Confuses Verisimilitude, Authenticity, Documentation, and Realism

Rating: 3/10 (10 July 2002)

Much has been made of the "realism" of this movie because the
combat scenes are graphic, intense, and more accurate in the
range of detail than much of what came before it. But as much was
made of the "authenticity" of this movie because of the attention to
detail made in its preparation. For instance, Spielberg bought up
the last stock of original legging and strap material to make part of
the uniforms, real M-1 rifles, searched exhaustively for the beach
appropriate for shooting that was absolutely closest to the
appearance of Normandy in 1944, and so forth.
But let's think about that. What's the point of having an "authentic"
cartridge belt, except that the audience knows about this from the
reviews, planted press stories, etc.? A replica can be made to look
more like the authentic thing than the authentic thing itself, given
the aging of the intervening years. But this was a sort of formalistic
post-modern exercise engaged by the filmmakers to convince
himself and the audience, before even seeing the movie, that
what they were seeing represented the "truth".
The opening scene of the aged Ryan, walking the graveyards of
Normandy, reflecting on the sacrifice of so many of his comrades
just so he could walk there with his adoring grandkids, is a classic
example of Spielberg heavy-handedness. He has to inject a
tone-deaf repetition of the 'why we fight' message into the
beginning, end, and middle of this movie to show that it was 'all
worth it'. Spielberg, being a literalist, has every character in the
squad pontificate on the subject along the way to locate Private
Ryan.
Why? Why do eight guys get themselves killed just to save one?
Well, the needs of the one sometimes outweigh the needs of the
many. Frankly, Star Trek III made the point somewhat more subtly.
Or is it the words put into Tom Hanks' character's mouth, "I'm just
fighting for the right to go home to my wife"? There's no elucidation
of this point here, just a ham-fisted morphing flashback and
flashforward to hammer home the point 'hey, this is connected to
the present' leaving the viewer to connect up the soundbyte dots.
I won't go into the many war movie cliches this film engages in.
Because Spielberg put together the celebrated first 20 minutes of
this movie, some of the most stunning combat sequences put on
film, does not excuse him the rest of the movie's repeated use of
B-movie props and stereotypes. Even the use of "documentary"
film techniques in the combat sequences is a bit too precious: it's
referential to real film of real combat, but hardly 'documentary'.
Documentary evidence shows things that happened: this film
uses the technique to try to convince the viewer that a fictive,
simplistic interpretation of war, the whys and the whats, is "reality".
The verisimilitude of the visuals of the combat sequences does
not make it "real". Using authentic materials from World War II
does not make it "real". At the bottom of this movie is one version
of a fairy tale about war.
For that reason I think 'Private Ryan' is a dangerous film, because
it's become the primary historical education for most people about
D-Day, World War II, and American participation in the most
cataclysmic event in history to date, and it's about as "true" to that
complex history as John Wayne was to the history of the West. An
exciting, hard-hitting action combat sequence that gets the
approval of veterans sixty-years removed from the events as being
"like what it was" isn't history. It's constructing a virtual reality that
threatens to overtake, engulf, swallow, and become history, like a
pod person in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
I am left mostly wondering what Sam Fuller could've done with
Spielberg's budgets.