What Shall We Do With Steven Spielberg?

Rating: 6/10 (7 February 2007)

No one can doubt the power of this film's opening sequence. When Miller (Tom Hanks), slimed in blood and filth, stares blank eyed at the carnal slaughter around him , you cannot help but think 'That was what is was really like'. And you cannot help but reflect on the importance of this moment in modern history, and on the undiluted bravery of the men who were there. And yet....when the initial battle is over, Horvath (Tom Sizemore) scoops up a handful of dirt and pours it in to a tin marked 'France'. It's a moment of forced quirkiness, quite out of keeping with the frank reportage of what's gone before. It's a bit of business, used by the director as a punctuation mark, and it's the first sign that this is a film with fatal flaws.
Having survived Omaha Beach, Miller and his men are assigned to locate Ryan, whose whereabouts are unknown. Ryan's brothers have been killed in action and the US military brass cannot allow Ryan to be lost too. There's a historical precedent for this, although 'Saving Private Ryan' is a wholly fictionalised account. Given their mission, the soldiers debate it's worth - are they to throw their lives away in order to arbitrarily save someone else? Conflicts arise, there are uneasy stand offs, and reluctant truces. They find Ryan, and save him. Ryan lives to be a humble old man, but most of the soldiers who saved him do not live to be old men of any sort.
Spielberg's technique is frequently brilliant, but it's unvaried, so that the final battle is no different in tone from the first one, three hours of screen time previous. But the real flaws are in the script. Miller is an ordinary decent man, who will make difficult decisions when pushed. Horvath is the tough sergeant, Wade is the medic disgusted by the slaughter, Reiben is the insubordinate, Mellish is the comedian who doesn't know when to shut up, Upham is the tenderfoot who's never fired a weapon on his life, Jackson is an illiterate from the deep south who's also crack shot, Carparzo is a giant of a man. Miller could be played by Gregory Peck, Horvath by Ernest Borgnine. Reiben might be a young William Holden and so on.
The worst crime is the character of the German soldier who the men want to execute in revenge for the death of Wade. The German begs pitifully for his life, says in broken English that he loves America and hates Germany. Upham is a humanitarian, he can't stand to see a man killed in cold blood and he persuades Miller to let the German go free. Upham has never fired a weapon in his life, remember, and Miller is full of human decency. So at the end, what happens? The German returns, having thrown in his lot with another platoon of German soldiers. In what is portrayed as a supreme irony, the German kills Miller, and in turn, is killed by Upham, who finally finds his courage, or at least, his capacity to kill. The problem is that as soon as you set eyes on Upham, he's so weak and pathetic that it's a certainty his character will undergo a dramatic reversal. It doesn't matter that Tom Hanks as Miller, Jeremy Davies as Upham, and Barry Pepper as Jackson are superb. It doesn't matter that as vignettes, the deaths of Wade and Mellish are exceptional. Behind the throat clearing and the reverence, the clichés stretch from the flinty military hawk who gives the order that Ryan must be saved, to the final soft focus image of the older Ryan himself. In the end, 'Saving Private Ryan' is a more callow, less worldly film than 'Attack' or 'A Walk In The Sun' and the savagery of it's opening only serves to emphasise the fact.