Saving Private Ryan Produced by Mutual Film Company / Mark Gordon Productions / DreamWorks SKG / Amblin Entertainment / Paramount Pictures. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Starring Tom Hanks (Captain Miller), Edward Burns (Private Reiben), Tom Sizemore Sergeant Horvath), Barry Pepper (Private Jackson) Vin Diesel (Private Caparzo), Adam Goldberg (Private Mellish), Giovanni Ribisi (Private Jackson), Jeremy Davies (Corporal Upham), and Matt Damon (Private Ryan). Runtime: 170. Reviewed by Michael Turton. ** out of *****.
Weighed down by tired plot lines and Spielberg's reliance on formulas, _Saving Private Ryan_ is a mediocre film which nods in the direction of realism before descending into an abyss of cliches.
There ought to be a law against Steven Spielberg making movies about truly serious topics. Spielberg's greatest strength as a director is the polished, formulaic way in which every aspect of the film falls carefully into place to make a perfect story. But for a topic of such weight as combat in the second world war (or the Holocaust) this technique backfires, for it creates coherent, comprehensible and redemptive narratives out of events whose size, complexity and evil are utterly beyond the reach of human ken. In this way Spielberg trivializes the awesome evil of the stories he films.
_Saving Private Ryan_ tells the story of eight men who have been detailed on a "PR mission" to pull a young man, Ryan (whose three other brothers were just killed in fighting elsewhere) out of combat on the Normandy front just after D-Day. Ryan is a paratrooper who dropped behind enemy lines the night before the landings and became separated from his fellow soldiers. The search for him takes the eight soldiers across the hellish terrain of World War II combat in France.
There's no denying Spielberg came within shouting distance of making a great war movie. The equipment, uniforms and weapons are superbly done. The opening sequence, in which Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) leads his men onto Omaha Beach, is quite possibly the closest anyone has come to actually capturing the unendurably savage intensity of modern infantry combat. Another pleasing aspect of the film is Spielberg's brave depiction of scenes largely unknown to American audiences, such as the shooting of prisoners by Allied soldiers, the banality of death in combat, the routine foul-ups in the execution of the war, and the cynicism of the troops. The technical side of the film is peerless, as always. The camera work is magnificent, the pacing perfect, the sets convincing, the directing without flaw. Hanks will no doubt be nominated for an Oscar for his performance, which was utterly convincing, and the supporting cast was excellent, though Ted Danson seems a mite out of place as a paratroop colonel.
Yet the attempt at a realistic depiction of combat falls flat on its face because realism is not something which can be represented by single instances or events. It has to thoroughly permeate the context at every level of the film, or the story fails to convince. Throughout the movie Spielberg repeatedly showed only single examples of the grotesque wounds produced by modern mechanized devices (exception: men are shown burning to death with relative frequency). For example, we see only one man with guts spilled out on the ground. Here and there men lose limbs; in one scene Miller is pulling a man to safety, there's an explosion, and Miller looks back to see he is only pulling half a man. But the rest of the corpses are remarkably intact. There are no shoes with only feet in them, no limbs scattered everywhere, no torsos without limbs, no charred corpses, and most importantly, all corpses have heads (in fairness there are a smattering of wicked head wounds). The relentless dehumanization of the war, in which even corpses failed to retain any indentity, is soft-pedaled in the film. Ultimately, _Saving Private Ryan_ bows to both Hollywood convention and the unwritten rules of wartime photography in its portrayal of wounds and death in war. Rather than saying _Saving Private Ryan_ is "realistic," it would be better to describe it as "having realistic moments."
Another aspect of the "Hollywoodization" of the war is the lack of realistic dialogue and in particular, the lack of swearing. Anyone familiar with the literature on the behavior of the men during the war, such as Fussell's superb _Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War_ (which has an extensive discussion on swearing), knows that the troops swore fluently and without letup. "Who is this Private Ryan that we have to die for him?" asks one infantrymen in the group of eight. Rendered in wartime demotic, that should have been expressed as "Who is this little pecker that we have to get our dicks shot off for him?" or some variant thereof. Conversations should have been literally sprinkled with the "F" word, and largely about (the search for) food and sex. This is all the more inexplicable because the movie already had an "R" rating due to violence, so swearing could not possibly have been eliminated to make it a family film.
However, the most troubling aspect of the film is the Spielbergization of the topic. The most intense hell humans have ever created for themselves is not emotionally wrenching enough for Steven Spielberg. He cannot just cede control to the material; he has to be bigger than it. As if afraid to let the viewer find their own (perhaps unsettled and not entirely clear) emotional foothold in the material, Spielberg has to package it in Hallmark moments to give the war a meaning and coherence it never had: the opening and closing scenes of Ryan and his family in the war cemetary (reminscent of the closing scene from _Schindler's List), the saccharine exchange between Ryan and his wife at the close (every bit as bad as Schindler's monologue about how his car, tiepin or ring could have saved another Jew), quotes from Abraham Lincoln and Emerson, Captain Miller's last words to Private Ryan, and an unbelievable storyline in which a prisoner whom they free earlier in the movie comes back to kill the Captain. That particular subplot is so hokey, so predictable, it nigh on ruins the film.
Nowhere in the film is there a resolute depiction of the meaninglessness, stupidity and waste which characterized the experience of war to the men who actually fought in combat (imagine if Miller had been killed by friendly fire or collateral damage). Because of its failure to mine deeply into the terrible realities of World War II, _Saving Private Ryan_ can only pan for small truths in the shallows. 2 stars out of 5.
Copyright 1998 by Michael A. Turton email: turton@yourinter.net
-----== Posted via Deja News, The Leader in Internet Discussion ==----- http://www.dejanews.com/rg_mkgrp.xp Create Your Own Free Member Forum
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews