Years later, the propaganda emerges more clearly. . .

Rating: 6/10 (19 September 2009)

I saw "Saving Private Ryan" in a theatre in its first release, and still watch it five or six times a year, for all sorts of reasons. Eleven years later, I'm starting to know more clearly what I'd like to say about this important film.
First, the mastery of cinematic technique shown by Steven Spielberg and his entire production crew is still exciting, and moving to me. A viewer's sense of being on the Normandy beach, panic-stricken in the thick of the chaotic energy, has not been dissipated by ten years of other films' computer effects and three-second jump cuts. The randomness of events, on the beach and after, is a kind of nightmare in a ruined pastoral landscape, and clarifies each soldier's need to withdraw to a sense of what to do, right now, to stay alive - right up to the moment when the impulse to take care of a friend, or a child, overrules common sense and the discipline of self-preservation.
Second, though, I'm more saddened every year by the myopic focus on American myth-making which Mr Spielberg embraced. He's made a wholly self-centred film about D-Day, and a generation of moviegoers will never know from this movie that the British, Canadian, Australian, and other Allied troops were landing up and down the French coast at the same moment. The Canadians, in fact, advanced considerably farther inland than the Americans that day, under equally heavy fire. Tom Hank's character mentions British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery leading his troops toward Germany; Ted Danson's character says "That guy's overrated!" and Hanks's character says "No argument from me." That's the total mention of the Allied participation in the invasion, and Montgomery's stature in defeating the Germans in North Africa a year earlier is erased for a whole generation of film goers, even though his excellent leadership in North Africa earned him command of the British troops on June 6th. The omissions, and flip judgments reflect badly on the scriptwriter, and on Mr Spielberg.
Third, the halo of sanctity which this film bestows on the members of the special mission has become cloying. The soldiers of this film seem to me to justify an American myth of charming immaturity, and "Saving Private Ryan" dodges completely the documented ways in which American soldiers' unpreparedness during and after the invasion was an acknowledged problem during the last year of the war, especially in the Battle of the Bulge, when American troops collapsed in the face of the German attacks.
I'm realising that, for me, "Saving Private Ryan" clashes seriously with the historical record, and that in this sense, it's a meretricious fantasy, however grippingly filmed. I'll still watch it, and feel the adrenaline flow on the beach, below the machine-gun nest, and in front of the bridge, but I won't subscribe to the myths.