One reason I wasn’t sure what to think of Letters the first time I saw it was that I didn’t know how it would be received in Japan. I wondered if it would seem accurate to most viewers there. I’ve since learned that the response has been very favorable and that it’s been near the top of the box-office charts since it opened.
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Written by Iris Yamashita and Paul Haggis
With Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase, Hiroshi Watanabe, and Takumi Bando
The Dead Girl ★★★
Directed and written by Karen Moncrieff
With Toni Colette, Rose Byrne, Mary Beth Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden, Brittany Murphy, Kerry Washington, Giovanni Ribisi, Piper Laurie, James Franco, Mary Steenburgen, Bruce Davison, Nick Searcy, and Josh Brolin
