Saving Private Ryan
Alleva, Richard
f you've read anything at all I about Saving Private Ryan, you've read about its violence. Yes, it is appalling. But most screen violence nowadays is appalling, and if Steven Spielberg's...
...A clump of Germans surrenders...
...And the actor who plays Marshall, Harve Presnell, makes him every inch the Zeus you want a great general to be...
...And if Ryan, unable to digest the shock of his brothers' deaths, selects not to go home but to stay with his company at a bridge that a German panzer unit must not be allowed to cross, so be it...
...He turns to his spouse: "Tell me I've led a good life...
...But, as the knife sinks slowly into the dying American, pity and horror grip the viewer and that instant of black comedy evaporates, leaving not the slightest suggestion of sadism to curdle the viewer's reaction...
...While the characteristics of the others are revealed at once, Miller, an unalterably private man, remains fairly opaque throughout the movie, sharing just a glimpse of his civilian past with his men, and even then only as a maneuver to distract them during a particularly explosive situation...
...at once a bullet pings right through the soldier's helmet and, in humane fury, the medic rips off the bandages and hurls them away, probably feeling that he would like to hurl them in the face of God...
...What kind of life should any of us be leading in view of the sacrifices made by our fathers and grandfathers...
...What drama can possibly unfold in such a meaningless world...
...Haven't hundreds of movies from The Big Parade to Platoon all told us the same thing by administering large or small doses of fabricated battlefield horror...
...It almost physically assaults the viewer for much of its length, yet its conclusion doesn't leave you spiritually jangled or raddled...
...Throughout the film, Jamusz Kaminski's photography certifies and amplifies everything Spielberg struggles to achieve...
...By the time the patrol locates Private Ryan, his continued survival has become not just an assignment to them but a gauntlet flung in the face of chaos...
...This quivering is war itself, coursing through his body and destroying him from within...
...If the rest of him were to commence shaking, he would soon be a useless wreck...
...Amazingly, the bluff pretty much works and gives Miller breathing space enough to recover his wits in tight situations...
...The graphically portrayed suffering we have just witnessed forbids any quick answers but injects the question right into your soul...
...There is the Tough Sergeant, the Wise Guy Malcontent (last done by Denzel Washington in Glory), the Four-Eyed Intellectual, the Hillbilly Sharpshooter now bagging Germans instead of possums...
...Since he's a man constitutionally less able to bear the horrors of combat than anybody else in his patrol (except for his translator, an intellectual radically out of place), and yet is expected to show the most fortitude, he must maintain an unfissured faqade of stoicism...
...But it is also an index of his humanity...
...What could Spielberg do except spend a few million more, ratchet up the special effects, set off a bigger bang...
...Why should they risk their lives for one man when so many have died on the beaches...
...Finally, the nests of German gunners are taken out and the Allied troops can move forward...
...The character of Miller works on a higher level because scenarist and director have employed a more daring strategy in creating him...
...After frenzied effort, a medic stops a soldier's bleeding...
...But there was something more for him to do and he has done it...
...Spielberg must have realized that no single method of filmmaking could encompass such horror...
...He remains a civilized human being at war...
...They will stay with him...
...Captain Miller, good soldier that he is, presses on but we feel what he feels: consequence is leaking out of the universe...
...The audience knows the charity and essential sanity of the quest, for we have seen the moment when Marshall makes his decision not on impulse or for the sake of public relations but out of deeply founded compassion...
...Nearby, a bullet bounces harmlessly off another helmet and its owner takes it off to stare at it in dumbfounded gratitude...
...A mission Miller is assigned to lead, the search for a Private Ryan whose three brothers have all been killed, has been initiated by General George C. Marshall for the sake of Ryan's mother...
...Though much of the battle is viewed from inside the captain's head, Spielberg often shifts to other parts of the battlefield, even to the viewpoint of the enemy, so that we can understand why the American troops are trapped in a particular area and can't move...
...Miller keeps marching, searching, commanding, killing, sparing, rescuing, trembling...
...Saving Private Ryan is a great movie, but I don't necessarily recommend it to you because I don't know who you are...
...He is also the one hilly realized, threedimensional character in the film, for let it be admitted that most of the others seem based on the types usually found sharing patrols in Hollywood war pictures...
...After a while, one begins to feel dread each time the camera singles out a young man's face because, in this sequence, a close-up is a harbinger of death...
...Kaminski often deliberately lowers the audience's expectation of natural beauty by desaturating colors...
...The rest of the movie is the answer...
...This film might inaugurate a universal Yom Kippur...
...But after such horror, what follows...
...He shot some of it in documentary fashion with nervously jiggling cameras, but other moments are captured in fluid slow motion with the sound switched off so that Miller seems to be bogged down in a nightmare from which he can't awake...
...And Michael Kahn's virtuosic editing holds it all together...
...some are drowned, some are stilled by bullets whizzing through water as ineluctably as through air...
...Spielberg's skills are at their zenith here--not just his oft-celebrated talent as an action director (the panzer tanks project the same thudding menace as Jurassic dinosaurs), but also his less remarked-upon ability to control tone and to modulate from one emotional key to another...
...Nothing seems to work...
...His men see it and, in embarrassment and dread, avoid mentioning it...
...Another pair surrenders, both are killed, their murderers crack moronic jokes over the bodies...
...In vain does A try to give birth to B. Disembarking soldiers are dragged under water by the very gear that is supposed to empower them...
...But what kind of life must one lead to deserve such a sacrifice...
...But back in Normandy, Miller and Commonweal 2 9 September 11, 1998 the other men on the patrol, desperate for a bit of respite, can't see the mission as anything but nonsense...
...But all these are so superbly acted and supplied with such lively dialogue by Robert Rodat that I wasn't aware of the schematicism until I saw this movie a second time...
...A creative life...
...He wants to be worthy of the sacrifice of the dead...
...Even compassion brings on absurdity, as in the scene in which a soldier's pity for a French family in a bombed-out building nearly gets a little girl killed while Miller's apparent indifference saves her...
...W.H...
...In the opening sequence of the Normandy landing, from the point of view of the protagonist, Captain John Miller, we see and hear not just the obliteration of hundreds of lives, not just the tearing of flesh and eruption of fluids, the screams of pain and whimpering for mother, the unleashing of sadism by expediency and the abrasion of dignity by squalor, but an awfulness above and beyond the isolated horrors: the evaporation of meaning within the furnace of war...
...Yet a palsy has taken hold of the captain's right hand and won't go away...
...Auden said they should be reserved for "high holidays of the spirit...
...But most screen violence nowadays is appalling, and if Steven Spielberg's depiction of the carnage of Omaha Beach and of subsequent battles and skLrmishes during the week following D-Day offered nothing more than shock through verisimilitude, there would be little reason to discuss it...
...A still won't give birth to B. But mankind cannot bear very much absurdity...
...In fact, Miller would be completely mysterious if it weren't for the effortless way Tom Hanks draws us close to him and siphons his thoughts and feelings to us...
...These dogfaces have become grungy Sisyphuses...
...On the beach, a soldier walks around looking for his severed arm, finds it, picks, it up, wanders off...
...Masterpieces aren't for everyone, nor are they right for all seasons and moods...
...But if the hand were to stop shaking, he would be a true creature of war, that is, a monster...
...Furthermore, we have also been present when Ryan's mother receives the news of her family's near-total destruction, so we want her to have her only remaining hope fulfilled...
...A merely peaceful one...
...A spectacularly virtuous one...
...This alternation of simulated cinema veritd with grisly lyricism, subjectivity with omniscience, captures the diapason of horror...
...Before the fade-out, an old man, fifty years after Normandy, contemplates the graves of the men who fought beside him and on his behalf...
...For that is what this great performance is--a series of stifled outbursts within a man who cannot afford to feel too much...
...One example: In the scene in which two soldiers, German and American, battle each other for control of a knife (the only weapon at hand), the fury of the hand-to-hand combat gives way for just a few seconds of queasy black comedy as the German, trying to distract his opponent, starts babbling to him in German...
...Commonweal 3 0 September 11, 1998...
...And the patrol itself seems to lead them deeper into absurdity...
...Indestructible humanity masked by indifference is the keynote of Miller's character...
...a bullet crashes into his skull...
...After all, do we really need to be told once again that war is hell...
...consequently, wherever color is momentarily allowed back onto the screen, even so banal a sight as cows grazing on greenery under an overcast morning sky leaps up to comfort the viewer just as it may comfort the emotionally battered soldiers...
...Hanks brings all sorts of emotions close to the surface and then blocks them before they become too apparent...
...one is gunned down, the rest are spared...
Vol. 125 • September 1998 • No. 15
