****SPOILERS****
Saving Private Ryan starts well and ends well - the beginning and ending are so heartstopping, such great film-making, that it can be forgiven for flopping a little in the middle. In fact the film reflects the life of the soldier - moments of adrenaline-pumping excitement and drama punctuating long stretches of boredom.
The *actual* start and end I hated - the scenes in the cemetery - for the same reason I didn't like the end of Schindler's List: they weren't *necessary*. The story in both cases is over: there is no need for a coda. At least in Schindler there was some point, some historical interest, in seeing the actual people involved in the movie's story. In Private Ryan the start isn't necessary - we don't need anything to lead us into the story. To begin it in the cold English Channel, the waves slapping off the boats, would have been more effective; and it would have been much more effective just to end it with the defense of the bridge. Instead we get the tacky closing scene with Harrison Young, playing the old Ryan, squeezing out a few tears and moaning "am I a good man?" to his adoring family. I would far rather have been left wondering about Ryan, whether he had survived the no doubt hazardous trip back to the US, what the rest of his life turned out like, whether he was worth saving. And of course, Spielberg has to show us Ryan with a happy family, surrounded by grandchildren - see? it's okay, children, Captain Miller and all those nice men didn't die in vain. No chance that Ryan was a sociopath, or a drug pusher, or anything nasty. No chance that he ended up unmarried or childless.
That rant out of the way, the real start of the film, the apocalyptic beach landing, is really beyond description. It has to be seen in the cinema. Beautifully made, the low camera angle reinforcing the feeling of helplessness, the choppy, documentary style emphasizing that this really happened, it is almost impossible to watch and yet impossible to look away from. Bullets hiss through the water, skip off the waves, drill through flesh with a soft dull sound: weighted by their packs, the men drown before they can even reach the beaches, or get torn apart in the water by machine guns. Once on the beach it's a long, long way to the slight cover provided by the dunes, and before long the sand is saturated with blood. We ca'n't see the enemy - we catch an occasional glimpse of a helmet behind the machine-gun emplacements, and the facelessness of those causing such devastation is terrifying, reinforces the inhumanity of what's happening. The camera work here is amazing, as is the sound editing, and the experience is totally immersive. It's so hard to sit and watch in the cinema - it is impossible for us to imagine what it was like really to undergo that horror, how *ordinary people* managed to do it. It is one thing for professional soldiers to face such scenes, quite another for ordinary plebs like you and me. Imagine yourself on that beach, and then realize how lucky you are that you are just imagining.
The plot of the film, based on a true story, is simple. Private James Ryan, a paratrooper, has been dropped somewhere in occupied France. His three brothers, serving on various fronts, are killed, and their parents receive the telegrams announcing their deaths on the same day. Largely as a PR exercise, the US Army Chief of Staff, George Marshall, decides to send a small patrol to locate Private Ryan and send him home. Captain Miller (Tom Hanks), a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown, leads the patrol, and it has the usual war-movie complement of the useless, terrified one, Corporal Upham (Jeremy Davies), who is an army translator/typist; an aggressive, cynical "what are we all doing here anyway" one, (Ed Burns) ; a medic (Giovanni Ribisi) ; the strong silent one, Miller's sergeant (Tom Sizemore), and so forth. Tom Hanks turns in a strong performance as Miller, which I felt was much more Oscar-worthy than Philadelphia or the ghastly Forrest Gump. Miller is a reticent man, reluctant to divulge much about himself - the men have a pool going, betting on what he does for a living back in the States. The scene where he reveals this is pivotal, but unemphatic. There is another scene where he is talking about his favourite memory of his wife, out in their garden: when asked to describe it, he shakes his head and says "no, that one I save just for me". In a tackier movie we would have been given a lush, tearjerking description - instead Miller is kept consistent and believable throughout. He is a quintessentially American character, and Tom Hanks, perfect for the role, gives a restrained, reserved, yet somehow very American performance.
As the soldiers make their way through newly-liberated France, unsure when they will run into German troops, we are shown both the absurdity of war - a glider crashes, killing all on board, because of special armour-plating to protect a general's ass - and its chaos. No-one knows where Ryan is, or what he looks like - as Miller puts it, it's like "looking for a needle in a stack of needles". Slowly but surely, the patrol's numbers drop - picked off by snipers, killed in an attack on a German gun-emplacement - and the resentment simmering in them at their mission begins to boil over. After the attack on the gun-emplacement there is a near-mutiny, as the men question why their lives are thrown away for this guy Ryan. What makes one life more valuable than another? These men have already risked so much, coming to fight in Europe, managing against the odds to survive the carnage on the beaches, and now they are asked to give up their lives so that Ryan can get his ticket home. This is the central question of the movie - when is one human life worth more than another? - and Spielberg does not attempt to answer it. It is a question that can have no answer.
The supporting actors are very strong, particularly Ed Burns and Tom Sizemore; Matt Damon jarred, seemed somehow too modern for his character, but this could be the dislike I had of the character rubbing off on the actor. Unlike the patrol, he has not been through the crucible of Omaha Beach - he cannot understand their weariness, and his gung-ho attitude makes it seem as though he is fighting a different war. For the audience, who has seen what the patrol has gone through to reach him, his insistence on staying with his buddies is infuriating. Jeremy Davies is terrific as the useless Upham - we start off identifying with him - afraid of combat, not sure what he will do under fire, horrified at what he sees happening around him - then as the film goes on we begin to want to wring his neck; by the end we want to wring his neck, chop the body up and jump up and down on the bits. I did, anyway. Probably because we still identify with him and are ashamed of what we see in him that we know is in ourselves.
The conclusion of the film, the defense of the bridge, is another beautifully-constructed sequence. Unlike the Omaha Beach sequence, this is not a choppy, confused turmoil: the defense strategy has been explained to the audience and the sequence is shot so that we can follow what we're seeing. We wait breathlessly with the patrol for the quiet rumble announcing the approaching tanks, we see every obstacle, every disaster as the plan begins to come apart in the face of superior numbers. Although help finally arrives in the form of the USAF, it comes too late for most of the patrol, including Captain Miller. When Miller is eventually hit he is stunned, dazed, and this is perfectly conveyed in the camera work - everything is lagged and out-of-focus, and very quiet - excellent film-making, spoilt only by his over-dramatic death. I ca'n't decide if it's good or bad for Miller to have seen the reinforcements arrive - whether it would be a comfort to know that they would now hold the bridge, he hadn't died for absolutely nothing, or a bitterness that if they had been ten minutes earlier or he ten minutes later - well, I suppose one of the things the film tries to convey is that in war surviving is basically a matter of luck, not of skill.
This film really has been put together superbly, with meticulous attention to detail. 60% of the colour was taken out in post-production and the result is a visual metaphor - drained, washed out, exhausted-looking, the colouring reflects the state of the characters and of the war-weary world they are caught in. The sound editing is justly Oscar-winning - the top-quality sound effects help to make the fight scenes the immersive, unforgettable experiences that they are. A good script, an outstanding cast and Spielberg's virtuoso direction make Saving Private Ryan, although flawed, one of the most powerful films about war and the human experience to have come out of Hollywood.
(c) Jennifer Mellerick 1999