The horror and the glory
Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan goes to Hell and
back
by Peter Keough
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. Directed by Stephen Spielberg. Written by Robert Rodat. With Tom Hanks, Tom
Sizemore, Edward Burns, Barry Pepper, Adam Goldberg, Vin Diesel, Giovanni
Ribisi, Jeremy Davies, Matt Damon, Ted Danson, Paul Giamatti, and Dennis
Farina. A DreamWorks Pictures and Paramount Pictures release. At the Showcase, Starcase, Westerly, and Woonsocket cinemas.
Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks), commanding a unit of Army Rangers storming
Omaha Beach on D-Day, drags a fallen lieutenant to safety. A shell bursts
nearby; Miller ducks and moves on. Glancing down at the wounded man, he
perceives that from the waist down the lieutenant has vanished. Meanwhile, in
the background, a soldier appears bewildered, apparently looking for something.
He finds it -- his severed arm -- and wanders off.
These are images from the first half hour of Steven Spielberg's Saving
Private Ryan, and they are the most harrowing and oddly exhilarating
re-creations of modern warfare ever to be seen in a film made for
entertainment. (Many have speculated that without Spielberg's clout, this film
would have been rated NC-17. Similarly suspect is the PG-13 rating for the
Spielberg-produced and eerily parallel Small Soldiers.) The
entertainment factor alone should raise doubts: where is the "decency" -- the
term used by Spielberg when he described his goal in making the movie -- in
selling tickets to the spectacle of such brutality, misery, and death? Although
I left the film disturbed, stimulated, and queasy from its sheer visceral
impact, I was more distraught by its failure -- and its success -- at putting
the horror into a moral context.
True, the tragic and horrific have been the mainstay of popular entertainment
since Greek drama, with its ritual catharsis of pity and fear. But who's going
to want to watch? Snuff-film fans aside, and those who see in such
Peckinpah-inspired dances of death a perverse sublimity, this film doesn't
offer the escapist distance of, say, The Lost World.
What it does offer is the sentimentality of Amistad and, to a lesser
degree, Schindler's List. Opening the film is a framing device
reminiscent of Schindler. A sun-scorched Old Glory (British and Canadian
viewers may be miffed at Spielberg's total disregard of their role in the
European invasion) lifts to reveal an old man tottering through the rows of
white crosses at the present-day Normandy beachhead memorial. The monuments
fade to the black crosses of steel obstructions on Omaha Beach and the seasick
faces of troops in landing craft cutting through the surf. The flashback proves
phony, not just because this character, it turns out, was never there, but
because it entombs the trauma to come in retrospective glory and mawkishness.
That's momentarily forgotten in the hellfire that follows, as the ramp of the
landing-craft flies open and troops are butchered in a merciless hail of
bullets. Shot via handheld camera to imitate actual combat footage (blood at
times splatters the lens, as well as everything else), this sequence creates a
feeling of helplessness and claustrophobic carnage. Nothing the soldiers do to
escape or fight back is of any avail -- in fact, their efforts backfire with
diabolical irony, the kind of cruel poetic injustices that mark the lumbering
D-Day epic The Longest Day (1961), and more cynically that underrated
paean to World War II disillusionment, The Victors (1963). As an enraged
medic notes when his lifesaving handiwork goes to naught because of a
whimsically accurate bullet, these guys can't catch a single break.
Such studiously rendered atrocities draw on a deep source of nightmare, the
universal horror of the frailty of the flesh and the need to transcend it. They
are reminiscent of Dante's Inferno, with the difference being that the
grotesque mutilations of Hell's various circles reflect divine logic and
justice, whereas these abominations are merely what happens when a human body
encounters bullets, high explosives, and fire. The consequences are inevitable
and meaningless. Or are they? The invaders regroup and, with sheer guts,
intelligence, and Yankee ingenuity, breach the defenses. You can choose between
enthusiasm and ambivalence as Nazi soldiers crammed into a trench are mowed
down in a turkey shoot, or as a soldier shouts out "Don't shoot them, let them
burn" when defenders leap out of a gun emplacement like living fireworks
displays. In the end, Miller's outfit accomplish their mission, and of course
their sacrifice leads to the downfall of the Third Reich.
But that's not enough for Spielberg or, presumably, the audience. As in
Schindler's List, the problem remains -- after so much death, what is
the value of a single human life? A contrived opportunity arises for the
resolution of this question. Three of four brothers have died in action within
days of one another. The fourth, paratrooper Private James Ryan (Matt Damon),
is unaccounted for behind enemy lines in Normandy. (A similar, true episode, in
which five brothers went down on the same ship, was dramatized in 1944 in
The Sullivans.) A general is informed, whereupon he proposes a rescue
mission to retrieve the surviving brother and send him back home. This general
squelches the reasonable objections of his staff (what chance do they have of
finding him? why bereave more mothers?) by reading a letter from Abraham
Lincoln to a mother whose sons all died in battle. That's illogical enough,
never mind the likelihood that in this crucial phase of D-Day these people
would have more important matters to attend to. Stranger still, no mention is
made of the military value of such a mission -- propaganda and public
relations.
Instead, what's offered is a variation on Apocalypse Now: a search not
for the heart of darkness but for the heart of decency. Enlisted are Captain
Miller and seven of his best men. Here Ryan draws from the melting-pot
squad conventions that go back to classic World War II movies from
Guadalcanal Diary to The Big Red One: each member is a
representative ethnic or regional stereotype backed by a trademark gimmick.
Private Reiben (Edward Burns, copping the same attitude as in The Brothers
McMullen but backed up with a Browning automatic rifle) takes personal
umbrage at the way this theoretical Ryan has endangered the lives of his
flesh-and-blood buddies. Private Mellish (Adam Goldberg) shows a nauseated
remorse over killing but relishes flaunting his Jewishness in front of German
POWs. Private Jackson (Barry Pepper) is a good old boy with a fundamentalist
streak and a dead eye with a shooting iron -- in a gratuitous bit of
Godfather-style parallel editing, his murmuring of prayers while lining
up a target is intercut with a padre reading the last rites to a dying
dogface.
More substantive is Sergeant Horvath (Tom Sizemore, the William Bendix of the
'90s, if not the Victor McLaglen), whose nurturing NCO takes from the
traditions of John Ford's cavalry movies and every other war movie ever made.
He's dedicated to Captain Miller, whom Hanks plays as the beleaguered Good
Shepherd squad leader hallowed in films such as The Story of G.I. Joe
and The Sands of Iwo Jima. Located somewhere between Forrest Gump and
Hanks's Jim Lovell in Apollo 13, Miller is made to seem complex and
vulnerable through a twitching hand, and enigmatic because he has kept his past
and identity a secret from his men.
Hanks's touching, melancholy performance aside (his bloodstained face does
justice to what he witnesses at Omaha Beach), his "secret" proves a red
herring. More beguiling and mysterious is Corporal Upham (Jeremy Davies,
delivering the film's most nuanced and troubling performance), a techie
recruited to replace the unit's slain translator. Puny, bookish, and totally
green, he brings the intellectual and moral point of view of a Norman Mailer in
The Naked and the Dead. Although in the background, his character is the
only one who really changes, and, to Spielberg's credit, not altogether
"decently."
Like the motley crew in Lewis Milestone's A Walk in the Sun (1945),
Miller's squad roam through the chaos of no man's land, bumping into anecdotes
ranging from the poignant and heartstopping to the predictable and pat. "We are
crossing over into the surreal," observes the often wry and thoughtful Miller,
but it's unclear whether he's referring to the Catch-22 turn their
mission eventually takes or to the unexpected appearance of Ted Danson as a
combat officer.
A fellow critic referred to this part of the movie as the best Combat
episode ever made, and that's a compliment. The usual clichés
abound, but they're skewed provocatively. The last-stand battle is ushered in
with the Jurassic Park entrance of Nazi armor and unfolds with the
otherworldly nihilism of Kubrick's Full Medal Jacket. The cavalry comes
at a timely moment, but not in time, and the begrudged release of a prisoner
about to be executed results in an ongoing morality play that is one of the
bravest parts of the film.
If only it weren't for that cipher Private Ryan -- his attempted rescue is
overshadowed by an earlier case of mistaken identity that rings far truer --
and the hollow sentiment of the flag-waving framing device. Spielberg might
better recall other words of Abraham Lincoln, his acknowledgment of gratitude
and impotence in the Gettysburg Address. Nonetheless, what can be saved from
Private Ryan is the recognition that some pain and heroism is beyond
imagination and the consolation of meaning.