Saving Private Ryan Review

There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.  - Barbara Kingsolver

 A little over a decade ago - in July of 1998, to be exact - moviegoers all over the United States and other countries sat in darkened theaters in quiet, almost solemn expectation and watched as the Dreamworks SKG and Paramount logos slowly dissolved to a shot of a backlit American flag and heard the mournful strains of a trumpet playing the first notes of composer John Williams' main title music for Steven Spielberg's first true war movie, Saving Private Ryan.

At first, all the audience saw was the flag fluttering in a stiff breeze, then the camera panned down to what looked like an ordinary American family - a guy in his late 60s, his wife, son, daughter-in-law and grandkids - out for a stroll in a park. 

But as the scene unfolded, Spielberg's cinematographer Janusz Kaminski began adding more details - the old man's solemn face, the wife's loving and supportive mien, the son's awed expression as he snapped photos witth a 35 mm camera - and the viewers began to realize that this was no ordinary outing.   It was a pilgrimage to the American Military Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, Normandy, where 9,387 U.S. soldiers killed during the invasion of northern France are buried.

This little sequence - which is echoed later in Saving Private Ryan's conclusion - was one of the few peaceful moments of Spielberg's brutally honest and moving tribute to the veterans of the Second World War.  What followed it was an accurate and very violent recreation of the initial landings on Omaha Beach, which isn't too far from where the Normandy American Cemetery is presently located.

Ryan's son: [running to comfort his father] Dad?
[flashback to D-Day]
LCVP pilot: Clear the ramp! Thirty seconds. God be with ya!

In perhaps one of the most effective dissolves in movie history, Spielberg shifts the audience's point of view from 1998 "Present Day" to that of Capt. John Miller (Tom Hanks) as the Higgins boat carrying a platoon of Army Rangers approaches one of the sectors of Omaha Beach. The men, some of them veterans of previous landings like Miller and Sergeant Mike Horvath (Tom Sizemore) but mostly green and untested in combat, are seasick and tense. Some pray, others get violently sick, but all of them just want to get off those landing craft and onto the beaches. But as soon as the ramps drop and the Rangers try to step into the seemingly shallow water, all hell breaks loose as the Germans open fire with everything they have.

What follows is the most intense and realistic cinematic depiction of the D-Day invasion, certainly far more violent and bloody than Darryl Zanuck's The Longest Day. Although that 1962 classic is an earnest attempt to portray the Normandy invasion truthfully, it doesn't show such vignettes as the "lucky bastard" whose helmet saves him from getting killed, only to have his brains blown out when he takes it off to examine the bullet holes...the soldier who drowns when he gets snagged in an underwater obstacle....the Higgins boat that catches fire when a GI's flamethrower is hit by a German bullet and sets the contents off in a spectacular fireball...and the brief but horrifying glimpse of a one-armed 29th Division soldier wandering on the beach and picking up his severed arm.

The first harrowing 20 minutes center on the Rangers' attempt to get off the beach and destroy a German pillbox. Here Spielberg shows us how the junior officers and NCOs (represented by Miller and Horvath) rallied the confused and intermingled soldiers of the first wave and led the way inland to take the war to the Germans. Using the various techniques learned over time in North Africa and the Mediterranean, the veteran captain and first sergeant get their makeshift company of Rangers and soldiers from other units past the seawall, up a bluff, and into the pillbox itself.

Spielberg also uses this sequence to introduce us to a few of the eight men who will be sent on a daring rescue mission, including Carpazzo (Vin Diesel), Reiben (Edward Burns), Jackson (Barry Pepper), and Wade (Giovanni Ribisi).

Saving Private Ryan's main storyline begins with a wide shot of the invasion beaches that gradually narrows to a close-up shot of a single dead GI lying on the surf line, with RYAN, S. stenciled on his backpack. Immediately we go from the beaches of Normandy to the somber and almost grave-like quiet of the War Department in Washington, DC. As overlapping voiceovers read excerpts of letters from commanding officers to newly bereaved relatives and spouses of dead soldiers, one secretary gets one letter, then another, then a third...examines them, then rushes to her military supervisor, who takes them to his own superior, and then finally to Gen. George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff (Harve Presnell).

The reason: an Iowa woman is about to receive three telegrams informing her that three of her four sons -- all of whom are in the Army -- have been killed. Two were killed on different beaches at Normandy, the other in New Guinea. The fourth son, Private James Ryan of the 101st Airborne, is somewhere in France, his status unknown.

In spite of opposition from one colonel (Dale Dye), Marshall makes a decision. "We are going to send someone to find him," he declares firmly, "and get him the hell out of there."

Of course, this means Capt. Miller and a select squad has to be diverted from their assignments to find and save Private Ryan, and not everyone is happy about it. Horvath is shocked ("They took your company away?" he asks his CO), Reiben, the cynical Browning Automatic Rifleman from Brooklyn is bitter ("Would someone explain the math of this to me? What's the sense of risking the eight of us to save one man?"), but orders are orders, and plucking a company clerk, Timothy Upham (Jeremy Davies) to replace their now-dead translator, off go Capt. Miller and his small "band of brothers" to find James Francis Ryan (Matt Damon) and get him back to his mother.

Sergeant Horvath: I don't know. Part of me thinks the kid's right. He asks what he's done to deserve this. He wants to stay here, fine. Let's leave him and go home. But then another part of me thinks, what if by some miracle we stay, then actually make it out of here. Someday we might look back on this and decide that saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we were able to pull out of this whole godawful, s----y mess. Like you said, Captain, maybe we do that, we all earn the right to go home.

My Viewpoint:

Although the film sometimes seems too unbearable to watch, I consider it to be one of the best testament to the "citizen-soldiers" who went to war and gave their all - including their lives - so that their children and grandchildren wouldn't live in a world dominated by Nazis, Fascists and Japanese militarists.  In showing us war's unvarnished ugliness - including scenes depicting American soldiers behaving callously at times - Spielberg honors his dad's generation without making a typical "Hollywood war flick" like the ones he grew up watching as a 1950s-era boy.

I've seen many war movies in my time, and some of them are among the best, but to me Saving Private Ryan is the most honest and moving one yet.  When I first saw this in a theater in 1998, I was struck by not only how attentive and quiet the audience was, but also about how emotionally affected we all were by the time the end credits rolled with composer Williams' requiem-like "Hymn to the Fallen."   I think we all left that theater with a greater awareness and appreciation of what those GIs went through on D-Day and in the battles that followed, and I believe that this movie is a fitting tribute to all the men and women who heeded their country's call to duty during World War II.

DVD Editions: Currently (December 2008) there are two different editions of Saving Private Ryan on DVD.  The first "Special Limited Edition" was issued in 1999 and is a single-disc release which contains the feature film, the featurette Into the Breach: Saving Private Ryan, plus cast and crew info and production notes.  

What I like most about Into the Breach isn't so much the behind the scenes stuff, though that's interesting, but the fact that Saving Private Ryan is loosely based on the true story of the four Niland brothers, all of whom were in the Army during the war.  They had been assigned to separate units as a result of the 1942 incident in which the five Sullivan Brothers died when their light cruiser was sunk off Guadalcanal, but in June of 1944 two of them were killed during the D-Day invasion and one was shot down and reported as Missing, Presumed Dead in Southeast Asia.  The Army, when informed that the Niland family had received the three dreaded telegrams from the War Department on the same day, decided to retrieve the fourth Niland brother and send him back home.  (The Niland family, though, was luckier than the fictional Ryans; the brother who was missing and presumed dead later escaped from a Japanese POW camp and returned to the U.S. alive.) 

The second Dreamworks Home Entertainment release is the 2004 60th Anniversary of D-Day two-disc edition.  This has a totally new package design - made to resemble an ammo box of some kind - and contains the feature on Disc 1, plus six "making of" featurettes on Disc 2. 

Though I like the extra features more on the D-Day Anniversary edition, I prefer the subtitles on the 1999 DVD; for some reason the person who was tasked with doing the subtitles for the 2004 re-issue somehow allowed errors to creep in ("mortar holes" instead of "murder holes").  I'm hard of hearing and depend greatly on subtitles - even though I think studios should think about where to put them on the screen - and I am also very nitpicky about discrepancies.