SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998)

Neha says

We all know a certain Mr. Steven Spielberg loves the theme of war- starting with his home movies about World War II when he was a young adolescent to his blockbusters- Remember the Nazi treasure hunters in Raider’s of the Lost Ark or those battle sequences in Empire of the Sun and more so the holocaust inspired and acclaimed Schindler’s List.. His 1998 Saving Private Ryan would not have had the same impact had it not combined Spielberg’s unflinchingly brutal vision of frontline chaos with his Schindler’s List cinematographer Janusz Kaminski’s edgy, documentary-style frantic and realistic execution. The film’s one juicy hotdog!!! The meat of the story has Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) on a public relations mission of finding a Private James Ryan (Matt Damon) the sole survivor of 4 brothers in the army. On either side of it, there are gruesome, gigantically drawn, graphic battle sequences that leave you numb with horror with an uncanny real time report of battle mayhem. If I didn’t know better and if there was no Tom Hanks in the frame-I might have just as easily assumed it was archival footage. Guts and blood spill, dismembered body parts, the smell of fear and the primitive survival instinct, the screams of soldiers crying out for their “mamma’s”, the tide turning red with blood in the Normandy beachfront encounter and those dramatic moments where sounds and voices drown out with Miller feeling like he’s smack bang in the madness of hell. It’s these visceral moments that haunt with their urgency, immediacy and that kinetic energy that in no small part is a product of the gritty camera, the razor sharp editing, the eerie sound design and effects and the uniformly excellent cast who do so well to nail that unpredictable randomness of war. The second mega battle sequence in the final act employs more strategy but Spielberg makes all the tactics collapse, reminding us that in chaos there can be no control.

The film raises some important questions as well- Is one man’s life more valuable than others? Is a public relations mission worth risking a soldier’s life? The army may want to get James Ryan to his mother but don’t the others have mothers as well? We see the characters in endless discussion and while Spielberg doesn’t resolve these dilemma’s what he does do is use them to reflect the way in which war dehumanizes man. Hanks does well to show us how distant he is and how he must be to do the awful things that need to be done. Jeremy Davies give the most memorable performance as a French and German translator Corporal Upham who really is the audience surrogate here with no real sense of what it entails to be behind enemy lines but as he joins Miller’s mission we see the realities slowly transform him. At first he fights it when he convinces the contingent to let a German soldier go but in the ultimate scenes of the film, face up against the heartlessness of war, his transformation is as convincing as it is required. Matt Damon when cast was unknown but he makes an impact. I can’t forget that one scene between him and Hanks where he tries to remember the faces of his dead brothers by reliving a memory that came so tangibly alive through just his words and emotions. Tom Sizemore as the deft sergeant, Edward Burns as the argumentative Private Reiben, Barry Pepper as the religious sniper, Adam Goldberg as the lone Jew and Vin Diesel as Private Caparzo do well in familiar but freshly presented character roles.

It’s an original, real and frightening re-enactment of history and Spielberg excels in painting it in all of its brutal glory with a pro technical team, solid cast and a thought provoking premise that leaves us with that one recurring phrase used in the film- FUBAR (fucked up beyond all recognition). That’s the crux of war and that sure is the world of Saving Private Ryan.

Ira says
Technical Sgt. Mike Horvath: What are your orders?
Captain Miller: Sergeant, we have crossed some strange boundary here, the world has taken a turn for the surreal.
St. Horvath: Clearly, but the question still stands
Captain Miller: I don’t know. What do you think?
Sgt Horvath: You don’t want to know what I think.
Captain Miller: No, Mike, I do.

‘Thinking’ is something war rarely allows you the time to do. At least not while a battle rages on endlessly, unstoppable, deafening, and bloody, as in those stunning first 25 minutes of Spielberg’s epic film where through gritty camera work and superbly executed action, Omaha beach is left spotted and crowded with corpses and the ocean is bathed with blood. Not while you watch a man, friend, comrade, and fellow soldier burn, cry, be torn apart and lose his breath by your side or in your arms, or while you listen to ‘orders’, realizing those eloquent words of great war poets, echo with a grueling, harsh reality of a soldiers life; ‘ours but to do and die’, and not while you stand by helplessly watching as things get FUBAR i.e. f***** up beyond all recognition.

And yet, it’s amazing how much Spielberg’s World War 2 war epic, Saving Private Ryan, makes you think. With one of the most unique premises to come out of a war story, here is a film that questions morality, honor, duty and service in an evocative and powerfully humane way. When a troop of men under Captain Miller’s (Tom Hanks’) command set out to find Pvt. Ryan, to get him safely home to his mother, war for them becomes a ‘public relations mission’ and yet is still war, a constant minefield of danger and risk. Losing 2 men along the way, through perilous territory, literally on ground and psychologically, characters, relationships and dynamics begin to clash against each other. When the troop finally finds him, Ryan (played by an alive and strong Matt Damon, great casting choice), clearly saddened and upset by the news of his brothers’ death, refuses to leave his station of duty, not being able to see the ‘sense’ in why he should be thus privileged. Why none of the others, who fought as hard as him, should go on without a chance. And that’s when Captain Miller, played with a firm, quiet inner strength and mesmerizing solidness by Hanks, is at a loss. The one in command, suddenly vulnerable and unsure, needs a second viewpoint, help, and advice from a friend. Which is what Sgt. ‘Mike’ is to him. And what many of these men are to one another. ‘Brotherhood between soldiers’ as young Upham, a field mapper and rookie who’s taken into Miller’s troop as translator because of his knowledge of German & French, would call it. When Upham tells his fellow soldiers he wants to write a paper on this subject of ‘army brotherhood’, they scoff at his naiveté, idealism, and ignorance. The irony is the brotherhood exists, but becomes precarious, challenged, by national sentiment, by internal tensions, and by the system of hierarchy in the army through the course of the film. Relationships are hugely important in Spielberg & Rodat’s story.

Even as the action never stops, feels real, and accessible, so do Spielberg’s characters. Each etched sharply, each memorable, each drawing our empathy and somehow making us connect to them. Its not just relationships between the men themselves, but between country and them, home and them, and between these young soldiers and their mothers (we hear a soldier cry out to his mother at least three distinct points in the narrative, a clever and fascinating thread that is fully fleshed out in the wonderful Church scene where WADE recalls his childhood memories of living with his mother). I’m not saying Rodat gets Freudian and analytical on us, I just liked how he touches on that umbilical relationship and on the idea that war, a futile loss of innocent lives, is a reminder of something primal, taking you back to the innocence of being a child, and forcing you through the horrors of its surroundings, to grow up before your time.

When Tibbs (Poitier), colored cop from Philadelphia enters at the heels of the murder of Sparta’s most powerful and wealthy man, Mr. Colbert, he’s at first mistaken for his killer and brought in for interrogation by the slimy, eager to please Wood purely on the grounds of being a black boy sitting alone at a station in the heat and darkness of the night. In a brilliantly edited, tense scene at the station that follows, within seconds, tables turn and where Gillespie first taunts and mocks Tibbs, trying to size him up, Poitier glares at Steiger in a penetrative silence. As he flings his badge across to him moments later, an embarrassed Gillespie must turn from uncouth to civil. And Jewison kickstarts his film, pitting the white and the black of it, strongly against one another.

In this case, the mission is one man, so who’s to decide which life is finally more important than the next. War creates a limbo of anonymity along with its sense of national sentiment and Spielberg doesn’t make these ideas easy for us to answer. His atmosphere is real, raw, waiting to explode, yet simmering with uncertainty. The deaths of Carpazo and later Wade simmer with potent questions, difficult choices, and the inevitable conflict each leader has to face when it comes down to losing one of his own for the ‘greater cause’. in the quiet interlude of the Church where the men take rest, Spielberg chooses shadows, candlelight and clean frames creating a nostalgic, haunting tone that counterpoints much of the rest of the film. And in that unforgettable dog tags scene, as Miller’s men flip through their fellow soldiers identities, reduced to metal plates with names on them, for a moment you forget who’s the enemy and who’s on the same team. Then when Hanks, in a fit of desperation, having lost a man and found a wrong soldier, starts calling out for ‘RYAN’ at random, stumbles onto a partially deaf character, you laugh out of nervousness, releasing all that energy Spielberg builds to that moment.

The power of Spielberg’s storytelling for me is not just in the brilliant technical aspects, fantastic cinematography and action sequences, sharp, thoughtful editing, realistic, grey production and art design, or in the absolutely amazing sound score, sound editing and mixing, its in these characters. And I liked how Spielberg doesn’t lose touch, or let us lose touch with them, no matter what. Not when we yearn to know, almost as much as his juniors who Miller really is, where he’s from or what he did, not when and how we finally discover he is a school teacher to 8th graders and not when you feel Hanks whispers to you as he does to Pvt. Ryan close tot the end of the film, “Earn this. Earn it.” Spielberg, for this one, one of the most raw, moving, well –performed, absorbing war entertainers Hollywood has made in the past couple of decades, you have.