Movie Review: 'Saving Private Ryan'
“There’s a graveyard in northern
France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach
from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a
forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly
straight, so after all it wasn’t a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to
do with nature, unless you count human nature.” — Barbara Kingsolver
If 1993's Schindler's
List was director Steven Spielberg's soul-searching and ultimately
redemptive examination of why we fought the war, then 1998's Saving Private Ryan is the emotional
bookend that depicts the sacrifices made by citizen-soldiers who put their
lives on hold -- and often lost them -- to save the world from becoming a
charnel-house ruled by Adolf Hitler and his Axis partners. It is a powerful and graphic film that has, in retrospect, reawakened our nation's
interest in World War II and made us realize, however belatedly, how much we
owe to the men and women of the rapidly dwindling "Greatest
Generation."
Gen. George C. Marshall:
That boy is alive. We are gonna send somebody to find him. And we are gonna get
him the Hell... outta there.
Saving Private Ryan begins
with a deceptively calm opening: a shot of a seemingly faded -- it's really
only backlit by a very bright sun -- and fluttering Old Glory, waving in a
stiff sea breeze blowing across the American Military Cemetery overlooking
Omaha Beach in Normandy, France.
We then see an old
ex-GI, his wife and grown children in tow, stopping in front of a grave marked
by one of the nearly 9,000 white crosses and Stars of David, one for every
soldier who died during the Normandy campaign in 1944. The old man, an
ex-paratrooper from the 101st Airborne Division, collapses with grief in front
of the still unidentified soldier's grave and Spielberg focuses on his face and
especially the eyes, blue eyes that seem to be looking past the crosses and not
seeing the concerned expressions of his family.
It will be the last moment of relative peace for the movie
watcher, for Spielberg uses the focusing-on-the-eyes as a transition from the
old vet's eyes in the 1990s to those of Capt. John Miller (Tom Hanks) as the
Higgins boat carrying a platoon of Army Rangers approaches one of the sectors
of Omaha Beach. The men, some of them veterans of previous landings like Miller
and Sergeant Mike Horvath (Tom Sizemore) but mostly green and untested in
combat, are seasick and tense. Some pray, others get violently sick, but all of
them just want to get off those landing craft and onto the beaches.
But as soon as the Higgins landing crafts’ ramps drop down
and the Rangers try to step into the seemingly shallow water, all hell breaks
loose as the Germans open fire with everything they have.
What follows is the most intense and realistic cinematic
depiction of the D-Day invasion, certainly far more violent and bloody than Saving Private Ryan's closest cinematic
cousin, Darryl Zanuck's The Longest Day.
Although that 1962 classic is an earnest attempt to portray
the Normandy invasion truthfully, it doesn't show such vignettes as the
"lucky bastard" whose helmet saves him from getting killed, only to
have his brains blown out when he takes it off to examine the bullet holes…the
soldier who drowns when he gets snagged in an underwater obstacle….the Higgins
boat that catches fire when a GI's flamethrower is hit by a German bullet and
sets the contents off in a spectacular fireball…and the brief but horrifying
glimpse of a one-armed 29th Division soldier wandering on the beach and picking
up his severed arm.
The first harrowing 20 minutes center on the Rangers'
attempt to get off the beach and destroy a German pillbox. Here Spielberg shows
us how the junior officers and NCOs (represented by Miller and Horvath) rallied
the confused and intermingled soldiers of the first wave and led the way inland
to take the war to the Germans. Using the various techniques learned over time
in North Africa and the Mediterranean, the veteran captain and first sergeant
get their makeshift company of Rangers and soldiers from other units past the
seawall, up a bluff, and into the pillbox itself.
Spielberg also uses this sequence to introduce us to a few
of the eight men who will be sent on a daring rescue mission, including
Carpazzo (Vin Diesel), Reiben (Edward Burns), Jackson (Barry Pepper), and Wade
(Giovanni Ribisi).
Sergeant Horvath: I don't
know. Part of me thinks the kid's right. He asks what he's done to deserve
this. He wants to stay here, fine. Let's leave him and go home. But then
another part of me thinks, what if by some miracle we stay, then actually make
it out of here. Someday we might look back on this and decide that saving
Private Ryan was the one decent thing we were able to pull out of this whole
godawful, shitty mess. Like you said, Captain, maybe we do that, we all earn
the right to go home.
Saving Private Ryan's
main storyline begins with a wide shot of the invasion beaches that gradually
narrows to a close-up shot of a single dead GI lying on the surf line, with
RYAN, S. stenciled on his backpack. Immediately we go from the beaches of
Normandy to the somber and almost grave-like quiet of the War Department in
Washington, DC.
As overlapping voiceovers read excerpts of letters from
commanding officers to newly bereaved relatives and spouses of dead soldiers,
one secretary gets one letter, then another, then a third…examines them, then
rushes to her military supervisor, who takes them to his own superior, and then
finally to Gen. George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff (Harve Presnell). The
reason: an Iowa woman is about to receive three telegrams informing her that
three of her four sons -- all of whom are in the Army -- have been killed. Two
were killed on different beaches at Normandy, the other in New Guinea. The
fourth son, Private James Ryan of the 101st Airborne, is somewhere in France, his
status unknown.
In spite of opposition from one colonel (Dale Dye, the
military advisor who trained the cast for the combat scenes), Marshall makes a
decision. "We are going to send someone to find him," he declares
firmly, "and get him the hell out of there."
Of course, this means Capt. Miller and a select squad has to
be diverted from their assignments to find and save Private Ryan, and not
everyone is happy about it. Horvath is shocked ("They took your company
away?" he asks his CO), Reiben, the cynic BAR man from Brooklyn is bitter
("Would someone explain the math of this to me? What's the sense of
risking the eight of us to save one man?"), but orders are orders, and
plucking a company clerk, Timothy Upham (Jeremy Davies, last seen playing
Charles Manson in CBS' remake of Helter Skelter) to replace their now-dead
translator, off go Capt. Miller and his small "band of brothers" to
find James Francis Ryan (Matt Damon) and get him back to his mother.
My Take:
Captain Miller: I'm a
schoolteacher. I teach English composition... in this little town called Adley,
Pennsylvania. The last eleven years, I've been at Thomas Alva Edison High
School. I was a coach of the baseball team in the springtime. Back home, I tell
people what I do for a living and they think well, now that figures. But over
here, it's a big, a big mystery. So, I guess I've changed some. Sometimes I
wonder if I've changed so much my wife is even going to recognize me, whenever
it is that I get back to her. And how I'll ever be able to tell her about days
like today. Ah, Ryan. I don't know anything about Ryan. I don't care. The man
means nothing to me. It's just a name. But if... You know if going to Rumelle
and finding him so that he can go home. If that earns me the right to get back
to my wife, then that's my mission.
[to Private Reiben]
Captain Miller: You want
to leave? You want to go off and fight the war? All right. All right. I won't
stop you. I'll even put in the paperwork. I just know that every man I kill the
farther away from home I feel.
For as long as I can remember, I've had a deep and abiding
fascination -- almost an obsession, really -- with World War II. Even as a kid
at the peak of the antiwar movement during the Vietnam War (which I was much
too young to understand), I'd plop down in front of the TV and watch such fare
as The Sands of Iwo Jima, The Halls of
Montezuma, and just about any war movie aired by the then-indy television
station WCIX (Channel 6) in Miami. I still remember that I convinced my mother
to let me stay up way after my 10 o'clock bedtime to watch The Longest Day on the CBS Late, Late Movie in the pre-David
Letterman 1970s, and I distinctly remember spurning Star Wars to go see Richard
Attenborough's 1977 flop, A Bridge Too Far…twice.
Steven Spielberg, too, has had a similar obsession with
World War II. His father Arnold was a radio operator-gunner on a B-25 in the
China-Burma-India Theater of Operations during the war, and young Steven grew
up listening to his dad's stories about the war and watching some of the same
movies I'd watch 20 years later as a kid. Among some of his early boyhood
movies, the future Oscar-winning director filmed two "war epics"
called Fighter Squadron and Escape to Nowhere. Later, World War II
would surface in more than half of his feature films, either peripherally (as
in the Indiana Jones Trilogy and Catch Me if You Can) or directly (1941, Empire of the Sun, Schindler's List, and
Saving Private Ryan).
Although I don't share most critics' opinion that Spielberg
had not done any "grown-up" films until Schindler's List and Saving
Private Ryan were released (as if The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun
had never been made!), I do think they are his true masterpieces. Yes, certain
Spielbergian touches are present in both films -- he always has a scene involving
children, and he is always technically adept, using film in ways no other
director had before. Yet, he never seems remote and cold, as Kubrick sometimes
was, and he never falls prey to the temptation to show his GIs as paragons of
virtue.
Indeed, some Americans are shown to be prone to cold-blooded
vengeance. After the pillbox is assaulted and two Czech inductees in the German army attempt to surrender, an American private shoots them, then when his buddy asks "What
did he say?" the shooter smiles and says, "Look Ma, I washed for
supper!"
They are not always brave, either; in the climactic battle for
the bridge at Ramelle, Upham freezes in the stairway of a house where one of
his squadmates has just been killed, letting the contemptuous SS soldier pass
him by.
Still, Saving Private Ryan still stands as one of the best and most moving films about American soldiers in World War II. It is a testament to the strengths and weaknesses of the young men who helped defeat Hitler's evil regime, as well as a reminder that freedom is never free.
Blu-ray Specifications (Paramount Sapphire Collection,
2010)
Special Features
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- Codec: MPEG-4 AVC (27.52 Mbps)
- Resolution: 1080p
- Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
- Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Audio
- English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
- French: Dolby Digital 5.1
- Portuguese: Dolby Digital 5.1
- Spanish: Dolby Digital 5.1
Subtitles
- English, English SDH, French, Portuguese, Spanish
Discs
- Blu-ray Disc
- Two-disc set (2 BD-50)
Packaging
- Slipcover in original pressing
- Embossed print
Playback
Region free
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