Spielberg Takes Us To War

Rating: 9/10 (18 February 2007)

The genius of Steven Spielberg is that he always knows exactly where he wants to take his audience, and then takes them there. If he wants to tug at our heartstrings, he'll make us fall in love with a brown and wrinkly space visitor we might otherwise find grotesque. If he wants to make us inch the blanket up over our eyes, he'll crank up the grim orchestral music and put us face-to-face with a toothy Great White. And if he wants us to truly understand an entirely different kind of horror, he'll show us small children leaping into a pool of outhouse waste to escape their murderous Holocaust captors.
Spielberg continues what he does best with SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, a film so graphic in its Second World War battlefield depictions that many veterans have called it the closest thing to being there. The explicit scenes of gushing arteries, severed limbs and faceless corpses come fast and furious, numbing us into the reality of the setting. In fact, if we didn't know Spielberg as a serious artist with noble objectives, we might be tempted to call him a shock artist obsessed with blood and guts and gore.
But we do know about Spielberg. We know he would not take us down such a rocky road without a reason. In SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, the obvious rationale is to help us understand not where he's coming from, but where the men we will ultimately spend nearly three hours with are coming from. It's in this hell on earth that Cpt. John Miller (Tom Hanks) and his small group of soldiers (fine actors like Edward Burns, Tim Sizemore and Barry Pepper among them) must not only survive with sanity intact, but carry out orders. And not all of those orders make sense at the time, if ever. Case in point, Hanks and his men are sent to locate one Pte. James Ryan (Matt Damon). Pte. Ryan is no POW, but a soldier still serving somewhere within the vast U.S. Forces -- if he's still alive, that is. During the Second World War, with a communication system that is a technological dinosaur by today's standards, it's a mission ordered said than accomplished.
The mission is a tough sell not just logistically, but emotionally. Pte. Ryan is sought so he can be sent home to his mom, who has just lost her three other sons virtually at once. As he himself admits, Pte. Ryan has displayed no more courage than his fellow soldiers. Why should he get to leave? Indeed that question crops up in the minds of Hanks' soldiers. Why is one man's life worth risking those of a group of men? they ask. It's an interesting angle for a film about heroes. We often think of soldiers doing the job with no questions asked, happy to put their lives on the line for their fellow GI. We forget they are rational humans.
And therein lies one of the biggest strengths of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. It's a very human story told in extreme circumstances. It covers all the traditional bases -- inner turmoil, terror, carnage -- but has a level of sophistication absent from most other war films, particularly those inspired by The Last Great War. Hanks isn't Patton, but a schoolteacher who secretly cries at the enormity of it all. The enemy fighters don't have horns, but uniforms and feelings just like the Americans. The soldiers are heroes, but reluctant ones.
Spielberg is a master at telling the story of war and men. SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is not his best, but it certainly comes close.