SAVING PRIVATE RYAN A film review by Andrew Hicks Copyright 1998 Andrew Hicks
(1998) *** (out of four)
Call me crazy, but I don't see SAVING PRIVATE RYAN as the film of the summer. A good movie, yes, with chillingly realistic battle scenes and emotion to spare. An utterly riviting movie on par with Steven Spielberg's best work, no. Personally, if I was Spielberg, I wouldn't go back to the World War II era one more time after SCHINDLER'S LIST and the Indiana Jones movies. I'm guessing Steve has a thing for Nazis; I really wouldn't be surprised if a velociraptor ate one of the swastika-wearing dudes in the next JURASSIC PARK movie.
All lofty pretenses aside, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is the goriest movie this side of a 1980s slasher flick. The difference is, it's easy during FRIDAY THE 13TH to laugh off a spear sticking out of Kevin Bacon's chest while blood spurts like crazy, but it's damn hard to sit and eat Reese's Pieces while soldiers suffer machine gun bullets to the head and have their intestines spilled out onto the battlefield.
And believe me, there's plenty of it. A 30-minute sequence at the beginning of the movie has an Army captain (Tom Hanks) and his soldiers landing at Omaha Beach to join countless other Americans who are already under fire. Lives are lost in seconds as the purposefully confusing and jarring scene goes on and on, and all the young men in the audience find themselves never, ever wanting to be drafted.
Cut to some bureaucratic defense office, where a hundred women pound out sympathy form letters to the families of the casualties. One woman happens upon an interesting detail -- three brothers in different platoons were killed in combat, and their mother is getting the telegram today. I guess it's an interesting conversation piece to everyone but the mother, so the Army chief (Harve Presnell) sends Hanks on what is essentially a public relations mission, to find the fourth Ryan brother and send him home. That way, the Army saves the postage on yet another telegram to Mrs. Ryan.
One good thing about SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is that the soldiers who are headed to rescue Ryan know it's a mission designed to make the Army look good. They question the worth of risking eight soldiers' lives to save one, and Hanks' character admits he doesn't give a damn about Ryan; he's just following orders. If this was a John Wayne movie, things would be different. There'd be a phony, "Let's go get that boy, gosh darn it!" attitude that would sugarcoat the reality of war. By doing things this way, Spielberg admits the instincts of self- preservation and complacency that every normal person has. It makes SAVING PRIVATE RYAN a lot more powerful than an testosterone-driven Stallone movie mission.
The movie's pattern is to have long battle scenes followed by quiet scenes of semi-introspective conversation among the soldiers. Hanks is painted first as a nails-tough Army man careful to hide his true self from the other men. It's not that way for long. Edward Burns, the guy you get for your movie when Ben Affleck isn't available, is the impulsive one. Jeremy Davies plays the translator who is seeing combat for the first time, and so on. None of the characters are fascinating or natural born heroes, but was Spielberg's obvious intention.
I wondered when I heard SAVING PRIVATE RYAN was three hours long, how were they going to fill three hours' time searching for one person and still make it interesting? There are a few false starts; Hanks finds one Private Ryan in Ted Danson's company (Apparently, Danson joined the Army after "Ink" was canceled.) and breaks the bad news before learning it's the wrong Ryan. And of course the movie's far from over when Hanks does locate Ryan (Matt Damon, the other guy you get when Affleck isn't available). That's when the movie turns into more of a conventional war flick, although body parts and limbs still fly like never before.
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is worth your time, but it's definitely no SCHINDLER'S LIST. The battle scenes are intense and realistic, but some of the attempts at sincere emotion aren't. The movie's bookends are particularly cheesy and out of place, when an old Private Ryan goes to the cemetary with his family and bawls his eyes out, whining, "Tell me I've led a good life. Tell me I'm a good man." Spielberg was apparently following the James Cameron line of thought that any three-hour movie about the past should be framed by a self-contained prologue and epilogue that takes place in the present.
Much more effective are subtler scenes, like the one where several of Hanks' men are rifling thrugh a bag of dogtags from dead soldiers, and they make light of what they're doing by pretending they're playing poker. This while an airborne division marches by, their eyes full of that mound of dogtags. By not explicitly pointing out that it symbolizes the random poker game that life and death can be in war, the audience gets the message. And even if it's not a classic, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is definitely one of the better war movies out there.
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