Saving Private Ryan, the most excellent American war film yet made, and the best film of the 1990s, represents the nadir of Steven Spielberg’s storytelling powers, considerable as they are. This film, along with 1993’s Schindler’s List, represents Spielberg’s artistic statements on the conflicts of World War II; one a cold look into evil and one a savage rebuke of the glory of combat. While Schindler’s List rightly deserves the praise it has received, Ryan surpasses its predecessor on every mark. Saving Private Ryan retooled the way other directors film and consider warfare; the performances took clichés and brought individualism to them, and show the terror and senselessness of the most massive conflict in human history. While Spielberg lets his penchant for emotional manipulation bookend the movie, the scenes of soldiers on the ground will leave the viewer with images horrific and thoughtful, beautiful, and haunting in their composition and effect. Saving Private Ryan will leave its viewers shaken and changed. It is rare for a film to able to compel a viewer to evaluate so many ‘big’ subjects; Saving Private Ryan is such a film. The question at the core of the film is not a fight for freedom, or companionship, or one character’s journey from witness to killer. Instead, it is the consideration of Ryan’s guilt, not understood nor dealt with until the last scene of the film. It is here we find the real power of Spielberg’s masterwork.
Steven Spielberg uses several techniques in his film-making arsenal to put us in the center of the conflict. His images are powerful, if sometimes manipulative, and bring us into the face of the carnage. The most remembered portion of this film is the landing on Omaha Beach, the bloodiest part of the Normandy invasion. This thirty-minute piece, outside the main story of the film, is as brutal and hellish a depiction of war as one may ever see. Spielberg never allows his camera a dispassionate view, and so does not spare the viewer the grotesque nature of the landing.
We begin in the Higgins boats, and commanders giving orders to the soldiers. This brief respite ends quickly. His opening image shows an entire craft of soldiers killed by the heavy barrage of German machine gunfire. After, he shows a desperate run for the beach, as some drown in the water under the weight of gear or killed by enemy gunfire. Spielberg uses muted colors, loud sounds, and a jumpy camera to keep us in the mindset of the landing. He also carries us to various factions of the landing: medics tending to the wounded, a priest giving the last rites, and Seabees demanding that the soldiers move off the beach so the obstacles preventing artillery from landing can be cleared. Although the scenes of destruction are many, Spielberg gives us two shots that illustrate the destructive nature of the landing. The first is a soldier looking through dead bodies, seeking his arm, blown off. The soldier finds it, and runs off-screen, in a moment of shocking absurdity. The second is the German view: the barrels of machine guns cutting through wave after wave of American troops. This view makes one wonder how anyone reached the other side of the beach. Spielberg continues in his use of these tools throughout the film to keep the viewer inside the action. Had the rest of this film been mediocre, this segment alone would have placed it amongst the top war films. In another use of none too subtle imagery, Spielberg opens and closes Saving Private Ryan with the image of a wind-whipped US flag. The first time is to use a noble vision, and ideal, that will be contrasted sharply by the majority of the film. The second shot of the flag is a simple reminder that all the power and ideals we associate with that image were bought with blood and carnage.
After brief cutaways stateside to establish the purpose of finding the last surviving Ryan brother, Tom Hanks’ Captain Miller is called upon to find him. Joining him are a group of war movie clichés: the innocent observer, Upham, a translator who has never beheld conflict; Mellish, Reiben, and Caparzo, sarcastic and cynical, hiding doubt and terror with humor and disdain; the religious sniper Jackson, a self-described instrument of warfare; and the gruff Sergeant Horvath, keeping discipline amongst the unit. Wade, a medic, serves as a caretaker of the dead and dying. At the center of this band is Captain Miller, an enigma to his men in every way. Miller has survived three years of constant warfare leading his men to wonder what he does ‘back home’ that has made him so seemingly invincible. Upham and Miller have the most genuine character development, but each man is given his turn at the wheel. Spielberg illustrates the cruelest of his many themes with these characters: scene after scene gives us insight and care for the soldiers, only to see many killed by the movie’s end. Caparzo is moved to help a young French girl who reminds him of a niece, only to be cut down and slowly bleed to death feet from his comrades for this indiscretion. Wade speaks of his mother and is killed, facing death surrounded by his comrades, aware of the inevitable and terrified. Jackson is dispatched in the climactic battle scene after Spielberg takes care to steer Jackson away from the religious soldier cliché. Mellish, a Jew, is fond of pointing that fact out to German POWs; due to the paralysis of Upham, Mellish is killed in a knife fight with an enemy soldier. Rieben and Upham are the only remaining members of the unit by the film’s end. Reiben, although capably fleshed out, never gets much of a backstory beyond being a typical Brooklynite. Reiben is the character we invest in the least, and yet lives. Upham, whose cowardice at a crucial moment ends the life of a comrade, moves past the paralysis of his terror to kill a German soldier whose life he earlier spared. It is here we see the full transformation of a man from educated to experience. Upham starts out knowing the philosophy of warfare, but by the end, it is pointless to him and us. Horvath is also gunned down, only moments away from being safely behind American held lines. Spielberg establishes the lack of purpose and order, of fairness, with these deaths. That they all die, without heroics, is the point.
The moment between Miller and Ryan, moments before Miller dies presents the central crisis of the film. Ryan has received news of his brothers’ deaths, and yet insists on not abandoning his post. Miller acquiesces, and they set about a defense of a critical bridge. Miller and Ryan talk about home, where Miller confesses to a memory that keeps his mind above the insanity of the conflict at hand. Miller is the last man killed in the film as if his confession to his fractured unit earlier in the movie about being just a schoolteacher has weakened his invincibility. Tom Hanks is a master of emotional acting, and his death is the most heartbreaking in the film. Spielberg hints to us this end when Miller tells of his home life to his unit and Ryan, but we are hard-pressed to believe that Miller, who has survived so much, would be killed so close to the end. For Spielberg, not killing Miller would be a cheat. Miller pulls Ryan in close and demands he ‘earn this.’ Miller is not talking about the many deaths on the mission to pull Ryan out of combat, but only his. Ryan must earn the memory Miller shared with him, must earn the right to live when Miller will not. As we pull back to the Normandy Memorial Cemetery, to the elderly Ryan visiting the grave of Miller, he pleads with the ghost of that demand that has followed him. He tells the grave marker he has tried his best to be a good and honorable man to earn what Miller lost. Ryan has been heavy with the burden of guilt all his life, so this scene suggests. Even as he hopes to affirm his goodness, doubt causes him to seek his spouse for confirmation he is and has been a good man. Saving Private Ryan has cost him a clear conscience, compelled by the knowledge that Miller’s final words will haunt him. The elderly Ryan is not sad about his war wounds, but his psychic wounds, about how Miller never got to tell his wife about the war, and Ryan did.
While Spielberg uses some manipulation, such as General Marshall’s high-minded reading of the Lincoln letter or the visit to the Ryan family home, it detracts little from the impact of this film. Saving Private Ryan allows us to look back at the Greatest Generation, and see what many did not know before: the real horror of it all. Vietnam was a television war, its secrets known to the viewing public. The soldiers of WWII were notorious for not talking about what happened ‘over there.’ If it has done nothing else, Saving Private Ryan speaks for them, allowing us to see what the cost of bringing down Nazism and Japanese aggression was. Saving Private Ryan stands as the most profound war film ever made, whose ideas and images cannot be easily dismissed after viewing.