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"Saving
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TOTAL WAR | PAGE 1, 2
In some ways, in fact, it blows up the rest of the movie. For this shattering vision is so corrosive, so subversive of all logic, all morality, all stories, that it devours the story that follows. What "Saving Private Ryan" is really about is war itself, and war eats everything up. Nor is Spielberg equipped to tell a story that might somehow flow out of or illuminate this void. Spielberg is essentially a first-rate conventional realist, the cinematic version of a skilled 19th century landscape artist. But by using his masterful brush strokes to capture the heart of darkness, he has willy-nilly become a modernist -- entered a world of absolutes, of metaphysical extremes, that requires a more audacious formal and narrative vocabulary than he possesses. "Saving Private Ryan" is like a Francis Bacon painting executed by Norman Rockwell. That's not necessarily a criticism: Maybe you need both visions to capture the experience of war. If Spielberg had made a more experimental film, the gut-wrenching terror of the battle scenes would probably dissolve into symbolism, subjectivity and "artistic meaning." Still, there's something jarring about the film's movement from nightmare realism to character-centered realism and back. The story line is pure Hollywood, but it's presented as morally ambiguous. After they finally secure the beach, a platoon of eight soldiers led by Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) receives top-brass orders to find and rescue one Private Ryan (Matt Damon), a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne missing somewhere in Normandy. All of his three brothers have been killed, and the military doesn't want another debacle like the one that inspired Abraham Lincoln's famous letter to the mother of five Union soldiers killed in the Civil War. So Miller and his men set off to find Ryan, knowing that their mission will probably mean that several men will die to save one. Hanks is brilliant as Miller. In the finest performance of his career, he plays him with a gentleness, a weariness, that is nonetheless rooted not just in decency but in the deep, unknowable soil of courage, a courage made awe-inspiring by our knowledge of what it confronts. He has his own negotiations with fear and madness, but you know that he knows he won't break. With his trembling hands -- the result of too much combat -- and haunted eyes, he is Everyman, and his quiet presence stands as a majestic rebuke -- at once invincible and utterly vulnerable -- to the inhuman forces that surround him. It's almost impossible to depict a platoon of soldiers without falling into tough-bonding clichés, but Spielberg and his fine cast manage to suggest the distance between the men as well as the camaraderie that holds them together. His soldiers are clearly delineated characters, played with concision and authority. Sergeant Horvath (Tom Sizemore) is the John Wayne character, gruff and implacable; Jeremy Davies plays the quavering, Emerson-quoting translator Corporal Upham, whose paralyzed terror in the climactic battle scene is at once comic and hideous; Ed Burns is the hotheaded guy from Brooklyn who threatens to abandon the expedition, Adam Goldberg the bitter-eyed grunt who mocks German POWs, saying "Juden! Juden!" as he holds out his Star of David. When they finally locate Ryan, he stubbornly refuses to leave his platoon, saying, "These are my brothers now." Damon's presence, however, is jarring: His Harvard-jock look seems cinematic, as does his big set speech in which he remembers a ridiculous sexual escapade involving his brothers. It's one of the movie's few moments of artificiality. The platoon decides to stay with Ryan and his comrades to defend a vital bridge against the approaching Germans. (It's never made quite clear why they don't just blow up the bridge, which seems to be mostly of use to the Germans, and flee.) The climactic battle is even more horrifically violent than the D-Day sequence -- the scene in which a German soldier slowly stabs one of the Americans through the heart, while whispering gently in his ear, is completely unwatchable. And its use of sound is even more ominous: The rumble of the approaching Panzers sounds like the gates of hell yawning open, and when a tank suddenly rears up above the Americans with a metallic roar, you almost have to laugh: It's right out of "Jurassic Park." It's beautifully choreographed stuff, and it again captures the mayhem of combat with unparalleled vividness (although the Gunfight at the OK Corral-like setting and the deus ex machina -- or Mustang -- ending make it marginally more Hollywood-y than the first one). The problem is, the pornographic allure of combat overshadows our interest in or concern for the characters or the story's outcome. And since the movie has by now lost the hallucinatory, free-floating quality that made the D-Day sequence so compelling, and become a conventional narrative, there's something unsatisfying about the lack of emotional identification and catharsis. Spielberg could have avoided this by giving his characters, and Ryan in particular, more depth, creating backstories for them, perhaps weaving other plot elements into his story. This, of course, would have made the film much more conventional and potentially sentimental, and it would have taken away from its quasi-documentary quality, but it would have had the virtue of heightening our identification with the human beings fighting and dying in front of us. In a peculiar way, though, you have to give Spielberg credit for not making his film more conventionally gripping. If he had made Ryan a more compelling character, we would have cared about the mission to rescue him -- which is what you'd expect from the master manipulator of emotions. No doubt out of a salutary realist impulse, he chose not to -- but as a result, the whole dramatic thrust of the story is vitiated. (Warning: If you don't want to know how the movie turns out, don't read the next paragraph.) Yet Spielberg does hit a high emotional note at the end. In a powerful framing device that recalls the ending of "Schindler's List," the aged Ryan, revisiting with his family the place where other men died to save him, falls to his knees, shattered by grief and memory and shame, and asks his wife to justify their sacrifice: "Tell me I've had a good life. Tell me I'm a good man," he pleads. His refusal to forget the debt he owes, the humility of his memory, is not only enormously moving, it serves as a kind of redemption, a necessary if eternally fragile answer to the hell he witnessed. War may mock humanity, snuff out life and hope, but human beings can still remember, and they can still love. The fragments we shore against our ruins. With "Schindler's List" and now "Saving Private Ryan," Spielberg has
become a powerful chronicler of the central event of our century.
Despite its harrowing vision of war, and despite certain dark revisionist
elements -- like its portrayal of the summary execution of surrendering
Germans -- "Saving Private Ryan" does not diminish the blood, sweat and
tears of those who fought and died in Anzio and Bastogne and Guadalcanal.
In fact, it heightens one's sense of their heroism. No one who sees this
movie would ever want to go to war -- but no one with a conscience could
feel anything other than immense gratitude for those who did. The next time
I stand in front of a field of white crosses, I will have a little clearer
sense of just what I am trying to remember.
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