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
**** out of *****
The "meatgrinder" of Omaha Beach has rarely been as vividly portrayed as it is in Steven Spielberg's SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. Horrific war imagery is not a new cinematic device: it's at least as old as the floating severed arm (and oblivious owner) in Cornel Wilde's 1967 classic, BEACH RED. What IS new is Spielberg's portrayal of shell-shocked GI's weeping hysterically, or gleefully blasting surrendering Germans: as I watched the scenes of carnage unfold, it seemed to me that we were at last going to gain some new insights into the physical and moral convulsion known as war.
Spielberg is merciless in his portrayal of what happens to the bodies (and minds) of men under continuous, withering fire. But once "Captain Miller" (and the story) move off Omaha Beach, things change...almost as if Spielberg has had a "change of heart", not toward war, but toward those who participate in it and prolong it.
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN has been touted as "anti-war" simply because it DOES confront us with those ghastly images. But a TRUE "anti-war" film should feature characters that are morally doubles for those images; but Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) and his little Squad would not be out of place in a John Wayne epic.
Perhaps Spielberg is exploring his own ambivalent feelings about war. As a citizen of the "enlightened nineties" he cannot help but be disgusted with the waste and the suffering it epitomizes. But he is also aware that without men like Captain Miller rushing deliberately into harm's way at Omaha Beach, "Schindler" and the constuitents of that famous "List" might well have been reduced to ashfall in a Polish meadow.
Are the American GI's (and their British and Canadian Counterparts) to be seen as ordinary, decent men--or just simple-minded, suicidal pawns? Spielberg, for all his revulsion towards war, simply cannot bring himself to condemn those who don military uniforms. It almost seems as if he is trying to atone for the way his generation presented returning Viet Nam vets with bags of dog excrement: certainly the quest for the elusive "Ryan", with its objective of "saving" instead of "slaying", seems almost too perfect a reversal of the premise of Francis Ford Coppola's APOCALYPSE NOW.
Again and again, Spielberg brings us to the brink of revelation....only to draw back at the last second. He cannot, like Richard Attenborough in A BRIDGE TO FAR, bring himself to show us the "Ryan Rescue Mission" as a pointless, bloody debacle. Nor can he, like Michael Caton-Jones' 1990 version of MEMPHIS BELLE, make Miller and his brave band mere fodder for the cold-blooded machinations of a Public Relations Department. Had he done so, we might have had some subjects for serious debate here, and not simply "discussion points", and might have found some answers.....
How does a man who dispatched 94 men to their deaths, avoid becoming himself a dehumanized killing machine? How does the Company Sniper (a nod to Howard Hawks' SERGEANT YORK?) reconcile Scripture passages with his murderous specialty? SAVING PRIVATE RYAN gives us no "answers"...only more questions.
In William Wellman's 1949 classic, BATTLEGROUND, a Chaplain begins his Christmas Sermon to the battered Bastogne defenders with the words, "Was this Trip necessary?" One might almost ask, of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, "Was this Movie necessary?" The answer in both cases is an unequivocal "YES!" Yes,--because for all its reluctance to "take chances", SAVING PRIVATE RYAN comes about 20 years after Attenborough's epic--and may enocourage a generation to think about the sacrifices that made its very existence possible, and hopefully to look at the work of other, earlier directors who risked their souls (and careers) to explore this brutal and bloody phenomenon that seems so unthinkable--and yet at times, so very tragically "necessary".
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