All This and World War II

Rating: Null/10 (19 August 1998)

"Saving Private Ryan" left me with some of the conflicted feelings I'd had toward Spielberg's "Schindler's List" -- I wanted to admire the film, but as powerful as parts of it were, I felt it didn't quite achieve what it was reaching for. The first half-hour offers a searing re-creation of the invasion of Normandy, rightly so. But after that chaotic, gory opening, the movie seems to lose its way. Steven Spielberg apparently wanted to make an epic film -- without any epic characters. (At least "Schindler's List" had Oskar Schindler.) The American soldiers who are assigned to try to save Private Ryan are, with the exception of Captain Miller and Corporal Upham, pretty much ciphers. Someone might reply, "You're missing the point -- men in combat usually don't have time to get well acquainted." But "Private Ryan" doesn't seem to be about the anonymity of war. This is not to say it needed the jolly, ragtag group of stereotypes you'd get in a John Wayne war picture. But the characters -- the ones we care about -- should have loomed a bit larger. And while Spielberg gets credit for avoiding the clichÃ©s of a John Wayne picture, he still falls back on a Hollywood style of story -telling, complete with silhouetted figures against a dying sunlight and uplifting John Williams music on the soundtrack. As surprising as this may sound, I found myself half-wishing that John Wayne had played Captain Miller instead of Tom Hanks. I can picture the Duke shouting Hanks' line, "We're not here to do the decent thing, we're here to follow orders!" Wayne, by his booming presence, would have automatically filled up the general blankness of the character. Hanks' Miller doesn't seem interesting enough to justify the pool his men are running (they're wondering what his occupation in civilian life was.) "Saving Private Ryan" seems to suffer from Spielberg's desire to make it the definitive World War II movie (just as "Schindler's List" seemed to suffer from a desire to be the definite Holocaust drama). The scene in which General George C. Marshall makes his little speech in favor of saving Private Ryan is very touching, but I couldn't help wondering: If the U.S. Army is that concerned about the last of the Ryan brothers, why were all four of them sent to the front lines in the first place?