SAVING PRIVATE RYAN A film review by David N. Butterworth Copyright 1998 David N. Butterworth
**** (out of ****)
The great American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that "war educates the senses," and that statement has never been truer than when applied to Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan."
Nothing can quite prepare you for the opening thirty minutes of this remarkable film. Following a brief, present-day exposition, the film takes us back to June 6, 1944; American troops are preparing to land on Omaha Beach. Taking full advantage of today's digital sound and sound effects editing techniques, Spielberg doesn't allow for a casual witnessing of the invasion from afar. Instead, he plunges you headlong into it, forcing you to become a sensory participant in the incredible, cataclysmic mêlée.
The explosions are deafening. Bullets whistle through the air, zinging off metal, fizzling through water, thudding into human flesh. Mortars pound. Magazines empty. Machine guns rattle at ferocious speed. The cacophony of sound is overwhelming.
"What the hell do we do now, sir?" yells a young Ranger during a rare lapse in the chaos, plainly confused and confounded.
Hemmed in, pinned down, under fire and out of options, men drop like flies. Arms and legs are blown off every which way. Huge wounds rip open. Blood pours with the exuberance of a vintner uncorking his newest vintage.
By the time this amazing, uncompromising sequence is over, the tide flows red with blood, and thirty-five men under the command of Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) are dead. The camera tracks down the beach riddled with corpses, body parts, and dead fish, finally resting on the pack of a slain soldier bearing the stamp "PVT. RYAN."
No other film so immediately captures the intensity, the brutality, and the utter senselessness of war. The opening establishes the mood for the rest of the film; the audience cannot relax for one minute. A walk across a pretty, open cornfield, for example, could result in sniper fire, a land mine, or a Panzer attack.
We are as much on our guard as the allied forces.
Before he can catch his breath, Capt. Miller is given another, more critical assignment: round up a handful of men to locate and bring back Private James Francis Ryan of Iowa. His three brothers have all recently been killed in action and the State Department has decreed that their mother receive some good news along with the bad.
Hanks gives a wonderfully focused performance at the film's core and is more than ably assisted by a solid supporting cast that includes Tom Sizemore, Edward Burns, and Matt Damon as the title character.
But the picture is Spielberg's all the way. It is the work of a master craftsman at the very top of his game; the director manipulates and pushes the medium of film to its limits. "Saving Private Ryan" comes closer than any other film to graphically depicting the harrowing experience of military combat. It renews respect and admiration for those who fought, and those who died, for freedom.
And in that regard, it educates the mind as well as the senses.
-- David N. Butterworth dnb@mail.med.upenn.edu
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