Bloodbath and beyond

By Michael Gray

Fans of film director Steven Spielberg will know by now that his new World War II epic, “Saving Private Ryan,” is not the combination of FX thrills, cozy morality lessons and feel-good sentimentality we’ve come to expect from him. Filmed partly on the County Wexford coast in Ireland, Spielberg’s latest work is based loosely on true stories of two American families who lost several brothers in the Pacific and European conflicts.

“Saving Private Ryan” is hard-edged and tough-minded about the violence and the incredible loss of life that war inflicts on both sides. And with the exception of the prologue and epilogue in a Normandy war graveyard, the film is quite devoid of his usual saccharine stylings.

Instead of lying back to have hearts warmed and lachrymal ducts squeezed once again by the master manipulator of emotions, audiences will recoil from the kick in the stomach that is Spielberg’s opening battle scene on the Normandy beaches in June of 1944. The onslaught doesn’t let up for the next 25 minutes as U.S. landing craft, prevented from beaching by rough seas and German barriers on the shoreline, disgorge their cargo of troops and artillery into the sea to face the bloodbath of Omaha Beach. Numbed as we are to the sight of fake gore by horror films, mobster movies and sci-fi disasters, the blunt reality of seeing the dismembered corpses and the wounded soldiers spilling entrails in a factual conflict, will shock the most jaded of viewers. The action is so frenetic that the camera seems to be mounted on a jackhammer rather than a tripod, and the lens is splattered regularly with blood as we see wave after wave of U.S. troops mowed down by German machine-gun fire.

If you’re squeamish about overly realistic depictions of carnage, closing your eyes won’t help much. The stereophonic sound of bullets striking against metal helmets and tearing holes in human flesh, and the sucking sound of viscera, shoved by frantic medics back inside wounded bodies as they scream for God, mother and morphine, will let you know exactly what’s going on without looking at the screen. The only upside to the relentless shell blasts and gunfire is that the battle noise is so loud it renders the clichTd orchestral swellings of John Williams’s soundtrack barely audible for lengthy periods.

By the time the battle ends and the red tide laps the gray, corpse-strewn sand, the audience gasps with relief and Spielberg gets down to telling the story outlined in the film’s title. Back in the U.S., a government typist in the death-letter typing pool notices that she has drafted three death notices to a Mrs. Ryan in Iowa. Army efficiency ensures that all three missives arrive at the Ryan household the same day, causing the distraught Mrs. Ryan to collapse with grief at the loss of her three sons. She has a fourth son believed to be still alive in Northern France, and the army brass decides to send a special team into enemy territory to find him and take him home.

If the audience finds it hard to believe that the brass would do such a thing, whether for humane or PR reasons, the requisite motley crew sent to save Private Ryan (Matt Damon) feels the same way. The team is made up survivors of the Omaha Beach landing and is led by Tom Hanks, as Captain Miller. In an impressive performance that leavens his usual geniality with sardonic grit and war-weary cynicism, Hanks leads an ensemble cast of young and up-and-coming actors who make up his reluctant rescue team. There’s an aggressive, pragmatic sergeant (Tom Sizemore), a religious hillbilly who’s also a crack marksman (Barry Pepper), a callow translator (Jeremy Davies) who has seen no action yet and normally packs a typewriter instead of a rifle; an earnest medic (Giovanni Ribisi), an Italian private (Vin Diesel), and a disgruntled Brooklynite (Ed Burns). This is Burns’s first effort as an actor in a film that he neither directed nor wrote. Partly for this reason, and partly because there’s a war on, no beautiful girls fall in love with him. Despite this, Burns acquits himself well as the surly dissenter who thinks it’s crazy to risk eight lives to save one.

As the team sets out on its mission, the brutal tempo of the earlier battle scene is replaced with a mood of grim, unrelenting dread as the soldiers inch their way through one deadly encounter after another to find their man. Strong, edgy dialogue by scriptwriter Robert Rodat lifts the film above conventional buddy-movie standard, and fleshes out the different characters as they look out for one another en route to the climactic battle scene.

In most big-budget war films, the major expenditure (besides star payroll) is earmarked for the opening and closing battle scenes, with small skirmishes sandwiched in between. This film is no exception, and ends with a stunning pitched battle between a depleted American force, defending a bridge in a bombed out Normandy village, and a ragged bunch of German troops with Panzers, half-tracks and assorted infantry. The scale of combat in this finale may be smaller than that of the earlier battle, but Spielberg once again delivers a visual and aural assault so real, and so horrifying, that the film was only a couple of exit wounds away from an NC-17 rating.

The film’s main weakness is the flimsy story that is slung between two of the most harrowing battle scenes ever filmed. While it may be based on a real event from the war, despite good dialogue it packs little narrative punch. And in the weeks following the Normandy landing, true stories of heroic deeds and tragic misdeeds abounded on a scale that would relegate the Private Ryan story to the sidelines. Spielberg’s commitment to showing the real horrors of war deserves a more substantive central theme.

In “Saving Private Ryan,” Spielberg sends out no wholesome messages, and a cynicism untypical of his earlier style pervades the movie. No good deed goes unpunished. The humane act of sparing the life of a German prisoner, whom Hanks’s troops would much rather shoot than allow to live, later results in the death of the film’s most overtly Jewish protagonist. And when Private Caparzo (Vin Diesel) tries to help a terrified French child in the bombed-out ruins of her parents’ farmhouse, he exposes himself to enemy sniper fire, with deadly consequences.

Spielberg pounds home the message that war is the villain, and all the participants victims of the savagery that still compels mankind to conquer by brute force, no matter how far our civilization advances.

Even the retreating German troops are presented at close quarters as terrified human beings, unlike the evil Nazi caricatures of his other films. They’re just as full of blood and intestines as their American adversaries, and just as pathetic when staring down the wrong end of a gun barrel.

Anti-war films have been around for as long as we’ve had films, from the World War I epics “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” and “All Quiet On The Western Front” in the 1920s and ’30s, through the series of Vietnam films in the ’70s and ’80s. But none has gone to this extreme, showing the carnage of war as it really is. This is the kind of cinematic violence that will make conscientious objectors out of fully paid up NRA members, and make the rest of us wonder if the reasons for waging war can ever be worth the price paid in human suffering.

Film based on true family tragedies

The book written by Max Allen Collins on which “Saving Private Ryan” is based, and the movie script by Robert Rodat, both take their cue from wartime tragedies involving two real families, the Sullivans of Iowa and the Nilands of upstate New York.

The Sullivan family lost five sons when the ship on which they were serving, the USS Juneau, was sunk by Japanese torpedoes at Guadalcanal in 1942. The Sullivan parents became symbols of the sacrifices made in the cause of freedom, and their story was made into a film, “The Sullivans” (later re-released as “The Fighting Sullivans”), in 1944.

The Nilands lost two sons in the D-Day landing, and another was listed as Missing In Action after his plane was shot down over Burma. Senior army officers, not wanting another tragedy as absolute as that of the Sullivan family, sent envoys into Northern France to bring the youngest brother back. He completed his service back on home ground in the U.S. A year later, the MIA brother in Burma showed up alive, having survived a parachute landing in the jungle, and several months in a Japanese POW camp

– Michael Gray