IF PETS grow to resemble their owners, or vice versa, does the same apply to filmmakers.

If their careers last long enough, do their films ultimately reflect their own personalities?

That seems to be the case with Clint Eastwood. His films are becoming increasingly spare and laconic but at the same time they also become more eloquent.

Since Unforgiven, Eastwood seems to be embarking on a journey of enormous introspection, in the process putting the American psyche under the microscope.

Or at least the psyche of a specific generation, the one he belongs to and is generally referred to in American popular culture as The Greatest Generation.

This is the generation that fought the Second World War, the men who died on the beaches of Normandy and Pacific Islands such as Iwo Jima.

These are the men whose motivation is explored by Eastwood in this extraordinary film.

If Unforgiven is a meditation on violence and by extension his own career, Flags of Our Fathers looks at what it means to be a hero and again, by extension, looks at another aspect of Eastwood's screen persona.

The raising of the American flag atop Mount Suribachi on the island of Iwo Jima was a turning point for the US in the Second World War.

The Americans' island-hopping campaign had taken them to Iwo Jima and for the first time they were setting foot on Japanese soil.

The fighting was bitter, brutal, and bloody. Casualties, especially on the Japanese side, were catastrophically high.

But early in the fighting six marines hoisted the Stars and Stripes on top of the mountain and the moment was captured in what became an iconic photograph.

Three of those six men died in the next few days; the remaining three were shipped home to go on a fundraising tour to raise money to continue to fight an increasingly unpopular war.

The men took to it in different ways. Doc Bradley (Ryan Philippe) was sober and serious and took it in with detached amusement, Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) revels in his new-found celebrity, but Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), a native American, is deeply troubled by it all.

The film is based on the book of the same name by James Bradley, son of the Ryan Phillippe character, who tried to find out what happened at Iwo Jima in an attempt to discover something of his own father.

What he finds is a remarkable portrait of the best kind of heroism, the sort in which men die not for their country but for their comrades in arms.

The film dwells on the camaraderie and kinship forged in this adversity.

There is also the suggestion that in being forcibly removed from the fighting and pressed into service on an increasingly desperate media tour, these three men suffer from something approaching survivor guilt.

As the story flashes back and forward between their experiences and those of their comrades still fighting it's not difficult to sense their feeling that they should be there.

Eastwood's spartan direction means the story emerges from the performances.

Unlike Steven Spielberg who reinvented war as epic entertainment in Saving Private Ryan, Eastwood chooses a more intimate approach. Phillippe, Bradford and especially Adam Beach are eloquent witnesses to this story of ordinary men pushed to extraordinary lengths.

Eastwood was so taken with this subject he immediately started filming a version telling the story of the suicidal defence of the island by the Japanese.

That film, Letters from Iwo Jima, is scooping up awards right left and centre in the US.

It arrives here in February and if it's as good as this one then it is going to be well worth seeing.