The Price of One Life
Saving Private Ryan
a review
By Jeremiah Rickert
Starring: Tom Hanks, Edward Burns, Matt Damon, Tom Sizemore Directed by: Steven Spielberg
For the last couple of weeks, I have been bombarded with a pile of very lyrical and moving reviews of Steven Spielberg's realistic war-tale, Saving Private Ryan. The reviews themselves were as moving as any film I'd seen, telling me that this was a film about war and humanity and the like, the greatest American War Film ever, the best American film of the last 10 years, one after another I read them. My local newspaper even went so far as to give the film five stars out of four. I had to see this film and I had to see it soon. The opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan is one of the most harrowing, accurate (from what survivors have said in print and on TV) brutal, wet, muddy, desperate, bloody, tense scenes in the history of American Cinema. For those expecting the kind of scenes that made John Wayne a star, you are in for a shock. There is no trumpet-blowing and flag waving to be found as German machine guns rip the landing American soldiers to shreds, over and over for about 30minutes. The camera sits the audience right in the middle, there is no omnipotent camera in this sequence, you see and hear exactly what the soldiers see and hear, and it causes you to want to duck as the bullets whiz passed your head and clang off of helmets and bone. It's a very remarkable picture of war at its most brutal...and honest. This scene introduces us to Capt. John Miller and his squad of rangers as they slowly push onto the beach. Hanks as Miller avoids melodrama and cliche and just does his duty, sending men to their deaths again and again until the objective is accomplished. Hanks leads the strong Ensemble cast that includes Tom Sizemore as Sgt. Horvath, (Heart and Souls, The Relic, Heat) Edward Burns (Brothers McMullen, She's The One) as the vocal Pvt. Reiben, Matt Damon (Good Will Hunting, Rainmaker) as Pvt. Ryan, and Jeremy Davies (Nell, Spanking The Monkey) as map-maker turned squad interpreter, Corporal Upham. After surviving Omaha, a clerk discovers that three of the four Ryan brothers are dead, and a fourth has just parachuted into Normandy with the 101st Airborne. General George C. Marshall (played with gruff elegance by Harve Presnell) decides that in order to avoid not only a PR disaster, but another heartbroken mother (the Sullivan brothers were all killed when the ship they were all one was destroyed) he wants a squad to find Pvt. Ryan and bring him back home. Miller gets to pick his best men for the job and head to where Ryan was to have landed. On the way they bicker among themselves as to whether this is all worth it, and is it worth giving their lives to save one man? Miller insists that it's their mission and they must follow orders. Can he keep his squad together for this seemingly unimportant mission? Overall, the film is a start, realistic picture of war, but I have to say that overall I was a bit disappointed. While I'm sure this will make me unpopular with some, I have to be honest. The main purpose of the film seemed to be to make a realistic war film. On this level, Spielberg and Co. succeeded. However, realism doesn't make great cinema. The plot and characters more and more fall a distant second to the realism of the images and sounds. I found myself less and less interested in the characters and more and more interested in the cinematography and details of the costumes and such. A truly great film doesn't allow you to be distracted by the individual parts that make it great. I didn't sit through L.A. Confidential marvelling at the fact that the guns and ammo were really the ones the LAPD used in the 50s. I was more interested in the characters. Saving Private Ryan failed to keep me enthralled with the characters. There was a great opportunity to explore a variety of themes that were ever-so-slightly touched on in the film, but only barely. I wanted to be swept up in the conflict that arises when decent humane people are forced to be in an inhumane environment and expected to survive. Hanks' character embodied this very theme, but he wasn't allowed to do much with it. I wanted to be moved by the cameraderie between fellow soldiers, but this is just taken for granted, we're all brothers, they just say it, their actions rarely speak for themselves. Spielberg obviously took a lot of care to avoid the cliches and flag-waving of earlier films, but he failed to make this something that Americans can relate to. It is entirely possible to make people feel emotionally patriotic without resorting to cliches and manipulative imagery and music and dialogue. When I say emotional, I only mean that the audience needs to feel a kinship with the characters, and when characters and audience come from such different backgrounds/eras the only thing you can do is relate to the things that are the same in everyone, humanity, and in the case of American audiences, the country we live in. I found it hard to relate, and that's what was missing in this film. Even though the camera sets you right in the middle of the action, it's only your eyes and ears, and not your heart that is into it. They just went a step too far in setting the parameters for the film and I was very disappointed because of that. The opening and closing scenes of the film, with the d-day veteran (I won't say who) visiting the graves of his fallen comrades in France in the present were far more moving than any other part of the film. He looks at the crosses and says with his face "why me? Why did I survive?" It was that humanity that the rest of the film lacked, that emotion. Perhaps Spileberg and Co. wanted there to be emotional detachment, the same detachment Miller has as he sends wave after wave of his troops to be slaughtered. If that was the case, the film was successful, but not engaging. The technical aspects of the film are of course all top-notch. The Cinematography by Janusz Kaminski (Jerry Maguire, Lost World, Amistad) is at times incredible, a real achievment. The colors, textures, and scenes are consistently stunning. The musical score by John Williams is adquate to the task, only subtlely in places, so as to not overcome the music of war. One thing that I also liked was the fact that during the entire opening sequence, we don't see the faces of the German soldiers until the characters see their faces. Just a rain of machine-gun fire, greeting them/us on the beach. Overall, the film is realistic and technically superior to previous war films, but in my opinion it lacked the any emotional connection to the characters and the story. I really didn't care if they found him or not, as long as the characters caused me to be involved in the film at a personal level. That did not happen. Therefore the film was to me a disappointment.
Of the 3.75 I paid for it, it was worth $1.85
(c) 1998 jeremiah rickert --
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