Review: Saving Private Ryan
June 6, 1944. Omaha Beach. Normandy. A landing craft prepares to unload. The skies are grey. The men are a portrait of mass anxiety. There are no gung ho warriors here, only young men trembling, vomiting, praying.
The gate opens and therein ensues 25 minutes of pure, chaotic carnage. Rows of soldiers are shot before a full second passes. Within minutes, the ocean bleeds corpses. Bullets fly like miniscule meteors. Explosions abound. Soldiers are engulfed in fire. Bodies are dismembered by shrapnel. One soldier even wanders, holding his severed arm. Intestines spill. The men cry for their mothers.
Do you remember that shot from Gone With the Wind? That majestic crane shot of the camera pulling back as Scarlett O'Hara surveys the wounded men? And you think, My God, will the bodies never end? Imagine extending that into twenty-five minutes. Saving Private Ryan spares you nothing in its opening sequence. The camera itself isn't exempt. It's in the trenches with the men. It gets knocked about; dirt, water and blood are spat on it; there are moments amidst the gunfire when it doesn't even know where to look.
This is not your father's war film, director Steven Spielberg seems to be saying. I myself have never been one for war films -- Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket have soured my regard. The last war film that truly moved me was Platoon, Oliver Stone's ode to Vietnam. I can never erase that shot of Willem Dafoe sinking to his knees and raising his arms in the air before succumbing to his death. That shot, of course, is at odds with Spielberg's directive, which is to reawaken our benumbed senses. Spielberg wants to show us the gore, the literal blood and guts, the horror -- oh, the horror. He wants authenticity without romantization; in essence, an unpoetic reality. But the cinema is the cinema and, when you have a director of Spielberg's visual and narrative caliber, poetry will always seep in. Schindler's List, for all its documentarian trappings, was glossily bleak. In Saving Private Ryan, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (who also shot Schindler's List and Amistad) alternately bleaches and desaturates color -- dirt and blood never looked more defined. Do you think soldiers were aware of how visually striking their silhouettes looked against a fading sunset? Reality is never poetic. That's why God created poets and artists: to take what is real and ordinary and make it transcendent. Which is precisely what Spielberg does.
As the opening mayhem winds down, Spielberg narrows his focus on eight men: Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks), Sergeant Horvath (Tom Sizemore), Privates Reiben (Edward Burns), Caparzo (Vin Diesel), Mellish (Adam Goldberg), and Jackson (Barry Pepper), Medic Wade (Giovanni Ribisi), and Corporal Upham (Jeremy Davies). They barely have a breath to note their survival when they're ordered to find a certain Private James Ryan (Matt Damon), whose three brothers have been killed in combat. Though a fiction weaved into fact, the plight of the Ryans does have basis in fact: five Sullivan brothers (immortalized in The Fighting Sullivans) were torpedoed in 1942; three Niland brothers were killed in 1944. As in the film, the Niland matriarch received all three death notification telegrams on the same day which prompted the Army to extricate the last remaining Niland son from the combat zone.
It wouldn't cost you anything for me to divulge that Private Ryan doesn't want to be saved. Saving Private Ryan, as its title implies, isn't about the act but rather the process of the act. It's about the journey of these eight men. It's about the absurdity of war, the reasoning of eight lives being sacrificed for one man, of sacrificing lives for an ideal.
Not surprisingly, the film treads boredom during its more reflective moments. That opening battle said it all. Words are ineffectual next to the images. The quieter moments also allow an undercurrent of patriotism to sneak through. Spielberg uses John Williams' score sparingly but when he utilizes it, it's very noticeable. Scenes that are inherently affecting in nature -- such as the visit to the Ryans' mother -- are made even more so. It may be classy shmaltz, but it's schmaltz nonetheless. While we're at it, why did the film have to be so Americana? The Ryan family is of the flag-waving, white picket fence variety. Why couldn't they have been of the dirt poor, backwoods sort? None of the eight men chosen for us to embrace have even a hint of ambiguity in their backgrounds. Still, despite its faults, there's no denying the power of Saving Private Ryan.
Spielberg elicits fine work from his octet. Especially outstanding are Sizemore, gritty and solid; Ribisi, beleaguered and considerate; and Pepper, who veils his sharpshooter with an evangelical zeal. Hanks grows up at last though a doughiness still remains. Spielberg keeps moving his camera closer and closer to Hanks' eyes. He wants to see what's behind them and Hanks displays an almost shocking hauntedness: everything before him will be a nightmare for years to come. He has a superb moment when Miller breaks down and cries -- the leader is a man, after all. Hanks chokes on the sobs and evokes a man's shame at his own emotional weakness and frustration at his own futility. Best of all is the superlative Davies (think Anthony Perkins cross-pollinated with Montgomery Clift) as the too young, too skinny, too nervous translator who's never seen combat. "What is happening?" he asks at a point when the men start turning on their Captain and their morals. His portrayal of trembling innocence is exemplary. His scenes towards the end, when Spielberg stages the second and final big battle, are wrenching. Davies is the epitome of a boy paralyzed in fear. Davies has been turning in some great performances in little seen films -- Spanking the Monkey, Going All the Way, The Locusts. In Saving Private Ryan, he cements his mettle.
So does Spielberg who continues probing his cinematic heart of darkness. Every Spielberg drama garners a Newsweek cover and it's no wonder: his films, while sincere, have become a bit canny. Schindler's List, Amistad and Saving Private Ryan are all thematically significant. So much so that one can't criticize without seeming unintelligent or inhumane -- in essence, when criticizing the film, one is accused of criticizing the theme. These are mutually exclusive elements. When I say Schindler's List was brilliant but overrated, I am not saying the Holocaust should have been trivialized. When I say I liked exactly 30 minutes -- the beginning, the end and the sum of Anthony Hopkins' scenes -- of Amistad, I am not saying the Passage is an unmomentous piece of drama. What I am saying is the execution could be better.
The execution has improved in Saving Private Ryan but there is still a sense that Spielberg doesn't fully trust his material. More specifically, he handles it too reverentially. The patriotism may not be the rah-rah affair that the John Wayne-headlined war films promoted, but there is a patriotism touched with both melancholy and pride. The characters are too homogenized; few have the disturbing ambivalence Ralph Fiennes brought to the fore in Schindler's List. Spielberg may be maturing with each film, but he's also regressing.
Saving Private Ryan
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Written by: Robert Rodat
Starring: Tom Hanks, Edward Burns, Tom Sizemore, Barry Pepper, Adam Goldberg, Vin Diesel, Jeremy Davies, Giovanni Ribisi, Matt Damon, Ted Danson, Paul Giamatti
