Film: Saving Private RyanDirector: Steven Spielberg
Distributors: Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Pictures, 1998
Reviewer: Milan Voykovic
Benjamin Franklin wrote that "there never was a good war, or a bad peace." With his two most profound war films, Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg suggests that the Second World War was an exception. It may not have been a "good war," but it would have been a "bad peace" if Nazism, Fascism and, Japanese militarism hadn't been defeated.
These banal observations (Franklin's excepted) on good and evil may seem a strange place to begin a review of Saving Private Ryan, but in many ways the film is about the righteousness of killing and dying, or as Spielberg has claimed, the "morality of sacrifice." This is all well and good, but sadly Spielberg's sentimentality, overweening patriotism and didacticism buries the film's questions beneath heroic music and gratuitous flag waving (literal and figurative), particularly in the prologue and epilogue.
What saves this film from being more like the adventure/war movies that Spielberg watched as a boy (such as William Wellman's Battleground [1950], for example), is the way in which he handles the Allied invasion of France in June 1944. More specifically, the image of war he creates using the landing of the first wave of American troops on Omaha beach, the area between Pointe de la Percee and St Honorine in Normandy. This, the film's first battle sequence, is an exceptional piece of cinema. Here the audience is not spared any of the horror of war. As the Americans struggle out of their landing crafts and up the beach to the German positions, they are met by constant machine gun and artillery fire. Rather than the "good guys" being killed quickly and cleanly as in many war movies, the troops on Omaha Beach bleed to death. They are ripped open by machine-gun fire; they are dismembered by explosions; they drown; they burn. Moreover, Spielberg demonstrates the chaos and carnage of battle in poignant ways. In one sequence a soldier with one arm is looking at a pile of dead bodies. He bends down, picks up his severed arm, and stumbles off after his comrades. Spielberg also uses sharp handheld camera movements and sound, or rather the noise of battle, punctuated only by Captain John Miller's (Tom Hanks) momentary lapses into a silent state of shock, to make this scene truly terrifying.
From here, the film moves to the discovery by an administrator in Washington that three of the Ryan family's four sons are dead, and the determination by the US Army's Chief of Staff General George Marshall that Mrs Ryan's remaining son will be found and sent home. The eponymous Ryan (Matt Damon) is, however, a private in the 101st Airborne Division that was dropped behind enemy lines to secure objectives as a part of the D-Day invasion. Thus it falls upon Captain Miller and what remains of his company's best men to find Ryan, and it is this odyssey that takes up the bulk of the film. As they trudge into France the enlisted men complain about and question the nature of their mission: Are all our lives worth risking for one life? In terms of philosophising, that is about as far as Spielberg goes. Naturally Ryan is eventually found, but this in itself does not end the dramatic tension as Miller's men, Ryan, and assorted paratroopers then engage in another battle.
The characters of Miller's squad are drawn from the stable of stock war-film stereotypes. These are Tom Hanks as the solid Captain Miller, a brave man who cannot conceal the stress of battle and leadership all of the time; the reliable, courageous friend-of-the-Captain Sergeant Horvath (Tom Sizemore); Private Reiben (Edward Burns), the working-class grumbler who questions everything; Private Jackson (Barry Pepper), the quirky sniper from the South who repeats verses from the Bible while he shoots; Wade (Giovanni Ribisi), the slightly neurotic medical orderly; Private Mellish (Adam Goldberg), the wise-cracking Jewish boy; Private Caparzo (Vin Diesel) the big guy with a heart of gold, and Corporal Upham (Jeremy Davis), the over-sensitive wimp who may not have what it takes. As with other aspects of this film, what makes this well-worn ensemble work is the skill of those involved, especially Tom Hanks and Tom Sizemore.
Saving Private Ryan demonstrates two things: firstly, that Spielberg is a true master of the craft of film in terms of cinematography and story-telling, and secondly, that he reveals a striking intellectual simpleness when he moves away from technique. Indeed, the whole moral centrepiece of the film, that eight might die in the rescue of one, is something of a contrived non-issue. For if Miller and his men were not risking their lives trying to rescue Ryan, then surely they'd be risking their lives doing something else at the Normandy beachhead. Yes, there is something of a lesson in the way that Ryan's rescuers come to see a mission that they believed was nothing more than a potentially fatal public-relations exercise as a noble act, but is this all that Spielberg's "morality of sacrifice" means? This film seems to confine itself to asking the age-old question: have we, the "survivors" of that and subsequent generations, "lived up" to the standard bequeathed to us by those who sacrificed so much? To underline this point, much of the movie is accompanied by John Williams's score that can best be described as Generic Heroic American, the minimalist kind of music that sounds like Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" that seems to find its way into any movie in which Americans undertake an epic enterprise. If this wasn't enough, Spielberg guarantees that the audience is not baffled by equivocation by ensuring that all the Germans are bad and all the Americans are good, although to be fair the film does show that the Allies were just as capable of cruelty as anyone else.
Despite its acting, technical effects, and extraordinary battle scenes, Saving Private Ryan is a conventional Hollywood film with a conventional Hollywood philosophy. That is, if the characters that the audience is encouraged to associate with the most are safe at the end of the film, then all is redeemed. All the other victims fade into the background, as they did in Spielberg's other war epic, Schindler's List.
Saving Private Ryan is not an anti-war film as such, nor did it try to be. Spielberg does not question the morality of war because this might question the morality of the Second World War. One could sympathise with this view, but really few, with the exception of some right-wing loonies and the odd revisionist historian, would seriously claim that the war against Hitler et al was an enterprise that should not have been undertaken. Perhaps by displaying a greater sense of his audience's ability to see things for themselves without unambiguous moralising, simplistic patriotism, and crass sentimentality, Spielberg might have shown that he can handle content as well as form.
Still, the film does raise some issues that Bahá'ís may wish to ponder: Is there such a thing as a "just war"? What forms of "sacrifice" can be justified? When should collective ethics override individual conscience? In the case illustrated in Saving Private Ryan, the issues were clear. It was a "just war," American sacrifice was legitimate, and the individuals' morals were submerged in the collective ethos. As the film points out, this is what war does, and in wars there are no passengers or bystanders, as the character of Corporal Upham shows. Once involved, the individual does not get the chance, or indeed have the right as far as the authorities are concerned, to circumscribe the degree to which he or she is committed to "the cause." It could be argued, however, that this is indeed what Bahá'ís should try to do, as perhaps sacrifice for Bahá'ís does not mean dying for an ideology, nation, or group of comrades, but sacrificing the "self" to the will of God.
Does this mean, however, serving a just cause by doing evil things, i.e. killing? The guidance on the subject says that Bahá'ís cannot voluntarily enlist in any branch of the armed forces where they would be subject to orders to take human life. But what if, like Corporal Upham, one is involuntarily placed in such a branch? As far as armies are concerned, anyone in uniform, be they a cook, nurse, doctor, or clerk is a soldier subordinate to military discipline and the lawful orders of senior officers, including those to kill, and could, in theory be sent to fight in the front line if the need arose. So we are left with the questions, what is the will of God, and how do I serve it?
