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Tom Hanks leads a platoon of men through incredible sacrifice in Spielberg's landmark Saving Private Ryan |
From landing at Omaha beach on D-Day, the film follows a
single week in the lives of Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) and a platoon of
soldiers, sent on a ‘public relations’ mission. Three brothers have all been
killed in action, with their mother receiving notification of their deaths all on
the same day. The top brass decide she has suffered enough and that her last
remaining son James (Matt Damon) should be bought home. Problem is, he’s a
member of the 101st Parachute Airborne – and no one is quite sure
where he’s been dropped. Miller and his men are to find Ryan and bring him home
– despite the resentment of his men that their lives at being put at risk to
save one man.
Any discussion of Saving Private Ryan begins with
that Omaha beach sequence. It’s hard to
even begin to understand the impact this sequence had on audiences in 1998.
Quite simply, we’d never seen anything like it. Expectations before its release
was that Spielberg was producing a crowd-pleasing, Dirty Dozen style
men-on-a-mission film. No one expected a savage, brutally realistic vision of
what warfare actually meant, with its brutal, swift and random death.
The sequence starts with Spielberg panning across the faces
of soldiers in the landing craft Miller and his company are riding to the
beach. He lingers on these faces – only for them to be promptly ripped to
pieces by machine-gun fire the second the doors open. Omaha beach is a savage
nightmare, the closest thing you can image to hell on earth. Machine gun
bullets rip down relentlessly on the pinned down soldiers – and the camera
throws us right in there with them.
With drained out colours, hand-held camerawork (some of it operated by Spielberg himself), mud, blood and sand spraying up into the lens, it’s all-consuming. The film’s sound design is awe-inspiringly good, every single sound (the splatter of sand, the thud of bullets ripping through flesh, the snap of rifles) builds into a shatteringly immersive crescendo with no respite. Spielberg doesn’t shy away from the horror. Bodies are mutilated by bullets. Heads are caved in. A soldiers walks the beach, carrying his own severed arm. Medics treat soldiers drowning in their own blood, crying for their mothers. Bullets claim the brave and scared alike.
You watch and you can’t believe anyone emerged from this
alive. The cost of getting off the beach is seismic. The visceral horror
doesn’t let up over the first 25 minutes as Miller’s company – suffering huge
losses – struggles from landing craft, to beach, to storming the German
defences. Our ear drums are assaulted by bullet sound effects, and every single
step shows us some new horror. There are no long-shots, no cut aways and the
only peace we get is when we share with Miller his tinnitus from narrow-escape
explosions. The brutality is even-handed – after the massacre on the beach, the
US soldiers show no mercy to the Germans (two of whom are gunned down
surrendering and begging for mercy), officers urging their men to “let ‘em
burn” as on-fire Germans fall from incinerated machine gun banks.
It’s extraordinary – and sets the tone. Combat is immediate,
visceral, terrifying, brutal and always carries a heavy cost. The human body is
infinitely fragile and every death – high or low – is met with fear, loneliness
and regret. Veterans had to leave the cinema during screenings to compose
themselves, and viewers were stunned into silence. You could watch Saving
Private Ryan and feel you never even began to understand what war was until
then – and that even with this taste you can still never understand it. It’s a
brutal zero-sum game with only losers.
Any film would struggle to follow that: but Saving
Private Ryan does a fabulous job of maintaining the dramatic force of its
opening sequence before its book-end final battle, as the remains of the
platoon join Ryan’s unit in a seemingly-hopeless defence of a vital bridge in a
bombed out town (another grim, gripping and stunning slice of war with the
added kick to the guts of watching people we have spent the entire film with
being blown away and ripped apart by bullets).
Spielberg’s film explores what makes the cost of this worth
it. It’s a film about the power of sacrifice: the sacrifices the men make to
find Ryan, but on a larger scale the sacrifices this whole generation made for
those that were to come. When Miller urges Ryan to “earn this”, he’s speaking
to us all. Men like him died to give us the chance to make the world a better
place. The sacrifices of this platoon for one man is all part of the same price
this entire generation made for the ones that were to come.
And one of the things sacrificed is the rules of humanity.
Prisoners are shot, unarmed men are killed – if you play this game, you play to
win. Thrown into Omaha, the audience understand this – meaning we feel as
little patience with translator Upham (a fine performance of
out-of-his-depth-fear from Jeremy Davies), who whines about right-and-wrong, as
his colleagues, who understand living-and-dying is the only issue out here
anyone cares about.
Understanding this depends on relating to the soldiers – and the cast has been hand-picked for that. None more so than Tom Hanks, channelling his relatability into a home-spun, ordinary man forced into extraordinary and brutal situations that have left a shattering mark on him. With an intermittent tremor in his hand, Hanks embodies the stoic sacrifice of a generation. It’s a landmark performance. There are many fine performances in the film, Tom Sizemore (battling drug addiction and a promise of instant dismissal if he relapsed) perhaps the stand-out as his hardened sergeant.
If Saving Private Ryan has a fault, it’s that it
falls into Spielberg’s sentimentality trap. Sometimes the man can’t help
himself. The film is bookended by an old man visiting war graves – someone we
discover at the film’s end is Ryan himself. As if somehow still not
trusting us to get the message about sacrifice and horror the film has so
effectively communicated, old-man-Ryan explicitly tell us, tearily asking his
wife if he has led a “good life”. It’s a hammer-home the film doesn’t need and dents
its final impact. (I’d also say the film has endless empathy for US Joes, but sees
all the Germans as a ruthless swarm fighting an evil cause, although many of
them were also as scared).
But these are quibbles in a film that does so much right –
and which reinvented an entire genre. It’s one of Spielberg’s masterpieces, a
stunning display of directorial skill and immersive film-making, and its impact
never seems to lessen. It gets as close as any film can to showing us war – and
yet it is still a million miles further away than most of us (thankfully) will
ever have to get.
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