A Bloody Crowd

...a rebellious, tough talking Brooklynite named Reiben (Edward Burns...

...Thus it is images, rather than ideas, that linger in the mind...

...he tells a hopelessly jejune and protracted anecdote about how he and his brothers accidentally set the family barn on fire...

...The details of the story are overwhelmed not only by the strength of the visuals, but also by maudlin scenes at the start and end of the film, including a translucent waving American flag...

...and a born-again Southern sniper (Barry Pepper), who calls on the Lord each time he aims his gun...

...In place of the ideology of the 1940s films, the director and his collaborators have substituted disgruntlement with an apparently insignificant assignment...

...Spielberg's greatest—and most lucrative—talent is his ability to bring audiences to the perimeter of what they are willing to tolerate, and no further...

...By focusing on the chaos, speed and carnage of battle, by defining character and situation as vaguely and universally as possible, he has attempted to fashion a work that is relevant to all wars...

...On the beach at the beginning, the Allies are the larger force, cut down by just a few men sitting behind well-placed pieces of weaponry...

...Ryan himself turns out to be a naïve Iowa farm boy...

...I've seen Saving Private Ryan twice and I still don't understand why General Marshall's obsession with a letter of condolence that Abraham Lincoln wrote to a mother during the Civil War justifies a mission that will, as Marshall's subordinates argue, itself almost certainly result in casualties...

...We also encounter Corporal Upham (Jeremy Davies), a cringing pointy-headed translator who has not fired a gun since basic training...

...Because the camera keeps us consistently within the melee, it doesn't sweep "artistically" over circles of mangled bodies laid out symmetrically on the landscape...

...Although some scenes are photographed with a lushness that recalls the work of David Lean, the violence is never estheticized...

...In an early sequence, set on a Normandy beach, and at the climax, on a bridge in the French town of Remel, scores of men are maimed and killed with terrifying swiftness...

...By contrast, Saving Private Ryan was the blockbuster hit of this summer...

...They make the rest of the slaughter seem mild by comparison...

...The major battle scenes are mirror images of one another...

...The film deviates most radically from other World War II movies in its complete dismissal of patriotism...

...In the episodic progress of the story, Miller and his men fall into a number of situations that each somehow mirror their search...

...We feel as if we are documentary cameramen landing with the troops...

...Yet as we move through the 25-minute invasion scene, these self-consciously subjective techniques diminish our sense of verisimilitude...

...RUNNING almost three hours, the movie frequently stops the action and shifts to similarly banal foreground speeches...

...With Schindler's List, Spielberg hoped to draw an analogy between the Holocaust and the oppression and genocide that persist all over the world...

...And even these astonishingly designed sequences contain little visual anodynes...

...Rodat builds his script around a single achievable goal...

...Nuances, too, are repeated again and again and again...

...The water in the English Channel runs red with blood...

...Thankfully, there are no smirkingly confident musclebound heroes mowing down enemy hordes...

...men, riddled with holes, writhe helplessly...

...When General George Marshall (Harve Presnell) hears that the three brothers of paratrooper James Ryan (Matt Damon) have been killed in combat, he orders Miller and a handpickedunitto locate the private, who has been separated from his command and lost somewhere behind enemy lines...

...The vivid attention to the faces and bodies of the combatants screams out that the violence we are witnessing is monstrously real...

...Our first experience of this effect, as the amphibious tubs take the soldiers to the beach, is exhilarating...

...The special unit's members, who must collectively cope with having been asked to risk their lives to console someone else's mother, individually possess personality traits that are so stereotyped they seem to have dropped in from a John Wayne epic...

...When Spielberg wants us to feel Miller's temporary loss of hearing, he removes ambient sound and blurs the picture more than usual...

...This is the first Spielberg movie to kill off heroic characters, but their deaths are not choreographed as lugubrious, epic tragedies...

...By populating their work not with characters but with abstractions who follow the empty logic of the scenarists, Rodat and Spielberg, with a single exception, have created figures whose deaths are easy to mourn...

...Miller is so busy moving his endangered troops up the beach that he has no time to take notice...

...In depicting combat on D-Day and during the following week, instead of focusing on the panorama of Allied troops massed for victory in World War II, Spielberg has us experience battle through the participants' sufferings...

...They were able to stomach it because Spielberg carefully protects us from excessive disgust or trauma...

...How many times do we have to watch Miller's hand shake unaccountably, or witness Upham cringe during a firefight...

...At the Remel bridge, Miller, the remains of his unit and a small band of paratroopers lie in ambush for a parade of German soldiers and tanks...

...They are all the more terrible for being abrupt and somber...

...The beach scenes contribute nothing to the narrative of the movie, but they are sufficiently horrific to steel us for what is to come...

...At other points, German bullets punch into the skulls of soldier after soldier...

...their symmetry is the most subtle aspect of the film...

...And despite composer John Williams' efforts to telegraph emotion with mournful horns and strings, the chief sounds we hear during combat are the screaming of the men and the sickening noise of cannon and machine gun fire...

...They are photographed with a dizzyingly busy hand-held camera, cranked at what appears to be a slightly faster speed than the conventional 24 frames per second...

...Everybody who views these grisly encounters will probably be haunted by a particular shot...

...In the ensuing skirmish, the Americans do as much damage to the enemy troops as was done to the invading Americans...

...Previous war films have contained more graphic sequences, but Spielberg, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski and the visual effects team at Industrial Light and Magic increase the horror of what they show by avoiding many of the visual conventions that make such spectacles palatable...

...Like the best films about the Holocaust, though, the great war movies avoid the hackneyed, embrace specificity, create idiosyncratic characters who are both intellectually and emotionally compelling, honor the uniqueness of their historical moment, and avoid cheap sentimentality and cathartic closure...

...I was struck most by the image of bullets digging into a soldier sitting near Captain Miller (Tom Hanks...

...In addition, grandstanding characters assert positions that make no dramatic sense...

...Nor can I fathom why Reiben's desire to desert is quashed by Miller's long monologue about his past life and his love for his wife...

...Gripping as Saving Private Ryan is, though, it also seems calculated to loosen its hold once the closing credits roll...

...All around, artillery shells explode in huge bursts of gut and sinew...

...Yet Spielberg wants to redeem them, to make us believe that while war may bring out the least attractive side of people, it can also transform them into heroes...

...Miller turning on Ryan toward the end and asserting cantankerously that he's known many squirts just like him—and the considerable talents of the actors...

...He makes a cheap effort at the very beginning and the conclusion to yank at our heartstrings, but he principally impresses us by concentrating on physical wounds...

...As for the plot, screenwriter Robert Rodat has created a traditional quest narrative that tosses out a stream of consolingly familiar clichés...

...He is backed by burly, loyal Sergeant Horvath (Tom Sizemore), who keeps the men in line by barking the Captain's orders at them...

...Miller's company reflects the spirit of the '90s, reserving their deepest fury for the forces in Washington that control their destiny...

...Interestingly, they appear most human when we see them at their worst, refusing to obey commands, or angrily killing surrendering troops...

...Cinéastes, popular audiences, veterans, and children developing new respect for their grandfathers saw it again and again, and brought their friends...

...He dwells almost obsessively, as he did in Schindler's List, on shooting people in the head...

...Miller is a brooding, secretive, flawed, but ultimately noble commander...

...The choices he made in Saving Private Ryan reflect corresponding impulses...

...Influenced by the cynicism of Vietnam movies, Spielberg has the soldiers voice affection for one another, but they do not say a word about the necessity of preventing the Nazi conquest of Europe or protecting the free world...

...a cynical, surly Jew (Adam Goldberg...

...When the circumstances demand it, they are willing to martyr themselves for the sake of their comrades-in-arms...

...Later, disembodied limbs decorate the stones of Remel bridge...

...Such works resonate so deeply that they are hard to see again without mustering up a good deal of fortitude...

...For all the shock and potency of its imagery, Saving Private Ryan plays it safe...

...No one who sees Saving Private Ryan will want to fight in a war...

...one of these sudden cripples, devoured by agony, cries out pathetically for his mother...

...Saving Private Ryan thus manages to be both antiwar and promilitary...

...The first strikes him in the forehead, and as his helmet sinks over his face subsequent gunfire transforms him, in seconds, into an unrecognizable, bloody thing...

...Genuinely disturbing war films like All Quiet on the Western Front, The Deer Hunter and Full Metal Jacket emphasize the chronic psychological agonies of war...

...That we care about any of them is a tribute to a few genuinely marvelous touches—Horvath collecting sand on the beach as a souvenir...

...But the jittery camera movement and awkward film speed, not to mention the inconsistency of the light from shot to shot and the splashes of water and blood that occasionally fly into the lens, remind us that after all we are only watching a movie...