Historically sensitive film shows maturing Spielberg
Saving Private Ryan presents combat as savage yet clings to hope that courage, loyalty and grace can somehow make themselves known.
Saving Private Ryan, starring Tom Hanks, Tom Sizemore and Matt Damon, is directed by Steven Spielberg. Rated R for intense prolonged realistically graphic sequences of war violence, and for language.
By
Peter T. Chattaway
ChristianWeek movie critic
 |
The ads may say that Saving
Private Ryan is about "the last great
invasion of the last great war," but
don’t let that fool you. There is nothing
great about war, even if you’re fighting
Nazis, and Steven Spielberg rams that point home
with the same casual intensity that made Schindler’s
List the Holocaust movie to end all Holocaust
movies. The film begins with a harrowing half-hour sequence chronicling the invasion of Omaha Beach on D-Day. The Allied soldiers endure bad weather and choppy seas only to be gunned down en masse as soon as their boats reach the shore and let down their ramps. Jumping overboard is no solution; bullets streak through the water and hit those hiding below the waves. Those who make it ashore are shot, blown up, or forced to find their missing limbs in the sand. No one is safe...except, perhaps, for Captain John Miller. He is played by two-time Oscar-winner Tom Hanks, so we know he won’t die right away. |
| DAVID
JAMES PHOTO Corporal Upham (Jeremy Davies) finds himself thrust into the war when he joins a squad of American soldiers on a dangerous mission behind enemy lines to find and retrieve Private James Ryan. |
That’s about the only sure thing the audience can bank on. Spielberg has culled the rest of his cast–including Tom Sizemore, Ed Burns, Adam Goldberg and Jeremy Davies–from the largely obscure world of independent films, so their fates are harder to predict.
Once the beach is secure, these five men, and three others, are given an unusual mission: to find and retrieve one James Ryan (Matt Damon), a paratrooper lost behind enemy lines, and send him home. There’s nothing special about Ryan, but his three brothers have all just died in action, and the chief of staff wants to ensure that Ryan’s mother will have at least one son left alive when the war is over.
The mission makes no mathematical sense–why risk eight troops to save just one?–but, like the shepherd who abandoned his sheep to search for the one that was lost, the soldiers accept their orders and begin their search.
Not so far-fetched
The story, although fictitious, is not as far-fetched as it may sound. Newsweek reports that a real-life paratrooper, Fritz Niland, was tracked down by an army chaplain and sent home after his three brothers died in a single week. There is no chaplain in Miller’s rescue squad, but there is at least one explicitly Christian character, a sharpshooter named Jackson (Barry Pepper) who says things like "God grant me strength" every time he draws a bead on some poor German.
In this, Spielberg shows the same grudging, and caricatured, affirmation of Christianity that marked his last film, Amistad. He shows American troops praying just before they make their first breakthrough at Omaha, and he suggests, more than once, that God is for the Allies, so who can be against them? But the film does not present the radical gospel of Jesus Christ, which might challenge the militaristic ways of the world; instead it upholds a domesticated civil religion, where faith is fine so long as it follows the flag.
Still, this is in many ways Spielberg’s most mature work yet. It is that rare historically sensitive film which does not, thankfully, feel like a history lesson. And it does for World War II what Glory did for the Civil War and Braveheart for medieval battles, only better. It presents combat as brutal and savage yet clings to the hope that courage, loyalty and grace can somehow make themselves known amidst the carnage.
In risking–and, in some cases, sacrificing–their lives for a common grunt, Miller and his men even form a sort of collective Christ figure. The salvation they offer Ryan has its price, and it is high, perhaps too high for some audiences to stomach. The suffering these men endure is not pretty, but then, neither was the cross.
