ALL GUTS, NO GLORY

...Why should they be called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice to make George Marshall feel better...

...What makes a war story work is the interaction of world-historical events with characters—real, identifiable characters who feel and act and conduct themselves as you or I would...

...We just watch them die, and if their guts weren’t hanging out, we wouldn’t respond at all...

...In service of this profoundly original idea, which no one has had the courage or wisdom to express before, he has given birth to Saving Private Ryan...

...There’s a sensitive novelist, a doctor, and a gruff but lovable sarge...

...There’s already been a lot of talk about how Saving Private Ryan is the first movie to show battle in all its naked bloodiness, but that’s just hype...

...And while no movie has ever gone quite as far as Saving Private Ryan in showing what the insides of a human body look like, there’s no moment as powerful as when a terrified southerner in Gone with the Wind begs a stolid doctor not to amputate his gangrenous leg without anesthetic...

...It is at once the most powerful war movie ever made and the least meaningful...

...The duty falls to Tom Hanks, with whom we have just experienced the landing at Omaha Beach...

...It’s a seamless merger of special effects, makeup effects, sound effects, and choreography, as realistic and graphic as the scene in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park when a giant Tyrannosaurus Rex attacks a sportutility vehicle...

...Remember the blood that poured from Robert Shaw’s mouth as the shark bit him in two in Jaws...

...Spielberg takes World War II and, in the interest of paying tribute to the almost unimaginable sacrifices made by those who fought it, minimizes the war beyond recognition...

...a third is an Italian...

...But Spielberg, who has practically become a secular saint since the release of Schindler’s List, cannot bring himself to make a purely pacifist tale about World War II...

...Spielberg spent almost $20 million to stage the nightmarish D-Day assault that ended with three thousand American soldiers dead on a narrow strip of beach...

...This is the conundrum of the cinema: The people who make great popular art usually aren’t artists themselves, but somehow manage in A contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, John Podhoretz edits the editorial pages of the New York Post...

...He has, in fact, everything an artist ought to have—everything except wisdom, vision, and soul, which is to say that he isn’t really an artist...

...Nor is there much to care about in the drama that unfolds after Hanks is given the mission of finding Private Ryan...

...When Hanks’s rescue mission finally locates the missing soldier, Private Ryan bravely refuses to abandon his post until reinforcements arrive...

...Remembering a letter Abraham Lincoln wrote to console a woman who lost five sons in battle, Marshall decides the army must do what it can to save the fourth Ryan and send him home...

...His reluctance is understandable, but his movie sinks into a morass as a result...

...another is a Jew...

...So is the twentyfive- minute fight near a small bridge in a French town with which the film ends...

...The logic of Saving Private Ryan is that of a classic anti-war novel or film, like All Quiet on the Western Front or The Good Soldier Schweik: men put in absurd danger for no good reason...

...Gone with the Wind is told from the perspective of those who waged a bloody war for the express purpose of preserving slavery and is still magnificent...

...But isn’t this why artists have been grappling with war since Homer’s time—that out of the carnage and waste and loss of war, men prove themselves capable of bravery and self-sacrifice...

...Like an inflexible preacher with a single message to convey, Spielberg will not let anything come between the audience and his assertion that War is Hell...

...What happens to them is affecting...

...He is so concerned with depicting the horror of Omaha Beach that he doesn’t allow the audience to enjoy the courage of Hanks and his men as they succeed in routing one of the German positions...

...Hundreds die on screen, but they’re just extras...

...It was hell, but it was more than hell too...

...soldiers frantically try to stuff their innards back in their nearly eviscerated bodies before dying...

...The battlefield gore in Saving Private Ryan is really just another example of Spielberg’s hunger to offer thrills and chills above all else...

...In part that’s because every character in the movie is a cipher, except George C. Marshall, who sets the plot in motion...

...War stories ask the most profound questions about human conduct under conditions of extreme stress and danger...

...Half an hour into the movie, Marshall receives word that three Iowa brothers named Ryan have all died in the same week, two on D-Day and one in the Pacific theater...

...Spielberg’s determination to avoid “gung ho” or “macho” clich?s (as he has told many interviewers) is so strong that he doesn’t know what to make of Ryan’s declaration...

...He brings along seven men, and it’s a mark of how little Spielberg and screenwriter Robert Rodat care about these individual characters that five minutes after the movie is over, you can’t remember their names...

...Is it fair that eight men should risk their lives to save a single soldier...

...He just records it as Hanks and the rest of his men stand around uncomfortably...

...Arms and heads are blown off on camera...

...Don’t their families have the right to see them home safe...

...Between the two sequences, Spielberg shows us French towns reduced to rubble and a French countryside alive with menace...

...Now, there’s no shame in getting the message wrong in a drama of war...

...The moral dilemma posed by the movie has to do with carrying out orders...

...Only instead of depicting a confrontation between actors and an animal that doesn’t exist, Spielberg is using his craftsmanship to bring home to audiences deadened by years of graphic violence what it might have been like to be under assault from machine-gun fire...

...He has a thirty- five-year record of taking obnoxious joy in trying to gross out audiences with special effects...

...collaboration to fashion works that can stay with you for a lifetime...

...In fact, he helped bring viscera, once relegated to drive-in fare with titles like The Wizard of Gore, to the big-budget Hollywood movie...

...Just as he supervised the construction of a “Back to the Future” ride at Universal Studios, so Saving Private Ryan is his version of a World War II ride...

...A fourth Ryan brother, a paratrooper, is missing somewhere in France...

...Or the heart that was pulled straight out of a man’s chest in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom...

...Spielberg has no idea what to make of what he is showing us and wants to make us believe that complexity and confusion are the same thing...

...There’s no single shot in this sequence to compare with the image of thousands of dead and dying Southern soldiers lying on the Atlanta railroad tracks in Gone with the Wind...

...The same is true in Saving Private Ryan...

...The movie ends with Hanks’s brigade pulling off another triumph— but if their last stand had led to a defeat, the moment could not have been depicted any more somberly...

...The Omaha Beach sequence is extraordinary in every sense of the term...

...Spielberg’s inability to grasp these ideas, which aren’t all that complicated, shows his limitations not only as an artist but as an adult...

...Indeed, the word “heroism” was once solely associated with war...

...There has never been anyone like Spielberg, really: He is a movie director the way you are a person who breathes, and he seems to have coursing through his blood the distilled experience and skill of a century of directors before him...

...Spielberg certainly does capture the causes for that fear—not only the incessant pinging of bullets and the chaotic mix of explosions and screams, but the agonies of the wounded and dying...

...One guy has a Brooklyn accent...

...Tolstoy’s War and Peace is built on a patently absurd theory of the meaninglessness of individual humans in battle and manages nonetheless to be the greatest of war novels...

...Robert Capa, the great World War II photographer who was there on Omaha Beach, spoke of “a new kind of fear shaking my body from toe to hair, and twisting my face...

...World War II was a just war—the just war to end all just wars...

...Saving Private Ryan isn’t one of those works...

...Saving Private Ryan isn’t a tragic story of loss, a noble story of heroism, or an ironic story about insignificant men trapped in a struggle beyond their comprehension...

...The twenty-five-minute depiction of the horrific battle to take Omaha Beach that opens the film is staggering in its intensity...

...Omaha Beach was a site of tragedy and triumph, and it was the triumph that gave meaning to the tragedy...

...That even in the noblest of causes, men behave barbarically— and that even in barbaric causes, like the southern side of the Civil War, men behave heroically...

...But there’s nothing to these men but banter, anger, and sullenness...

...If their director can’t figure out whether Ryan is noble or foolhardy, how can the actors...

...The grave weakness of the otherwise superb Schindler’s List was that Spielberg and screenwriter Steven Zaillian never bothered to give names or faces or identities to the Jews we saw walking into the gas chambers...

...The craftsmanship is awesome...

...Using all the cinematic magic at his command—which is almost unlimited, given that he is the most financially successful entertainer in the history of the Earth and actually owns the movie studio that financed Saving Private Ryan—Spielberg has recreated the D-Day landing and the week following the Allied invasion of Europe in World War II...

...And Marshall seems like a real person only because he was a real person...

...How can you fail to be affected by the sight of a soldier cradled in his buddies’ arms as the life seeps out of him...

...We like the captain, but that’s only because he is played by Tom Hanks, the most likable actor alive...

...And when it comes to the use of gore on screen, Spielberg’s motives are suspect in any case...

...It tries to be all of these things, and it ends up being none of them...

...So does Saving Private Ryan, but it offers no coherent answers...