'Private Ryan' mulls over the meaning of sacrifice' by Wallace Baine Film writer Santa Cruz Sentinel
Every combat veteran knows something the rest of us will never -- can never -- really understand ... what it was like. The vet will likely try to explain, but no matter how vivid the stories, words eventually fail. This is the territory Steven Spielberg attempts to traverse in the straight-no-chaser near-masterpiece called `Saving Private Ryan' ... what it was like, not only the chaos and the carnage, but how combat exists on an entirely different plane of experience where morality, purpose, rationality and decency all take on a different shape. The first half-hour of `Saving Private Ryan' is a bone-jarring experience, so horrifying it sometimes feels like the movie screen won't contain it. It is a rendering of the legendary invasion of Normandy, what we've grown up calling `D-Day,' June 6, 1944, the most decisive campaign of World War II. >From the first minute that the first personnel carrier empties on the beaches of France, we are witness to a massacre of staggering proportion as the lapping ocean literally turns red with blood. The camera is at grunt's eye level, sometimes shaking with the frenzy of fear, always recording the gut-shaking details, the sound of empty casings falling to the ground or of a bullet ripping through the surf at GIs lost in the chaos, hiding underwater. There's also waves of the kind of butchery that war films have always had problems with showing convincingly: limbs blown away, entrails spilling into the sand, fierce soldiers transformed in an instant to so much hamburger. In one of the most haunting scenes, our hero Capt. John Miller (Tom Hanks) watches in dazed horror as a GI carries off his right arm with his left, his right shoulder a fraying bloody stump. The tone thus set, we settle in with Miller and his eight-man squad as they take on an unusual mission in the days after Normandy. They are to descend into the French countryside, behind German lines, to retrieve one Private James Ryan (Matt Damon of `Good Will Hunting'). The reason? Ryan is the last surviving of four brothers fighting in the war and the Army has decided that the Ryan family will not lose all their sons. Of course, as one of Miller's men points out, they have mothers too and thus begins an ongoing dialogue on the screwy ethical choices that war brings forth. Is it worth it to risk the lives of eight men to save one Iowa family? Besides Damon, `Saving Private Ryan' features a number of youngish rising stars who developed their chops on the indy-film circuit. Edward Burns, the wisecracking writer/director of `The Brothers McMullen' plays Reiben, a testy grunt who questions the wisdom of the mission. Giovanni Ribisi, who `Friends' fans might recognize as Phoebe's doltish brother, plays the squad's medic. Scrawny Jeremy Davies, the star of `Spanking the Monkey,' is Upham, a well-read but skitterish interpreter who becomes the film's conduit to explore questions of cowardice and courage. Holding it all together is Tom Hanks, turning in another remarkable performance as the enigmatic commanding officer disturbed only by a shaking-hand condition that's getting worse as he gets deeper into enemy territory. Hanks is emblematic of a kind of moral complexity you don't often see from the director of `Jurassic Park.' Miller clearly thirsts for victory over the Germans, but unlike the guts-and-glory war heroes of Hollywood's golden age, his motives are murky. He just wants the ordeal to be done with so he can get back to his wife. He's more Eisenhower than Patton. What's striking about `Saving Private Ryan' is the flinty, unsentimental tone Spielberg establishes. There is a minimum of grandiose dying scenes and deathbed speechifying. The death is cheap, sudden, merciless, matter-of-fact. One scene of a dying soldier is characterized by a panicked race to keep him from bleeding to death followed briefly by a helpless yelping for his mother. No dewy, choked sentiments, just terror receding into the abyss. This portrayal of the murderous violence of war gives the film its integrity. The exception to this hard-hearted realism is the film's frame, a contemporary scene of an aging man in golf attire standing solemnly at a military cemetery (Miller? Private Ryan?), a handsome family standing respectfully behind him, a family we are reminded that one stray battlefield bullet or grenade could have prevented from coming into existence. It's here where `Saving Private Ryan' addresses its most compelling theme: the meaning of sacrifice and gratitude. The empty pandering of politicians over the years has made such notions clichés, particularly falling on the ears of the soft, jaded generation that by accident of history has been excused from military service, to say nothing of combat. This picture attempts to bring about a fuller understanding of sacrifice on the battlefield and in that respect it is a moving and dignified salute to the fallen.
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