War’s hell has often been portrayed in movies — but never with as much bloody detail or gut-wrenching physical impact as it gets in Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan.”
This great World War II battle film — shot with all its director’s famous technical genius and sense of wonder, but tempered with a new toughness and maturity — is a watershed picture, for both Spielberg and war movies in general. Set during D-Day and its aftermath — and centering on a strange humanitarian mission, to save one soldier who has become the last survivor of four Army brothers — “Saving Private Ryan” accomplishes something rare and extraordinary. Grimly and unflinchingly, it conveys much of the brutality and madness of 20th Century warfare. But at the same time, it celebrates, believably, the courage and self-sacrifice of people who fought it.
A contradiction? Not necessarily. Spielberg, the son of a WWII Army veteran, as well as a child of the movies, works here with both the dream archetypes of “The Last Good War” and its shattering reality. Time and again, in this movie, he shows us the kind of bloodshed and savagery (mass death, a wounded medic clutching his guts as his life bleeds away) that the classic WWII movies usually left out. Most memorably, he stages two battle scenes — including an awe-inspiring re-creation of D-Day — which rank among the most convincing and terrifying ever put on film.
Through it all, Spielberg infuses the film with a heartfelt admiration for WWII’s “citizen soldiers” — especially Tom Hanks as Capt. Miller, leader of the expedition to save Pvt. Ryan — while refusing to romanticize or soften the horrors they went through. The film’s framing sequence, a John Fordian cemetery scene awash in tragic irony, is saturated with both that horror and admiration.
The movie was made from an original script by Robert Rodat (doctored by “Shawshank Redemption’s” Frank Darabont and “Out of Sight’s” Scott Frank), and its intense violence and earthy dialogue are obvious products of the post-Vietnam “Apocalypse Now” era. But its story is cast in the mold of the classic wartime epics of the ’40s and ’50s (“A Walk in the Sun,” “Attack!” “The Steel Helmet”) — one more tale of a small, tight-knit unit on a dangerous, character-revealing mission. Here, there’s an extra “historical” element: After three Ryan brothers die in combat, Gen. George Marshall (played by Harve Presnell, “Fargo’s” father) orders that the last survivor, Pvt. James Ryan (Matt Damon), whom the Army lost track of when he parachuted into Normandy, be found and returned home.
Marshall’s “order” — entirely fictitious but reminiscent of the actual WWII stories of the decimated Sullivan and Niland clans — is given to a handpicked platoon (led by Hanks’ Miller), members of a group that has already survived the Omaha Beach landing. But as the mission drags on and more of them die, tempers flare and morale begins to crumble. Why save Ryan when an entire world is in flames? Why submit to the Army’s incessant goofups, snafus and “FUBARs” (“F—– Up Beyond All Recognition”)? Why pull these soldiers away from action — or delay their own returns home — for a kind of military publicity stunt?
These questions haunt the movie, which begins and ends in that military cemetery where an unnamed, initially unrecognizable soldier is visiting the graves of his old WWII companions. In between, Rodat’s script uses not only a stock “dangerous mission” situation but also near-stock types in the search party: the tough, battle-scarred sergeant (Tom Sizemore as Sgt. Horvath), the wisecracking Brooklynite (Edward Burns as Reiben), the “Sgt. York”-style godly Southern sharpshooter (Barry Pepper as Pvt. Jackson), the feisty Jewish guy (Adam Goldberg as Pvt. Mellish), the salty Italian-American (Vin Diesel as Caparzo), the dedicated medic (Giovanni Ribini as Wade) and the sensitive writer and outsider (Jeremy Davies as Cpl. Upham). The movie and the actors — especially Hanks, Burns, Sizemore and Davies — transform and transcend these types, give them blood, flesh and grit. So does Spielberg’s harrowing vision of the war itself.
So jolting and shocking is “Saving Private Ryan’s” first big battle scene — an amazing half-hour re-creation of the D-Day landing on Omaha Beach, June 16, 1944, as seen through the eyes of Miller and his company — that the entire movie afterward seems haunted by it. In charged moments that recall the opening of Norman Mailer’s WWII novel “The Naked and the Dead,” Spielberg shows the apprehensive men in the landing boats as they descend on the beach. Then, on the beach, they crawl through hell itself, beneath a storm of machine gun and rocket fire, an inferno more appalling because it is so believable.
In that scene, bodies fall, spurting blood. Bullets crack and zing ominously. Men writhe and die under a gray sky, as if in some avalanche of death. Brilliantly shot with a hand-held camera and overexposed film stock — the camera frames jiggling in eerie imitation of actual WWII documentary battle footage — this sequence, like the movie’s final battle scene, is an amazing technical achievement. It’s a shock wave of terror, a battle scene of such overwhelming, lacerating realism that, as I watched it, I was convinced that D-Day, at least visually, must have been just like this.
Hanks has been repeatedly called the movie industry’s new Jimmy Stewart, and while the comparison is too facile, you can see the links in his deeply empathetic portrayal of Capt. Miller. Miller, the teacher-turned-soldier, is exactly the kind of character — tough, self-enclosed, slightly embittered and obsessive, and also secretly vulnerable — that Stewart began to play in the ’50s, in his string of westerns for director Anthony Mann. Like Stewart — one of the few Hollywood stars-turned-WWII soldiers who was a genuine military hero — Hanks isn’t afraid to show his vulnerability on screen. Beneath his stoic, cynical mask, Miller weeps, and his hand, as if in revolt, is seized regularly with shakes and tremors.
That vulnerability extends to the movie itself. “Saving Private Ryan,” a film that catches WWII’s terrors with a technology and freedom of language mostly unavailable to directors before the Vietnam era, may be the most physically exciting movie Spielberg has ever made. But, while it’s a violent movie, it’s also a tender one. (The character he most identifies with here, he says, is Cpl. Upham, the writer-artist-coward.)
Triumphantly, in this film, Spielberg turns that luminous camera eye on the century’s worst and longest days, its most just but painful world conflict. From Lewis Milestone’s infernal battlefields in “All Quiet on the Western Front” to Oliver Stone’s hallucinatory killing ground in “Platoon,” the great Hollywood battle films have told us repeatedly that war is hell. “Saving Private Ryan,” more than any other, is the one that shows it.
”SAVING PRIVATE RYAN”
(star) (star) (star) (star)
Directed by Steven Spielberg; written by Robert Rodat (and, uncredited, Scott Frank and Frank Darabont); photographed by Janusz Kaminski; edited by Michael Kahn; production designed by Tom Sanders; music by John Williams; produced by Mark Gordon, Gary Levinsohn. A Dreamworks Pictures/Paramount Pictures release; opens Friday. Running time: 2:48. MPAA rating: R (language, violence).
THE CAST
Capt. Miller ……….. Tom Hanks
Sgt. Horvath ……….. Tom Sizemore
Pvt. Reiben ………… Edward Burns
Pvt. James Ryan …….. Matt Damon
Pvt. Jackson ……….. Barry Pepper
Pvt. Mellish ……….. Adam Goldberg
