There are certain films that, given the option, I would rather not revisit. These are not bad films by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, they are often quite good if not excellent films. They just cover a topic or subject matter than I find very hard to watch, personal or horrifying stories that, to be honest, I often feel like once is enough. Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan is very much one of those films. While not as brutal or horrifying as Spielberg’s other great drama set in that time period, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan may be one of the most effective anti-war films I have ever seen, a film that takes the “good” war and shows how violent and inhumane it was for soldiers on the ground in a manner I had not seen before or since. It is for that reason that I was reluctant to ever go back to it.
But, as with all things, here I am, and if anything, I was able to absorb a bit more about the film this time around than I had before. At the least, this isn’t like my first viewing, at home with my parents, after which we caught a “Celebrity Jeopardy” skit on Saturday Night Live as a coincidental pallet cleanser to follow such a raw and often literal meatgrinder of a film.
Actually, before I go too much further, let me take a moment to point out that Saving Private Ryan is not a narratively flawless film. For one thing, the framing device of having the elderly Ryan visit the grave of everyman Captain Miller (the living embodiment of American decency in film, Tom Hanks) is clever in a way, but most of the film recounts events he wasn’t present for. If the film had truly wanted to make the “twist” a surprise that this was not Miller at the Normandy Cemetery, I would think having the old man stand revealed as Upham (Jeremy Davies), the inexperienced noncombat soldier brought along to act as a translator, could just as easily have worked as making it the much older Private Ryan. And I will second the general observations that for all that Spielberg did to make the view of war more nuanced, and his desire to never again direct anything with what he might think of as a “cartoon Nazi” post-Schindler’s List, the one German the film dedicates any time to, the man nicknamed “Steamboat Willie,” (Joerg Stadler) is still a bit of a stereotype, and it is awfully narratively convenient that he’s the one who shoots and kills Miller at the end of the film. However, these are what I would consider Saving Private Ryan‘s only real flaws, and both of them are incredibly minor.
Instead, look at what the film does from its very famous opening, an opening that was realistic enough to allegedly make actual D-Day veterans claim it was too close to the real thing. The opening twenty or so minutes is a bloodbath, one that shows young men being turned into lifeless meat and removing any and all romance and glamor from the invasion. Yes, the image of the soldier carrying his own severed arm has been reused on South Park, but there’s a reason the opening twenty minutes is probably the segment of the film people remember best. While I would generally agree that everything that came after that moment is not at the same visceral level, and I would even agree with the criticism that the film gets more sentimental as it goes, I would generally counter that I am not sure Spielberg knows how to make a film that is completely divorced from sentiment. I would say there’s even some in Schindler’s List, and that is the last time I will be citing that film in this article if I can help it. What Spielberg excels at is using the camera to paint a whole picture. Cutting back and forth between Captain Miller and his small group of men and the sheer awfulness happening to other men around them is just a director at the height of his power telling a story, and the story is “war does bad things to people on every level.”
That includes the moral level as the Americans are not exactly portrayed as saints in this film, a moment driven home even more in that opening scene where two enemy soldiers try to surrender, a moment made even more tragic for anyone in the audience who speaks Hungarian (the soldiers in question are trying to explain that they aren’t German).
In a nutshell, that is what Saving Private Ryan may be trying to do: find a moral thing within the context of the war. Is it right to send eight men into harm’s way to rescue one random guy? Is it even possible to do the right thing when sudden, violent death can happen at any time, and even stopping to do what looks like the right thing can get a person killed, as happened to the member of Miller’s squad played by arguably the actor whose career took off the most after this film came out, one Vin Diesel? Is what is basically a PR move on many levels worth so many actual lives? The film doesn’t really offer an answer to these questions, but Miller’s sergeant and confidant Horvath (Tom Sizemore) seems to believe saving Ryan is the closest they might come to such a thing. My general experience with the military tells me a good sergeant is generally a pragmatic person who knows how to get things done and acts as a close partner to an officer like Miller, so if Horvath is saying that, it’s maybe not correct, but it’s correct enough.
It is also to the film’s credit that there’s no answer to that. Ryan as an old man just wants to know if he’s been a good man, something I would think his wife would say yes to regardless, but he needs to hear it because a lot of men died to make sure he got to go home early, Miller most notably, and given the eight men who set out, I think it’s worth noting the only survivors are Upham, who can’t bring himself to fight in a combat situation and fires his weapon only once in the entire film as the last of his naivete wears off to kill the surrendering Steamboat Willie, and Reiben (Edward Burns), the soldier most likely to question their whole reason for being out there and the guy who almost just quit the mission and left, albeit with Miller’s permission.
By the by, Spielberg’s casting for most of the soldiers was to go for Indie actors and unknown actors, and I think it is rather amazing that Burns, the one I probably recognized the most when I first saw the film, has probably had the least impressive career of the lot of them. Setting aside Hanks and Sizemore as more established actors, the rest of the detachment is played by the aforementioned Burns, Diesel, and Davies, plus Barry Pepper, Giovanni Ribisi, and Adam Goldberg. Then there was an actor Spielberg cast just before his big break hit screens as the title character, namely Matt Damon. The rest of the cast has, much like Spielberg’s Lincoln, a good collection of familiar faces that can all sell their respective roles, including the likes of Dennis Farina, Paul Giamatti, Bryan Cranston, and a very young Nathan Fillion as a very different Private Ryan. These actors all basically disappear into their roles, as a good actor should, and the only one who might be distracting is Ted Danson as another unit’s C.O., and that’s not so much his fault as the fact that his TV work made him as recognizable as he is. I mean, the aforementioned Cranston hadn’t even done Malcolm in the Middle yet. Never let it be said Spielberg does not have a good eye for talent.
The climactic battle where Miller takes over the defense of a bridge, the reason Ryan refuses to leave the front lines just yet, shows the sort of Spielbergian story many might have expected this film to be before they saw the opening depiction of Normandy. There’s Hanks dispensing with some American gumption and setting up booby traps based entirely on a sort of do-it-yourself spirit that shows ingenuity in the face of certain death, and while the initial set-up seems to contain the Germans, if the film were as sentimental as some of its critics claim, then I suspect more of Miller’s ground would have gotten out of there alive. That the two most compassionate members of the group died before they even found Ryan says this is not the sort of film to give people the ending they deserve. Instead, it’s rather random, a product of dumb luck more than anything else, where a helmet might deflect one bullet to the amazement of the soldier wearing it only to have that same man die when a second bullet finds him seconds later. Is there a point to war, even the one where Americans like to tell themselves we defeated fascism? If there is, it isn’t for the men who actually have to fight it.
NEXT: I go from a film that I had no great desire to see again to one I have never seen before. Be back soon for what I have heard many critics refer to as one of the finest heist films ever made, the 1955 French crime drama Rififi.
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