director
Steven Spielberg
screenwriter
Robert Rodat
producers
Steven Spielberg
Ian Bryce
Mark Gordon
Gary Levinsohn
cinematographer
Janusz Kaminski
music
John Williams
editor
Michael Kahn
cast
Tom Hanks (Captain John Miller)
Edward Burns (Pvt. Reiben)
Matt Damon (Pvt. James Ryan)
Tom Sizemore (Sgt. Horvath)
Adam Goldberg (Pvt. Mellish)
Giovanni Ribisi (Medic Pvt. Wade)
Jeremy Davies (Corporal Upham)
Barry Pepper (Pvt. Jackson)
Vin Diesel (Pvt. Caparzo)
Ted Danson (Captain Hamill)
Dennis Farina (Lt. Col. Anderson)
Paul Giamatti (Sgt. Hill)
Harve Presnell (Gen. George C. Marshall)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 169m
u.s.
release: 7/24/98
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other steven
spielberg films
reviewed on this website:
- a.i.:
artificial intelligence
- amistad
- catch
me if you can
- close
encounters of the third kind
- e.t.
(special edition, 2002)
- jurassic
park
- the
lost world: jurassic park
- minority
report
- munich
- schindler's
list
- the
terminal
- war
of the worlds
|
Critics
across America have fallen over themselves to bestow masterpiece
status on Saving Private Ryan, the hefty war movie directed
by Steven Spielberg. I'll agree with the raves about the battle
sequences, which have a cruel, piercing horror, but otherwise
the critics sound like a pack of easily impressed 12-year-old
boys. A masterpiece? Hardly. Neither as subtly artful
as Schindler's
List nor as boringly high-minded as Amistad,
this film falls somewhere in the bland middle. It's forty minutes
of steely violence and two hours of cliché-ridden flab
-- and Spielberg's draining the color out of the clichés
doesn't make them any less clichés.
The film begins not with carnage but with grief: an elderly man
visiting the Normandy memorial, wandering through the rows of
white crosses. The image recalls Scarlett O'Hara walking through
the dead and dying in Gone with the Wind -- just one of
many bits Spielberg cribs from other war films. The old man gets
one of those sad-thinking-back faces, and we cut to D-Day on
Omaha Beach. Men are dying everywhere you look; they die before
they even get off the boats, they die underwater when bullets
cut through the murk and kick up a cloud of red. Spielberg and
cinematographer Janusz Kaminski stage the combat in a jittery,
haphazard style that conveys the systematic nightmare of war.
It's a bit of a distancing style, though -- too self-consciously
a newsreel effect -- and you can't help being excited even as
you're appalled. Spielberg pays a price for starting things off
with a bang: after a certain amount of graphic violence (and
this movie is the hardest R I've ever seen), you just go numb.
And Spielberg can't help aestheticizing it; even the harsh physical
realism becomes almost pleasurable to watch. The staccato noise
of bullets thudding into flesh, the shock of sudden death --
it all has a feral beauty. (The gray-toned photography further
distances us. Was Spielberg afraid to go all the way and shoot
in black and white -- an uncommercial format -- or did he want
to avoid comparisons to Schindler's List?)
Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly called Spielberg
"our most spectacular poet of war," which is not a
label anyone applied to Kubrick or Oliver Stone or Coppola --
or even Edward Zwick, whose Glory and Courage Under
Fire captured the moral complexity of war far more effectively
than anything in Saving Private Ryan. And has anyone noticed
how Spielberg the spectacular poet of war hedges his bets? He
doesn't start with any old battle -- he kicks things off with
D-Day. If he hadn't gotten our attention with such a large-scale
canvas of chaos, would we not feel that war is hell? In Glory,
we got the point without seeing dozens of men get their brains
blown out. One head blown off was quite enough to make the case.
At the center of Saving Private Ryan is a rather routine
drama. Four brothers are stationed overseas during World War
II; three of them have been killed, and the fourth, James Ryan
(Matt Damon), is still out there somewhere. The top brass sends
a platoon, headed by Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks), to find
Ryan and bring him back alive so he can go home to his thrice-bereaved
mother. So Miller and his squad of stereotypes -- the faithful
sergeant (Tom Sizemore), the cynical Brooklyn guy (Edward Burns),
the surly Italian (Vin Diesel), the sensitive medic (Giovanni
Ribisi), the skittish new guy (Jeremy Davies), the mordant Jew
(Adam Goldberg), the devout Christian (Barry Pepper) -- venture
into Spielberg's version of war-torn hell, which is really an
anthology of moments from war movies and books: the sniper, the
German prisoner, the little heart-tugging kid, and so on.
"Whoever saves one life saves the world entire" --
that was the defining line in Schindler's List, and it
could be the epigram for Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg
and screenwriter Robert Rodat hang their epic on a shaky metaphor.
Private Ryan, of course, is us -- the abstract American ideal
that our soldiers died to defend. "Earn this," Miller
says to Ryan -- meaning, Earn the life we've died to protect.
Yet Spielberg ignores the fact that it was the government, not
Ryan -- not us -- who sent those soldiers to die. The last scene,
a schmaltzy reprise of the opening scene, is meant to send us
out wanting to be worthy of America's great sacrifice. And it's
meant to make you feel small for asking why anyone must die or
kill in any war.
Saving Private Ryan says nothing fresh about war; it lacks
the sardonic vision of Kubrick's great war films (Paths of
Glory and Full Metal Jacket, the latter of which Spielberg
swipes from constantly), which regarded war with a hollow laugh,
as the sickest of sick jokes. The closest Spielberg comes to
Kubrick is in a couple of scenes with the terrified interpreter
played by Jeremy Davies, and in a perfectly realized death scene
claiming a soldier we've come to like. Elsewhere, Spielberg loses
focus, and he underdirects his actors. Some, like Edward Burns
and Adam Goldberg, come through anyway; others, like Tom Hanks
and Tom Sizemore, show little personality -- it's as if they
had no time to bring anything of themselves to the show. That's
true of Spielberg too. He has a fierce visual precision in those
combat scenes. Everywhere else, where it really counts, he shoots
all over the place. |
