Film Review: Saving Private Ryan

Saving Private Ryan is the latest installment from the mature Steven Spielberg. Mature because Saving Private Ryan like Schiendler’s List before it, is a gripping tale of truth and irony that examines the human condition at the vertex of the real and the surreal. The story is about the realized horrors of war told against the backdrop of the Ryan family of Iowa losing three sons in pitched battle in a single day, June 6^th, the invasion by the allies on the beaches of Normandy. The film is about the heroic effort to save a fourth son, Private James Ryan, competently portrayed by Matt Damon of Good Will Hunting fame.

Tom Hanks returns to Oscar caliber work as Captain John Miller, a hometown English teacher whom by surviving D-Day, becomes the leader of an eight man squad assigned the job of finding private Ryan. Through a series of haps, mishaps, and near-misses, Miller eventually finds Ryan but at a terrible cost, losing some his best men in the process. Complicating matters even more, at a purely human level, is the ‘found’ PFC Ryan who is in the process of fighting his own little war. Ryan refuses Captain Miller’s safe conduct orders and is willing to forsake his family and the memory of his dead brothers to defend and protect a bridge with his new brothers, those in his three man squad.

Let’s step back for a moment and examine the theme of the film. In a phrase; War Is Hell, and producer/director Steven Spielberg puts that fact right in your face. He’s produced an epic that will be talked about for decades to come. Spielberg gives us more than a vision, he shocks us with the reality of what war really is about. The first thirty minutes is a sobering primer on D-Day. There’s nothing like it short of having been there. It is the most realistic battle portrayal ever been produced on film. Imagine dragging your wounded buddy to safety when suddenly the load becomes unnaturally light. You look behind realizing the person you were dragging is now only a torso while the lower part of his body is ten feet behind you.

Imagine seeing a desperate soldier searching the ground frantically as if he had lost a contact lens when suddenly he’s relieved as he finds what it was he was looking for. You gasp as he turns to the camera to pick up the found possession, his severed left arm. Trust me, these are the minor battle mutilations. They seem all too real but pale when compared to other scenes too gruesome to describe here. Children should NOT see this film and that’s a shame because it is a historically accurate film about a terrible time in history.

Additionally, the story is brilliant, powerful, and remarkably non melodramatic. The heroes of this film never try to be heroic. We are treated to snap shots of raw human emotion at it’s bare essence. The film is 12 minutes short of three hours but the suspense is so intense it moves quickly. Almost everyone will be talking about the opening scenes but the real movie is in the stories of the eight men who took on the mission to save PFC James Ryan. Except for Edward J. Burns (The Brother McMullin), the rest of the cast is relatively obscure, at least for now. I thought this was an excellent approach to casting since it allows us to concentrate on these men in their respective roles and not as icons from other movies we’ve seen. Of the seven men accompanying Tom Hanks, three performances were exceptional. Edward Burns played Private Reiben, a fast talking, selfish New Yorker who forced to the surface the film’s important question: why is Ryan’s life worth more than the eight of theirs? Even more significant is Jeremy Davies as Corporal Upham, a green translator drafted for the mission because of his foreign language ability. He played the trepidation role to the hilt. Frozen by fear and anguish, he allowed his mission-mates to be killed while he cowered nearby unwilling to reveal himself to save those who had risked their lives to save him earlier. He even lobbies his squad to release a captured Nazi -- ironically the released German later kills several of his buddies. His performance is a textbook treatise in absolute cowardice under fire. Davies’ portrayal is as real as it gets. Finally there’s Private Caparzo expertly acted out by Vin Diesel. His competence as an army sniper is only out classed by the quirkiness he brings to his target by quoting the Bible before taking the shot. In one scene he shoots a German sniper in the eye sending the bullet through the enemy sniper’s rifle scope. Unbelievable!

The visual special F/Xs are obvious. What’s not so obvious are the audio effects. Please see this film in a SDDS or DTS theater. Spielberg uses a particularly unique sound effect in which you will tug at your ear feeling deaf. The rumbling of the tanks, sounds of explosives and the whizzing of bullets is heart throbbingly scary.

Saving Private Ryan is not a repeater. If you see it once you will know what God has always known: that man is the most dangerous animal on earth. You will wonder how men come to this point. The John Wayne movies of the past glamorized war and evoked many young men to leave home, join the military, all feeling the need to defend our great country. I dare suggest that if gung-ho post Pearl Harbor teenagers had seen this film before enlisting, many would have paused before committing.

One last personal political note. As long as man is man, war will be inevitable. The H-bomb proves it is man’s nature to self immolate. But, if conflict must exist, I defend Reagan bankrupting our near future to upgrade our present defenses. His efforts made it possible to prosecute a war by remote control never again exposing our troops to the horrors witnessed in Saving Private Ryan. Lest we forget that before the mid 80’s, most of our military was still using WWII weapons and tactics forty years later. Reagan’s Pentagon single-handedly moved us into the space age where military satellites and the surface systems they control, reduced war and casualties from six years and 20 million lives in WWII, ten years and millions more in Vietnam, to a little over a four months and a few thousand in the Gulf War.

If you’ve got the stomach for human gore in the ‘real’, see Saving Private Ryan and pray the world never returns to this brutality again.

Mike Way

Film Review: Saving Private Ryan: