Rediscovering ‘Saving Private Ryan’ after 25 years
“… Our great majority will emerge from the war almost as if it had never taken place, and not all the lip service in the world about internationalism will make that different. This and more and worse is all so obvious, so horrifying, and apparently unalterable that, being a peculiarly neurotic people, we are the more liable to nod and pay it the least possible attention. That is unfortunate.” — James Agee, “So Proudly We Fail,” Oct. 30, 1943
It’s often said the best war movies are really anti-war movies.
From Lewis Milestone’s still-affecting “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1930) to Edward Berger’s powerful 2022 remake, the most important and affecting war movies have always emphasized the human cost of military adventure. While the recruiting poster movies of the 1940s may have served their purpose (World War II was, if not a good war, at least a necessary one), the inherent jingoism and glorification of battle can seem obscene to those who understand the real nature of armed conflict — combat veterans.
James Agee once described the “war film” as a triple-distilled image of collective dreams, habits or desires, which was a way of saying war movies were never about just war. For Agee, they had more to do with soothing or inspiring folks at home than they did with depicting facts or war.
Agee believed it dangerous to imply heroism was within the scope of the ordinary, and that most war movies promulgated deadly myths and idealized expectations. Agee was never a warrior, but he recognized the “astronom
ical abyss between the experienced in war and the inexperienced.”
Those of us inexperienced in war cannot know what it is like. Not by going to movies, not by being “embedded” with combat forces in a documentary like Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger’s 2010 film “Restrepo.” War is not just being shot at and watching people you know die; it is shooting your own rifle — if you can, and a lot of grunts can’t.
Army historian Brigadier Gen. S.L.A. Marshall argued that during the second World War “maybe 20%” of American troops fired their weapons during combat situations — making, as George C. Scott as George S. Patton said, “the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”
It’s harder to bayonet someone than shoot him; harder to shoot him than rain bombs down on him. Harder to rain bombs down on him than to look at a screen and jiggle a joystick. Like our movies, our wars have become more and more like video games. It’s possible to make war from thousands of miles away without looking into the faces of those you would kill and who would kill you.
Theory has its uses, and we might all be better off if we learned to consider beforehand the consequences of potential actions. But don’t tell me it is glorious to fight and die for an ideal when the people who have done the fighting and the killing say there is nothing noble about it.
War may be necessary, but isn’t necessarily ennobling, and guys like me who have avoided shooting and being shot at have not missed out on one of the essential episodes of masculine experience. We are the lucky ones, not those who have had the Aristotelian “good fortune” of going to war.
In 1999, after a reading at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, someone asked novelist Tim O’Brien — the author of “If I Die in a Combat Zone,” “The Things They Carried,” and “Going After Cacciato,” a man who probably owes his literary career to his Vietnam experience — if he could go back in time to 1967 and exchange his draft notice for a student deferment, would he do so?
“I’d exchange it for just about anything,” the writer said quietly. “I’d exchange it for 10 cents.” For a bad toothache, a knee in the groin.
O’Brien went on to say that he wished he had been able to avoid the draft, that he’d had the courage to refuse to fight a war he didn’t believe in, a war he thought was wrong. He said he didn’t go to Vietnam out of a sense of duty or because his country needed him. He went because he would get in trouble if he refused. Because he was the kind of boy who was used to doing what he was told to do by men with ties and clipboards.
Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” was released July 24, 1998.
Spielberg was not the first director to attempt to resensitize the audience to the grinding brutality and limb-shearing violence of war. He is not the first to tell us that John Wayne was a lie.
Cornel Wilde tried with “Beach Red” in 1967; Oliver Stone tried with “Platoon” in 1986. John Huston tried in 1944 when he made his 30-minute documentary “The Battle of San Pietro” for the U.S. Army. (Agee praised “San Pietro” for its “pure tragic grandeur” and did not notice — or question — Huston’s obviously staged scenes; the film, marketed as a document of battle, was in fact largely re-created.)
By now we all know that people don’t die gloriously and that the enemy does not consist of faceless extras. Intellectually we know that combat is raw and terrifying and that human beings are soft and no match for flying metal.
But no one conveyed the horror and ultimate emptiness of dying in combat quite as effectively as Spielberg did with “Saving Private Ryan.” It might be the best anti-war war movie ever made.
At the very least, one 25-minute section of the film, the landing on Omaha Beach, should be shown in every high school classroom in America. It is tough to look at, gruesome and tense and suffused with a kind of animal fear that is no less palpable for having been made in Hollywood. “Saving Private Ryan” is a wrenching, excoriating experience. It changed my mind about Steven Spielberg.
Is the gore necessary? Probably. To depict the horror of combat as anything but a visceral nightmare is a disservice to the people who have endured it. If ever a director had a good reason for rubbing our faces in gore, it is Spielberg with this movie. Even good wars born of clear moral purpose get ugly and chaotic at ground level. And even in the midst of terrible, churning, vicious slaughter, individuals are capable of doing courageous, heroic and decent things.
What is extraordinary about “Saving Private Ryan” is the way Spielberg is able to charge the theater with fear. He puts the audience into the battle, onto the beach, amid the thunks and pops and deafening explosions of shells. He shows us the fear in the eyes of the soldiers and drains away about 60% of the color, giving the movie a sepia wash that is reminiscent of the work of combat cameraman George Stevens and the still photos of Robert Capa. What is good about “Saving Private Ryan” is the chilling detail, the jittering adrenal rush of the landing on Omaha Beach.
It is a remarkable film, hung on a standard-issue story, loosely based on a real episode during World War II where a platoon was sent behind German lines to rescue a paratrooper whose three brothers were killed in action within days of each other. The moral questions are obvious and rather banal: Is it worth risking eight lives to save one? Should the bereaved mother be factored into the pragmatic equation of war?
Though ripe for melodrama, the story proves sturdy enough. And the performances are never less than assured. Spielberg wouldn’t have allowed a false emotion to flash across an actor’s face. Tom Hanks is brilliant as an infantry captain, not so much hardened by war as made cautious, weary and dubious. It is Hanks’ eyes that lead us through the opening assault on Omaha Beach, his graceless thrashing through the waves, his utter human fragility that hooks us.
His squad is made up largely of what were then competent unknowns. Ed Burns was best known as the indie filmmaker, and Tom Sizemore — as the smart aleck from Brooklyn and trusted sergeant, respectively — was a familiar face, but the rest of the squad were young and appropriately anonymous, at least at the beginning of the film. (Matt Damon, as the Private Ryan of the title, was a relative unknown when he was cast. He didn’t really become Matt Damon until after the film was wrapped, a situation that spoils the minor surprise when the platoon first encounters him.)
It seems ungenerous to quibble about the nearly three-hour length, but a second staged battle near the end of the film probably didn’t need to have the real-time feeling of the landing at Omaha Beach. Even so, it is as nearly effective as the first battle sequence; the difference may be that the audience is largely numbed by the bodies stacked up during the film. It might be that we have become like that lost platoon — capable of playing poker with the dog tags of fresh dead.
And there are the obligatory relevance-relating scenes that frame the picture. It could be argued that “Private Ryan” would have been a stronger film without the opening and closing scenes.
Yet whatever one thinks of Spielberg’s habit of sermonizing, “Saving Private Ryan” validated the serious greatness of his 1993 film “Schindler’s List” and the transition of Spielberg from a consummate entertainer and storyteller into a genuinely great filmmaker. “Saving Private Ryan” holds up; after 25 years it still presents as a thoroughly adult film, sober and measure-taking and breathtakingly accomplished.
It is as close to battle as most of us will ever be; as close as most of us will ever want to come. It honors the dead and the survivors without succumbing to easy piety or gaudy fabrication. It is an amazingly popular movie; one that perhaps only Spielberg, with his uncanny combination of talents and instincts, could have realized.