CINEMA: Saving Private Ryan From Europe

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Asoka Jayasekera

LONDON, Sep 22 1998 (IPS) - From anyone’s viewpoint, Steven Spielberg’s latest epic ‘Saving Private Ryan’ is a remarkable directorial tour de force – brilliantly rendered and performed. The movie has been a huge success in the United States since it opened mid- summer, and now is doing brisk business at the box office here.

But the media hype is wrong. Spielberg has not transformed the genre, Saving Private Ryan really is just another war film.

True, it is a step beyond the form, in the way that ‘Star Wars’ was more than just a sci-fi feature. For sheer scale of reconstructed destruction, there’s been nothing like ‘Private Ryan’ since 1968 when director John Guillermin was sold an entire Czechoslovak town to blow up when filming ‘The Bridge At Remagen’. And Spielberg echoes, then eclipses, the choreographed horror of the battle scenes in Sam Peckinpah’s ‘Cross of Iron’.

But for all its power, Saving Private Ryan remains a simple film about a wartime mission behind enemy lines. Scores like it have been made by Hollywood since 1918 – Lewis Milestone’s ‘A Walk In the Sun’ or the flawed film version of Norman Mailer’s novel ‘The Naked and the Dead’ to name but two.

In Saving Private Ryan, a squad of U.S. soldiers are ordered to find a lost paratrooper whose three brothers have died in other battles within days of each other. The generals decide that the last surviving boy must be returned home to his mother. He makes it, though almost all the squad dies in the process.

The standard characters of Hollywood combat films are all present and correct: the trembling rookie who finally finds his nerve, the grizzled sergeant, and the tough but caring commander.

The squad members are the obligatory cross section of U.S. society, the Jew, the Hispanic, the Irish-American, the WASP. There is no African American in the the unit, since the film is set in 1944 and the U.S. Army did not desegregate its forces until 1950.

So far so familiar. The difference lies in the way Spielberg marshals the components, the music, the cinematography, the editing, the script, into a single collective, unbeatable force.

Like any good general he keeps his grasp on the big picture without losing sight of the detail. Frames from the opening scenes recreate the pictures taken by legendary war photographer Robert Capa on D-Day, which remain the best known images of that battle.

The slightly washed out, over-exposed film adds a dusty patina to the scenes and recall the first colour documentaries made during the war.

Of course, no Hollywood war film would be complete without the scene where the anguished trooper turns to his officer and asks: ‘What was it all for, Sir?’ That question is asked often enough in Saving Private Ryan. But ask the same question of General Spielberg, and as ever, he has a message.

Private Ryan’s message is that, War Is Hell. From his recent interviews, Spielberg gives the impression that he thinks that the cinemagoers might have forgotten this fact, after watching years of films starring John Wayne in which men die, ‘movie-style’, largely painlessly, and without spilling blood.

Private Ryan’s soldiers do not die quietly or bloodlessly. Nothing is spared the audience. The huge gouts of blood spurting from wounds, the dense pools of rounded crimson, the dying soldiers’ desperate pleadings, and above all, the fire in the air. Spielberg has tapped the nightmares of old soldiers, not their memories.

And his rendition of the hidden wounds of war, the psychological damage it wreaks, and above all, the racking guilt endured by the survivors, is as traumatic to watch as the physical destruction of the men’s bodies.

The unnaturalness of this existence is spelt out, for Spielberg believes that man is not by nature warlike, and that only by superhuman effort can he plumb these depths. These are not feats of valour, but feats of endurance.

For Spielberg, even a ‘just’ war has an absolute power that corrupts absolutely. Even the terrified rookie, horrified by the killing of German prisoners at the outset of the mission, finds it within himself by the film’s end, to gun down his own surrendered enemy who had returned to battle.

No man is safe from its degenerate grip, not even that icon of American wholesomeness, multi-Academy Award winning actor Tom Hanks, who plays the squad leader. Both he and Ted Danson, the liakable barkeeper from the 1980s TV sitcom ‘Cheers’ who turns up here as a paratroop colonel, are greyed and fouled by war almost beyond recognition.

This is what war makes of even the nicest folk, Spielberg seems to say. Meanwhile, the Germans, of whom all but one among hundreds in the film are utterly faceless, die much less bloodily than the Americans, and generally as painlessly as any Japanese actor might at the hands of John Wayne.

It seems that all the Americans, and not just Private Ryan, need to be saved from the horror, and brought home to the safety of mother’s hearth in Iowa.

Poor Private Ryan is in Europe after all, that most barbaric of continents, where even today national leaders who could see their countries richly ensconced in the European Union in a decade, choose instead to run militias of men who board refugee buses to slit the throats of babies. No wonder Spielberg went no farther into it than Ireland to make the film.

The war of Spielberg’s generation was fought in Vietnam, not Normandy, but he is far from tackling that conflict. John Wayne had a go in the bizarre 1968 film, ‘The Green Berets’, but as war correspondent Michael Herr memorably said, the Green Berets “wasn’t about Vietnam. It was about Santa Monica’.

Saving Private Ryan sometimes sounds like an old-fashioned isolationist appeal for all young Americans to be kept safely out of the reach of such dreadful goings on. Maybe Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan wasn’t about Normandy; perhaps it was about Bosnia.