Saving Private Ryan -- 1998
director: steven spielberg
cast: tom hanks, ed burns, barry pepper, adam goldberg, jeremy davies, vin diesel, giovanni ribisi, tom sizemore, ted danson, dennis farina
Little Stevie Spielberg takes one more shot at WW II and finally nails it right between the eyes with “Saving Private Ryan”. So far he’s tried depicting “The Big One” as a big comedy (“1941”), epic/tragedy (“Schindler’s List”) and a boy’s adventure (“Empire of the Sun”). What sets “Ryan” apart from a run-of-the-mill war film is the terrifying realism of the combat scenes. This is war as pornography — sickening, upsetting, hellish, chaotic, numbing, alienating and de-humanizing. There’s more blood and guts here than in the chum-buckets from “Jaws”.
The
opening scene "where the men hit the beach" can’t be easily forgotten
by anyone who see it. That and its bookend tank battle almost belong to a
different movie than the typical war story that rests uneasily in between.
Spielberg blinks and abandons the realism of the first twenty minutes. I’m
not giving anything away by saying that the central issue of a war film is
the question of who will live and who will die. But because this is also a
Spielberg film, it is real obvious who lives and who will get the bag. The
main characters are labeled early which ties things up nicely at the end but
undercuts the, “why did I survive while that other guy died?” feeling expressed
by many veterans.
The story is simple — A group of army rangers go behind German lines to bring back the sole surviving son of the Ryan family. His three brothers have all been killed in combat in different battles around the world and chief-of-staff George Marshall wants this boy back. No one family should be called upon to pay such high a price.
A tough but sensitive
captain (Tom Hanks) is the man chosen for this mission of dubious military
value. He’s a guy with a mysterious past and an equally mysterious hand tremor.
Ted “Frankenstein” Danson has a distracting cameo and crater-face 
Dennis
Farina also shows up for an easy paycheck. Ed Burns, Barry Pepper, Adam Goldberg,
Jeremy Davies, Vin Diesel, Giovanni Ribisi and Tom Sizemore are Hank’s bickering,
melting-pot troopers. Each gets his own little moment to express his feelings
about the horrors of war. The weakest part of the movie is the somewhat standard
telling of how these guys have to put their differences and doubts aside and
work together to complete their mission and survive.
The accomplishment of “Ryan” is the way it involves you in the physical space of Omaha Beach and later in the bombed out French towns. The encounters between the Americans and the Germans as they jockey for position, the confusing flip-flop between being the hunters and hunted (the victims and the victimizers) is captured like no other war film. Moral judgments are hard to apply. What are you to think when watching the terrified American GIs as they are machine-gunned in the surf, then later, an American survivor yelling, "Don't shoot 'em, let 'em burn!" as the German defenders make fiery leaps from their burning bunkers or shooting the Germans who do try to surrender? There's plenty of cruelty and inhumanity to go around. The differences between the two sides becomes more clear in a very subtle and un-Speilberg-like moment. After the carnage of capturing the beach is done, Adam Goldberg's character (Melish) is standing near a trench full of dead Germans when he is handed a Hitler Youth knife by a soldier who is searching the bodies. Goldberg jokes about the blade with its prominent swastika but is suddenly overwhelmed and sobs.
The biggest compliment I can pay to Spielberg is that intellectually I knew I was watching some actors run around an Irish beach in army costumes with some great special effects yet I started to believe that what I was watching was real. -- Tom Graney
$9.50
© 1998 Hollywood Outsider™