A Work of Art

Rating: 10/10 (31 October 2006)

In Hollywood war film tradition, epic warfare orbits on the actions of already acquainted heroes. In Steven Spielberg's judicial and exacting masterwork, thousands of horror-struck and nauseated men, most of them green to battle, are chucked into the grimace of devastating German fire. The opening sequence is as detailed as any war footage. In the blood-soaked opening steps, the landing forces and the enemy never connect eye to eye, but are just faceless clots of men who have been commanded to shoot at one another until one side is overwhelmed.
Spielberg's camera makes no comprehension of the engagement. That is the function of his approach. For the individual soldier on the beach, the landing was a cacophony of clamor, sludge, gore, entrails and morbidity. The scene is filled with various nongermane fragments of chronology, as when a soldier has his arm blown off.
This landing sequence is essential to form the remoteness between those who give the order that Pvt. Ryan be saved, and those who are dictated to do the saving. For Capt. Miller (Tom Hanks) and his men, the landing at Omaha has been a melting pot of crossfire. For the Army Chief in his Washington office, war feels more secluded and nationalistic. His advisors doubt the judgment and even the plausibility of a mission to save Ryan. That sets up the second act of the film, in which Miller and his men infiltrate spryly inflamed French terrain, while entertaining defiant ideas about the prudence of the assignment. All of Miller's men have served with him before, save for Cpl. Upham (Jeremy Davies), the translator, who speaks excellent German and French but has never fired a rifle in rage and is frightened nearly to the point of his morality's deterioration. The war was fought by civilians just like him, whose lives had not readied them for the brass tacks of combat.
Steven Spielberg is often thought of as a throwaway name to refer to when speaking of the greatest directors of all time, mainly because his movies are often romanticized, Hollywood blockbusters and not hard, tough, cool grungy stuff. Spielberg, while he demonstrates a mastery of pace and story crescendo that should be taught in every film school in the world, proves with Saving Private Ryan, not to mention with the more recent Munich, that he is capable of true grit and shocking realism.
The story begins with the most gut-wrenchingly violent battle scene I've seen in any war film. This prolonged sequence depicts D-Day in the most realistic possible way, not only with gore and violence but also with the ambient violence that must be dealt with in moments of hasty contemplation and desperate but emotionally diluted dialogue. The film then segues into a story that applies the deeply affecting theme of the mother. What makes the film so profound is its core drawing of sympathy from the audience for the common boy's mother and the pain and worry they endure in times of war that we can only imagine.
His cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, who also shot Schindler's List, brings a newsreel texture to a lot of the footage, but that's rather elementary next to his most substantial stroke, which is to make everything manifest lucid. Following the meticulous pandemonium of the landing scenes, Kaminski handles the attack on the machine gun nest, and an extensive climax concerning the fortification of a bridge, in a way that keeps us aligned. It's not simply men shooting at one another. We learn the plan of the action, the subtle victory of optimism over despair, the spontaneity, the corresponding locations of the soldiers.
Hanks has a subtle sense of drama in his personal commitment to the role of Capt. Miller, an English teacher who has outlived ordeals so overwhelming that he doubts if his wife will even place him. With a reserved, collected, and even exacting bearing, his hands nonetheless quiver. He is on the verge of breakdown, but he does his best since that is his duty. All of the actors, all the countless noteworthy faces, playing the men under him are compelling, somewhat on account of Spielberg defying the inducement to make them stereotypical caricatures in the custom of WWII movies, and makes them emphatically everyday.
Everything approaches the third act, when Private Ryan is found, and the soldiers determine what to do next. Spielberg and his screenwriter, Robert Rodat, have done a penetrating and personally transcendent thing: They have made a philosophical film about war in effect thoroughly in circumstances of action. Their sweeping ode says things about war that are as intricate and demanding as any essayist could likely assert, and does it with expansive, forceful imagery, with brutality, with coarseness, with movement, with rapport. It is conceivable to get across even the most sensitive notions in the most elementary words and actions, and that's what Spielberg does with keen instincts, because he signifies his impressions in visceral reactions, not words. Steven Spielberg is as technically accomplished as any filmmaker alive, and due to his mammoth eminence, he has admittance to any asset he entails. Both of those facts are relevant to the punch of this seamless period piece. He knows how to express his emotional fervor about men in combat with utmost moralistic intensity, and he has the apparatus, the greenback and the running dogs to make it happen.