Movie of the Week #22 - Saving Private Ryan

Story exists because we need it. And sometimes, a story will take as subject something that’s not fluffy kittens and birthday parties.

War is among the most horrific things humanity has ever wrought upon itself. Yet it’s a common choice for a story. The scale between exploit and education is an eternal debate for almost any example one can find, where a storyteller choses to appropriate such a setting for something that, at some level, is intended as entertainment.

For a long time in the history of movies, war was often painted with a light, sanitized touch. Many stories would put the war off-screen, and characters would simply speak of battles. Sometimes they’d won those, sometimes not, but what audiences were presented with rarely delved into the depths that war holds. And when action, when the war itself was put in frame, it would often be not just simplified, but rendered inoffensive so as to avoid turning the audience away.

With Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg upended that calculus. Where a lesser filmmaker (such as Bay with Pearl Harbor) sought only to dial up the thrilling excitement of battle, Spielberg found a way to wield the horror of war as a surgeon operating on a patient might employ a scalpel.

He rejected the notion that war is too grisly and disturbing to reveal to an audience. But he also refused to embrace a gratuitous depiction. He found a balance every bit as delicate as that of a doctor striving to save a life where the slightest wrong cut in either direction would be a slice too far.

Saving Private Ryan is a brutal experience, so much so that it almost immediately began to be heralded as true enough to haunt veterans of the battlefields it utilized in its story. Yet every instance of violence and gore, of inhumanity and insanity, has a purpose on the screen.

For example, it’s common to hear someone say “I love Saving Private Ryan, except for the bookends. They’re so boring.” Or something similar. It’s almost fashionable when you read online commentary about the film, to see people putting in such comments. Discounting the scenes that aren’t set directly in the brutality of war.

The opening bookend shows us an old man, with who we presume is his family following, at a cemetery. The shots are clean and clear. Row after row of grave markers.

There are a lot of them.

But you don’t tend to look at them, at the cemetery, and think of them as deaths. You categorize it into something more clinical, like cemetery. Something that’s easier to deal with. You do it unconsciously. And for entirely understandable reasons. After all, who can go through their life battered and beaten by an unending wave of emotion?

Saving Private Ryan only then, after that opening “bookend”, cuts to what a lot of discussions consider the “true” opening of the movie. The war. The landings at Normandy. We only see one beach, but it’s not at all difficult, or inaccurate, to extend most of what we see, perhaps even more than what we see, to the others that aren’t directly depicted onscreen.

It’s famously brutal. Proclaimed to be one of the most horrifically realistic war sequences every assembled on film. The death is front and center, and goes on even after you think Spielberg might have perhaps made that point.

And then it goes on some more. The machine guns raking through the landing boats as their loading ramps drop. The artillery shells blowing men apart. Bullets ripping across the sand seemingly at random. Characters are spared a miss by one, then taken by another.

The bunker that has been killing their fellows on the beach below, a beach they themselves just crossed, being engulfed in flame as the only way to stop the killing. Or at least some of it.

With more killing.

Some of the characters onscreen cower, some cry, some seemingly go a little numb, some persevere. Captain Miller himself cycles through this; caught off guard by the terror of the slaughter. For that’s what it was. It was a human wave attack pushed through the very teeth of a prepared defensive position. The entire attack, by design, accepting brutal initial casualties to get follow on units into assault position, and then seeing those units savaged and torn apart in turn to get those behind them into position to take the beach.

It’s exciting to some. Shocking to others. And in either event, horrific to think you’re not merely watching something made up. Something a writer sat down and decided to explore. War is real. World War II is real. The deaths were real.

Spielberg shows it in a way that breaks it out of that nice, easily compartmentalized category we so often keep it in on the occasion we might think of it.

This theme is explored through Saving Private Ryan. Miller is haunted by what he’s been brought to do. What he has done, what he might do. He holds the power of life and death over his men, and simply by calling their name at a certain moment, or not, their lives are forever altered.

Leadership is one of those subjects humanity will probably never come to terms with. If you’re “in charge” of leading a group of revelers to the next bar, it’s not the same kind of leadership as picking out four men to round a corner with rifles in hand as machine gun pours bullets down upon it.

Yet as Miller says when his company sergeant points out the terrible consequences of the orders that send those men into that fire, “it’s the only way to get everybody the hell out of here.”

Then, later, Miller finds himself swept up with an almost fever for fighting the war. For a moment he decides that perhaps this mission to find a man, to find and spare him and his family the added weight of a fourth death after three brothers have already fallen, is a waste. He could be fighting the war, not gallivanting about France looking for one lucky soul who’s got a ticket home.

It’s easy to simply bow to empathy, and stop at the conclusion that the Ryan family has earned, deserves, their sole surviving son back. That this family has, as the Bixby letter read by the Army Chief of Staff states, “laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.” They’ve done their part. They’ve paid their price.

But, as the squad debates up until Miller’s confession in the aftermath of Wade’s death and the doubt it triggers within his men, how is it right to sacrifice them? For someone they’ve never even met? As Miller says, in that very confessional, “I don’t know Ryan. I don’t care.”

Ryan himself, when he’s found, protests why him. Even with tears in his eyes from the news he’s now an only child, he raises up his fellow soldiers and proclaims they’ve all fought just as hard as him. Why do these deaths earn him the right to withdraw, to leave them in the lurch and face their own deaths without his aid?

For that’s what they’d be doing. As the final battle sequences shows us, in the same thrilling and brutal manner as the others, the battle is intense. Victory is not assured. The cost of defeat in that little battle would be a not inconsequential complication in the Allied European war effort as they seek to land heavy forces via a proper port.

It’s not explicitly discussed, but by the most trivial of inference it’s no challenge or stretch at all to assume that the Germans capturing that bridge would lead to Allied deaths on a broader scale. One beyond a single patchwork unit struggling to hold an improvised desperate defense.

Ryan’s plea to not abandon the men he’s defending with sways Miller, and the squad joins the defense at great cost. Only two of Miller’s men survive, and Miller’s not one of them.

But Ryan does, which Miller seems to find something of a comfort. Perhaps comfort is too strong of a word. It might just be a poor attempt at a consolation prize, seized upon by a dying man, but in Miller’s final moments he wants the sacrifice to be worth something. He’s not going home. Ryan is.

No soldier wants to see a sacrifice to be in vain.

Saving Private Ryan stands alone amid scores of war stories Hollywood has presented over the decades of movie making. It tackles a terrible subject with brutal honesty that wins you over rather than turning you away. It doesn’t shy from the horror of the subject, but neither does it shame you for finding it thought provoking and interesting.

Veterans of World War II are known to refuse to talk about their experiences. As is their right. They served, they paid, and as such it was entirely up to them whether or not they wished to go back to the places they were required to in that conflict. Not even in conversation.

Storytellers sometimes help bridge the gap between reality and fantasy. Saving Private Ryan’s bridge is more a vantage point. Jutting out from a dry, clinical telling of history sanitized for easy consumption, and toward the terrible truth of reality. Offering viewers a place where they can consider for the length of a movie the horror of history.

A triumphant feat of storytelling, tackling such a subject, such an event, and showing us the lessons a detached reading of the subject might be unable to connect us with.

And it’s a crime against the arts it wasn’t recognized as such by The Academy.