Saint Clint.

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 as a director--he shoots every scene in a mournful palette; he allows his actors to emote so long as they play up the anguish; and he favors stories in which human life seems little more than an accretion of unfortunate events. Given great actors and a claustrophobic canvas, this technique can feel like a bleak kind of genius, even if both Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby shaded into an unpleasant upper-class voyeurism--a chance for a millionaire director and his Bobo audience to wallow in the miseries of working-class life. But Flags of Our Fathers is too big and clumsy for Eastwood's bag of tricks to work. Its competing narratives talk over one another, and its actors aren't impressive enough to carry the audience through the movie's contradictions.

The Iwo Jima scenes succeed well enough: Eastwood films the island as a bombed-out moonscape, washed in chalk and charcoal, and his fatalist aesthetic is perfect for the randomness of combat. The camera captures the carnage without being overwhelmed by it, and we have enough distance to appreciate the soldiers' heroism--not because they're doing extraordinary things, but because they're doing the ordinary, following orders and operating machinery and climbing hills, in a world where life's arbitrariness is exaggerated to the point of madness.

The war itself, as Eastwood portrays it, is the only commentary on war the movie needs. But instead Flags of Our Fathers shuttles back and forth between Iwo Jima and the bond drive, the better to contrast the horror of combat with the kitsch of the home front. The point of these scenes is at once obvious (war is hell, and nobody at home knows it) and obscure (should the government not have sold war bonds?), and the actors don't give us any purchase: Phillippe glowers, Bradford mugs, and Beach sobs and drinks, drinks and sobs. And then, as if the studio--or maybe screenwriter Paul Haggis, he of bogus-uplift films like Crash--reminded Eastwood that this a Greatest Generation flick, dammit, the movie stops complicating the war effort and starts elegizing it, with sensitive boomers sobbing over their World War II vet dad.

The result is a film that's at war with itself--part melodrama and part docudrama, minimalist and bloated all at once. It's an Eastwood effort, so the critics love it, but those seeking a movie that actually says "something new and urgent about the uses of war and of the men who fight," as the Times's inevitable rave puts it, are better off looking elsewhere.