SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (DreamWorks - 1998) Starring Tom Hanks, Edward Burns, Tom Sizemore, Jeremy Davies, Vin Diesel, Adam Goldberg, Barry Pepper, Giovanni Ribisi, Matt Damon Screenplay by Robert Rodat Produced by Steven Spielberg, Ian Bryce, Mark Gordon, Gary Levinsohn Directed by Steven Spielberg Running time: 169 minutes
***1/2 (out of four stars)
Alternate Rating: A-
Note: Some may consider portions of the following text to be spoilers. Be forewarned.
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A sight which never fails to affect me is the annual commemoratory gatherings of WWII veterans at war monuments. It's been over fifty years since the curtain fell on the last Great War, and the young men who then risked life and limb to fight for their country are now aging seniors. As their numbers dwindle with time and the ceremonies now barely rate a five-second blurb with the youth-obsessed media, I can't help but be terribly moved to witness these elderly men, in full uniform and decorated with ribbons and medals, ignoring the protests of their weary bodies as they march with fierce pride and solemnly salute their fallen comrades. I'm overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude for the sacrifices and horrors to which these men have subjected themselves for the greater good, and saddened by the disinterest of the press and the public alike as indicated by the sparse attendance of the proceedings. Shamefully, we have forgotten. Steven Spielberg's film, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, attempts to address this situation by honouring these valiant soldiers.
A noble goal, to be sure, but good intentions don't necessarily translate into a good film; it's dangerous to fall into the trap of judging a film based upon the worthiness of its subject matter. At its best, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is a staggering achievement of verisimilitude, recreating the stark terror of the battlefield as perhaps no film has ever done before. Narratively symmetric, it opens with a washed-out shot of the stars and stripes fluttering in the wind, a present-day war cemetery sequence, and a spectacular half-hour battle scene, and closes with a reversal of the same elements, in effect coming full circle, although the picture's systematic emotional bombardment will undoubtedly result in the audience leaving the screening in a markedly different state of mind than that as they entered.
The opening battle segment on the shores of Omaha Beach during the D-Day assault is particularly stunning, impressing at once the hellish atmosphere of mayhem and carnage, and perhaps most significantly, the notion of futility. History informs us that we (referring to the Allied forces) won Omaha, and yet the film unblinkingly presents us to the chaos of our troops being mowed down in hails of bullets, shredded to pieces by explosives, blood and entrails splattering and spilling everywhere, with the cries and screams of the wounded and terrified only muted by detonations and the sound of ammunition tearing through flesh. (Curiously enough, although SAVING PRIVATE RYAN barely straddled the line between an R and the dreaded NC-17 rating from the MPAA, in Ontario it's been designated with a relatively biteless rating of AA -- adult accompaniment required for under-14s, far weaker than the Rs inexplicably given for tame fare such as HIGH ART and HENRY FOOL.) Impeccably staged by Mr. Spielberg and captured with the stark, glamourless flavour of authentic combat footage by cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, the net effect is intensely assaulting and at once captures the immense suffering of the soldiers.
The film wisely decides to forego introductions to the troops prior to the battle -- although we immediately latch upon the recognizable visage of our modern equivalent to the Jimmy Stewart-ish Everyman, Tom Hanks -- lending an unexpected sense of despair to the proceedings; not provided with the tools to be allowed to relate to the slaughtered onscreen victims as characters and heroes, we're forced to view them simply as men, and consequently the bitter sentiment of wasted lives is palpable. Smartly, Mr. Spielberg never provides a malevolent close-up of the Axis snipers during the first half of this battle -- the Allieds are essentially being attacked by a faceless enemy -- and he refrains from indulging in emblematic jingoism, avoiding the blatant use of the hateful Nazi swastika until quite late in the game; from a larger, philosophical perspective, this was a just war, but strictly on the microscopic level of this battleground as inspected by this film, principles such as right and wrong, good and evil, and heroes and villains don't enter into the fray: both sides being humanized, these are men fighting just to stay alive. When the Allied troops are able to topple the German stronghold, the mood isn't that of triumphant euphoria or jubilation, but of unadulterated relief.
The Omaha segment is so impressively achieved that it almost seems curmudgeonly to point out how clunky the film's screenplay, particularly the dialogue, becomes during the middle segment as the plot unfolds before giving way to the extended closing battle sequence. Assigned to locate and retrieve a Pvt. James Ryan in a goodwill mission, Cpt. John Miller (Mr. Hanks) and his men -- Sgt. Horvath (Tom Sizemore), Pvts. Reiben (Edward Burns), Jackson (Barry Pepper), Mellish (Adam Goldberg) and Caparzo (Vin Diesel), Medic Wade (Giovanni Ribisi), and later, a green translator, Cpl. Upham (Jeremy Davies) -- are sent behind enemy lines, and much moralizing and philosophizing is performed. It's all well-intentioned but comparatively ineffective in terms of execution, rife with contrived, Oscar-ready outbursts of introspection, banter which neither sounds genuinely naturalistic nor adequately addresses the issues raised on any more than a surface level, and a propensity to lend unearned gravity to profundities which lean more towards hokiness than provocation. There's also the problem of tone: the film clearly endeavours to capture the aura of a wartorn Europe as seen through the bleary eyes of our heroes, and yet two unnecessary comic bits are interjected which seem suited for sitcom-level storytelling; it's surprising that the film so willingly and needlessly undermines its achieved ambiance. The film's middle stretch has interludes of dramatic interest and some thematic exploration, but it's hardly groundshattering material.
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN's arduous middle section would probably be even more problematic if not for its direction. I'm not convinced that Mr. Spielberg is The Great Filmmaker Of Our Time; he's indisputably made some Great Films (including JAWS, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, and SCHINDLER'S LIST), but, as I recently remarked to a colleague, in a reality where Martin Scorsese still walks the Earth, designating Mr. Spielberg as America's finest filmmaker (as Time Magazine recently declared) is sheer folly. Nonetheless, he's a director of not inconsequential strengths, chief of which is his ability to elicit an emotional reaction from his audience; Mr. Spielberg can easily lay claim to the title of Master of Emotional Manipulation. It's a trait most conducive to exploitation for this film's subject matter. I appreciated the simple but effective manner of layering several voice-overs reading different condolence telegrams as the camera panned across a busy room to convey the enormity and tragedy of the war, and particularly liked the use of silence accompanying a bit with a secretary wordlessly shuffling between three letters and then rushing off to draw the attention of her supervisor. With nary a word, the onscreen implications are brutally clear; indeed, what words are suitable for such a grievous loss? It's a much more subtle touch than a later monologue by Harve Presnell (performed well, incidentally) involving a stirring letter reading.
For the most part, the film eschews subtlety for the use of emblems, both literal and figurative. Not only does SAVING PRIVATE RYAN open and close with a colour-muted shot of the American flag, its vibrancy literally drained from it, but it epitomizes in wholesome Pvt. Ryan (Matt Damon) the spirit of America; it's no accident that he's from Iowa, dead center in the heartland of America, and that his family background is in that most American of professions, farming. (When Pvt. Ryan's mother appears onscreen, she's even in the kitchen -- kudos to the filmmakers for the restraint of not depicting her baking an apple pie.) When Cpt. Miller addresses Pvt. Ryan, particularly at a pivotal moment late in the film, he's essentially speaking to the audience. However, the audience surrogate in the picture is not that of Pvt. Ryan, but of Cpl. Upham, a nervous wreck thrown into battle for the first time. Like him, we're seeing the horrors of the war through startled, inexperienced and idealistic eyes, and consequently we're simultaneously dismayed and empathetic at his limited effectiveness as a soldier. Though it was an interesting touch to encapsulate the entire conflict into a single scenario -- a German soldier killing a Jew as an American soldier stands by helplessly -- I was most impressed with the film's cynical lesson about the consequences of moral righteousness at wartime, an unexpected bit of grimness atypical for a film in Mr. Spielberg's oeuvre (although it's disappointingly tempered and dulled by a cathartic counterresponse which, while audience-pleasing, plays false).
While SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is far from flawless, during its best stretches there are moments of sheer visceral bravura. Its recreation of battles, with the sea literally awash with blood and soldiers being slain with horrifying ease, is a testament to the real brutality of war. It's a price which our WWII veterans paid on our behalf, and it's something that we should not forget.
- Alex Fung
email: aw220@freenet.carleton.ca
web : http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~aw220/
-- Alex Fung (aw220@freenet.carleton.ca) | http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~aw220/ "...a first screenplay unaccompanied by a powerful agent or industry sponsor is generally a pathetic fetus of a film, nothing more." - Andrew Sarris
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