A harrowing and powerful experience.

Rating: Null/10 (3 November 2003)

**** out of ****

Five years can really put a lot in perspective. At the time of its release, Saving Private Ryan was the talk of the summer. It introduced a new gritty style of war filmmaking that was only occasionally glimpsed at before. The acclaim was virtually unanimous, I'd never seen so many critics place one specific film at the top of the year-end-best list. Five years later, SPR has suffered a minor critical backlash, not too dissimilar from Forrest Gump or even Titanic (two movies that I largely adored as well). It's now considered the most overrated war film. Forget critics or the Razzies, immense popularity can do more damage than those two combined ever could in droves.
The question is: how good is this movie? I've seen it three times. Twice in theaters and another time on DVD, after it became a perennial punching bag for Spielberg haters, who came to see it as all that represented what was wrong with the popular director. For me, nothing's really changed. It's still a harrowing experience, I still find myself quivering and shaking by the film's conclusion, but I'm not unwilling to concede the film's faults. Five years (of which I've become a more demanding, even pickier, moviegoer) and three viewings have made that clear enough to me.
Most people probably know the film's basic premise, so I won't go into a detailed explanation. Tom Hanks stars as John Miller, a WWII captain who leads seven men into enemy territory to search for a Private James Ryan, whose three brothers were killed in combat. Their orders are to relieve him of duty and bring him back immediately. Unsurprisingly, many obstacles hinder their search, to the extent the men question whether finding the private is worth the sacrifices it will take to reach him.
The central premise is what keeps the film standing out from the rest of the genre. It's rare to see a war film driven by plot when it's usually a random series of events, typically battle scenes, that hold these movies together. The premise is simple, but it's effective. Whether eight lives are worth risking to save one is enough to spark a debate that probably won't reach any satisfying conclusion. Everyone's got their own opinion on the matter, myself included, but it's to the film's credit it at least made me question the topic. Viewers should at least be open-minded enough to absorb the film's moral quandaries, they're partially the glue that holds the film together.
The camaraderie and interaction among the eight soldiers is that other piece that completes the film. There's an equal mix of humor, tension, respect, and pathos between these men. Robert Rodat's script lays out each supporting character nicely, they may initially read like stereotypes, but the performers bring them to life. With that said, SPR boasts one of the best ensemble casts I've ever seen. Among the eight soldiers, there's not a single weak performance in the lot. Even the annoying Jeremy Davies comes through, mainly because his character's supposed to be annoying (and, at one point, the lone voice of sanity in, ironically, a world that deems his actions cowardly)(spoiler: oddly enough, the film later goes on to show him kill the man he earlier defended, what this is supposed to speak out about his previous actions, I'm not entirely sure, other than war can lead to extenuating circumstances).
That's not to say I liked every aspect of the film's storytelling. I'm not sure whose idea it was to give us those flashback bookends, but while they weren't grating, I'm not sure they're necessary, either. I even see the point of those scenes, Spielberg clearly wants to tie in our feelings in the present and connect us to the past. In that sense, the scene works, and you do question who the old man is in the beginning, but one gets the feeling it's somewhat superfluous. Spielberg's greatest criticism has been his need to display sentimentality. SPR is no different, there's a bit of emotional manipulation in the final moments, but to say it didn't affect me would be a complete lie. I was endeared to the characters, and their deaths were shocking, sobering, and saddening.
The battle scenes are virtually without peer. The furious intensity of the combat footage surprised me. Prior to SPR, Platoon was the most intense war film I'd ever seen and the battle scenes in that film almost look plain in comparison to the work accomplished here. It's gritty, bloody, uncompromising, and disturbing, exactly the way war should be. The level of violence has been repeated over the years (most recently in 2002, when Black Hawk Down, We Were Soldiers, and Windtalkers all aimed for the same level of graphic realism), but has never been quite used as effectively as it has been here, a lot of that having to do with attention paid to plot and character.
In the lead performance, Tom Hanks feels like an initially odd choice to play a U.S. captain. For some reason, I keep picturing Harrison Ford in this role (and who knows what he could have accomplished with it, especially after seeing his interesting work in K-19), but Hanks is fine. For all intents and purposes, he delivers a great performance, perhaps the most powerful one of his career, but Rodat's script puts a few too many John Wayne-ish tendencies into Miller. The man achieves three-dimensional characterization mostly because of Hanks' touches.
The ads and trailers clearly show that the platoon finds Ryan; I think I would have preferred not knowing that going into the film, might have added to the suspense and certainly would have given an extra edge to the moral questions surrounding the plot. Matt Damon's performance as Ryan is quite good, but yet again, Rodat's script makes him into almost a cartoonishly unselfish and honorable character. But Damon is convincing enough that some of his more one-dimensional actions didn't bother me much.
First-rate direction and acting go a long way in covering script deficiencies, and while Rodat's script is definitely the most flawed aspect of the film, it's still a well-written story of well-developed characters who risk and sacrifice their lives not only to save a man, but so that we could enjoy the freedom we almost take for granted these days. Lauding heroism in war movies is an easy sell to mass audiences but tough to win over the critics who generally hold the opinion that war produces no heroes. Maybe not intentionally, but it's undeniable that the men who fought were braver than I could ever hope to be.