Saving Private Ryan
Each person sees a movie a bit differently. It comes from bringing our own backgrounds and experiences to the movie house, perhaps shaded a little by how good dinner was, or whether the subway was crowded. I went to "Saving Private Ryan" with a sort of international politics background (well, school, not flying between Tel Aviv and Damascus negotiating Mideast peace; note that this is not a practical subject unless you're in certain places) and a diet of recent Stephen Ambrose books about the war in Europe. This is a Big Picture background: the goals of Allied Grand Strategy, the scope of American wartime production, and so on. Ambrose described D-Day as the essential act of American foreign policy. That's a bit of the flavor of this thinking: the war in the context of international relations theory, the war as the Last Crusade.
"Saving Private Ryan" takes the point of view of the foot soldier. The war from there is gory and loud, a confusion of random, sudden death. Reports about the first half hour of the film are true: Spielberg doesn't hide behind the Hollywood illusion that bullets and explosions merely cause a painless spurt of cosmetic blood. They disfigure. This is in contrast to the cool technical mastery of, say, Tom Clancy's "Patriot Games" -- war as bloodless video game, conducted from air conditioned control rooms -- or the calm efficiency of movie SWAT and Special Forces teams. An early gasp from the audience came when disembarking GIs ducked underwater, only to be killed by German machine guns: only for James Bond do bullets stop at the water's surface.
One interesting thing is that there is no long, establishing shot of the beach assault. In films of this scale, there's some effort made do dramatize the size of the events. "The Longest Day" had any number of shots of hundreds of infantrymen storming across the beaches and glimpses of the invasion fleet stretching from horizon to horizon. Ambrose's books mention the never-to-be-repeated view of hundreds of landing craft heading to shore, as seen from passing aircraft. "A Bridge Too Far" showed the air armada flying overhead, and the wide-ranging battle across all of Holland. Concerning a different era, "Gone With the Wind" had the famous shot of the Confederate wounded in Atlanta. Big, important things are afoot.
"Ryan", on the other hand, shows only one or two landing craft at once. It's only well after the landings have been complete do we catch a quick panorama of the men and equipment being unloaded on the beaches. Prior to this, but after the objectives were taken and the battle won, there was a shot of the dead and wounded on the beach, but the focus is, again, on the individuals who make up this horrific composition. Later, Tom Hanks mentions, vaguely and hand-wavingly, in one of those off-the-cuff conversations, the sequence of events that have to happen before the war ends: first Caen has to be taken, then such-and-such, then Paris, then Berlin. Then they go home. From the infantry's point of view, all this takes place on a different planet. They're concerned with the here and now, with accomplishing their immediate mission. And, as the title and the tag lines suggest, the mission is about just one man.
Well, that's the framework for this movie: after the beach assault, Tom Hanks must lead a squad of men through Normandy, to find Pvt. Ryan, whose three brothers had just been killed in the war, and whose mother had received three telegrams from the War Department in one afternoon. He gets to go home, to spare the family the loss of all its sons. Ryan, though, is someplace in the battlefield, far from where he's supposed to be because of the confusion of the parachute drop. While searching for Ryan, Hanks's men find themselves in a variety of situations, some of which are meant to put on film previously glossed over moral ambiguities in this most moral of wars.
The German soldiers in the film are just sort of there. Only two have speaking roles, one of whose consists of two or three lines of taunting. The ambiguities do not come directly from them -- they're props as much as anything -- but from the conduct of the Americans in relation to them. Further, the Americans take on a number of roles through the film. In the beginning, GIs are assaulting heavily defended positions. At the end of the film, the Germans are on the offense, and the Americans are holed up as the German beach defenders were, with their enemy walking into pre-planned killing zones. In the first half, a German sniper fires on the GIs from a bell tower. The roles become reversed by the end. Generally, we don't see a German point of view. The emphasis is clearly on how the Americans act.
And the actions of Americans range from cruel to something more noble, from cowardice to courage, from unthinking to compassionate. The high points are what we've come to expect and believe about GIs as crusaders in the Second World War, the low points flirting with what we may consider reprehensible conduct by our soldiers. And I suppose Spielberg should be commended for pointing out that in an enterprise as large and as complicated as war, we won't always hit the highs, and the lows are sometimes comprehensible.
It should be noted that there have already been morally questioning war films. For Americans, Vietnam is the standard setting: clearly there were atrocities committed by US soldiers there, in awful contrast to shining American ideals. World War 2, though, has been relatively sacrosanct. In a real sense, this was the Last Crusade, when we were clear on who the bad guys were, when we could have at them on the battlefield and when we could come out winners. Nazis became great for cinematic evil: spiffy uniforms and historic menace in one goosestepping package. This sort of moral clarity is certainly dead by the end of the Vietnam war; with few exceptions, the only clear cut good vs. evil war movies involved giant space bugs and Doogie Howser, or environmentally incorrect alien invaders and Apple Computer saving the world.
Is it possible to make a morally unambiguous war film today? There's been perhaps one Gulf War movie, which was as much about Denzel Washington's inner guilt over a friendly fire incident as anything else. The dilemmas in "Courage Under Fire" are caused by accidents rather than deliberate conduct. But then, what would be the point of such an unambiguous film? The world is different now, or perhaps we've realized there are gray areas, and valid reasons for and against.
Does Spielberg succeed in showing that war is a tangible hell, that Americans weren't always in the moral clear? I'd argue, yes, from the effect on the audience alone. At the end, in what would normally be a woo-hoo moment as the last Tiger tank is killed, there was hardly a peep from the sold-out audience. The rah-rah had been exhausted.
There are of course faults with the film. From a pure wince perspective, the final few minutes contains an awful, awful speech, where the war veteran makes a terrible, predictable, cloying speech. He asks his wife if he's led a good life, if he earned the long-ago sacrifices and the right to go home. I suppose he represents America after the war, asking if America has "earned" the Second World War sacrifices through its post-war conduct. It was a truly bad scene, where all the stereotypes about the Spielberg sentimentality come on display. While thematically it's not out of place, it just feels poorly done. But, while clumsy, this is more than anything else fumbling towards the conclusion that, perhaps, yes, America has earned it, and the sacrifices were more severe than had previously been shown on the screen.
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