Saving Private Ryan

I've been reading about D-Day and it inspired me to take Saving Private Ryan off the shelf and watch it again. I hadn't seen it in a long time.

Saving Private Ryan is a flawed masterpiece. Like almost all of Steven Spielberg's films, it shows off his best tendencies and his worst. It is thrilling and expertly shot, with the D-Day sequence that opens the film probably the definitive narrative record of that day. But it also gives in to Spielberg's weakness for sentimentalism. Orson Welles wrote that sentimentalism was John Ford's weakness. Well, to Spielberg, it's a chronic illness.

The screenplay, by Robert Rodat, incorporates two of cinema's basic tropes: the mission and the journey. After the brilliant, 20-minute sequence showing Tom Hanks as a captain in the Army Rangers move his men up the beach, they are given a mission to find a soldier whose three brothers have been killed in action. A group of eight soldiers, each of course with different backgrounds and ethnicities--Brooklyn, the South, Jewish, Italian, and the requisite newbie who has never fired a gun in anger--head across France, finding "a needle in a stack of needles."

This format may be old and hokey, but it works, because Spielberg has bathed the film in nostalgia. It's not a replica of a 1940s war film--the violence and language are explicit--but in spirit the film is like many that were made during the period.

Spielberg's strengths are shown in the battle sequences. The D-Day landing is breathtaking in its economy and savagery. He and D.P. Janusz Kaminski use a hand-held camera, making you feel right there, the dirt kicking up in your face, and perhaps ducking bullets along with the men. The arbitrariness of death is overwhelming--some men are shot before they can get off the boats, others jump over the side and drown with their heavy packs. A soldier takes a bullet in the helmet, and he takes it off to admire its efficacy, and then gets another bullet right in the forehead.

In what I think is the most amazing sequence of the film, which only lasts about a minute, is when Mrs. Ryan receives the three telegrams notifying her of her sons' deaths. First we see a military car running along a farm road. Then Mrs. Ryan in the kitchen. Then, she looks out the window at the approaching car. The shot reverses, showing her in the window, with the car reflected in the glass. She goes out on the porch, the shot taken from inside the house. When she sees a minister get out of the car, she faints. This should be taught to every prospective director.

The closing battle scene is no less thrilling, but much more conventionally filmed. I particularly like the shot when the team's sniper, Barry Pepper, sees the gun barrel of the tank pointing up at him, and he knows he's doomed. Spielberg shoots it at as a POV, so the barrel is pointed at us, and we feel it, too.

Where the film shows Spielberg's weakness is the incredibly corny bookend sequences in the American cemetery in Normandy. The aged Ryan visits the graves of his comrades, and asks his wife, "Have I been a good man?" Jeez. Talk about syrupy. The only thing I like about this section is Spielberg's decision to show the flag filtering the son, giving it a washed out appearance.

This bookend also exposes what I believe William Goldman pointed out as a severe structural error. We are led to believe that this is all a flashback by the old man in the cemetery, whose identity we don't yet know. But this could not be Ryan's flashback, as he did not take part in the first three-quarters of the film, such as the D-Day landing (he was Airborne) and the subsequent search for him. The flashback had to be from the perspective of one of the eight, of only two who survived.

The cast, aside from Hanks, who was the biggest star in Hollywood at the time (and much too old to be playing a Ranger, who's average age was about 22) was made up of indie actors, like Edward Burns, Adam Goldberg, Giovanni Ribisi, and Jeremy Davies. A young Vin Diesel is there, as well, and the film has a host of stars that pop up, like Dennis Farina and Ted Danson, and future stars like Paul Giamatti (who as he's running across a bombed out French town, complains of his "ankles like an old woman"). The script is not as sentimental with these actors. Davies, as the coward, does not get his redemption in the true-blue American way, and Goldberg, as the Jewish soldier, who is well aware of Nazi anti-Semitism, has a particularly stinging ending.

Also, Matt Damon was not yet a star when he made the film. Between the filming and its release he did become one, with the release of Good Will Hunting, which might have burned Spielberg because I'm sure he wanted a no-name as Ryan. The scene in which they finally find him, completely serendipitously, would have worked better if we the audience didn't say, "Hey, that's Matt Damon!"

Though Saving Private Ryan uses war film tropes, and has perhaps too many big speeches (the one in which Hanks reveals his past is close to the edge of maudlin) it is one of the best war films of this generation, and holds up incredibly well.