Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Directed by Steven Spielberg

After the spate of war films in the mid-to-late 80s that rendered Vietnam a total cliché (take that, vets—screwed again!), it seemed like the genre was played out and never to return. Saving Private Ryan invests the "war movie" with an unforced moral weight and a greater realism than perhaps has ever been captured. The opening half hour, depicting the first waves of soldiers landing at Normandy during the D-Day invasion, is grittier and more challenging than any war film I've ever seen, although I'm not sure it warrants the extreme overreaction by the media in terms of its violent content. This is not a film that glorifies killing, but rather a rarity wherein the body count has emotional consequences.

Spielberg's direction of the beach-storming sequence eclipses even the greatness of Schindler's List, so it's all the more unfortunate that the rest of the film is, by and large, stupid. The only comparison I can draw is to Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, which similarly has an incredible first part and a limp second part. In the case of Saving Private Ryan, the problem stems more from the imposed Hollywood conventions—the obvious "character development," the idiotic "back story," and especially the terrible present-day framework tacked on to the beginning and end of the film, in which the war survivor comes to terms with the ghosts of the past. Give me a fucking break.

Although Spielberg knows damn well he can make whatever movie he wants, he still seems uncontrollably drawn to the "big" Hollywood button-pushing and other types of manipulation. At his best, the guy is definitely one of the best film-makers ever, but as his subjects get increasingly serious (i.e. he's at least making films that don't involve killer sharks or cute aliens), his tendencies toward selling his movies to the audience seem more and more hollow. Saving Private Ryan opens with a badly filmed and hackneyed scene where an elderly man, accompanied by his incredibly supportive family, stumbles through a military cemetery until he finds the grave marker he's looking for. This triggers the expected "flashback" which is the amazing Normandy sequence. Surely Spielberg realizes that the film would have been better served without this joke of a prelude, which was, to make matters worse, clearly modeled on Titanic. He's filmed one of the best extended passages in cinema history, and subjugates it to a scene that is only in the movie so that middle America "gets" the drama. But subtlety has never been Spielberg's forte.

The Normandy scene comprises about half an hour of unrelenting brutality, and it is kind of hard to watch, actually. Revising the accepted historical mythology that America "stormed the beach" and "took Normandy," this scene portrays the first waves of soldiers, who were more or less gunned down without mercy until the reinforcements arrived and made the "taking" of the beach possible. The film focuses on an officer played by Tom Hanks, a schoolteacher whose experiences in the war are taking a huge toll on his body and spirit—we know this because as the film progresses, his hand quakes against his will. And don't be afraid of missing this detail, as Spielberg close-ups on the shaking hand numerous times to hammer the point across. So one of the film's central messages is that war causes some forms of epilepsy? Stop the war! Better yet, stop the shaking!

After the beach has been secured, Hanks gets an unusual assignement—he is to rescue the sole surviving son of a widowed mother in Iowa (awwww), three of whose sons have been killed in the same week. Improbability aside, it's a fair premise for a movie, and the rest of the film follows Hanks and his troop as they search for the elusive Private Ryan. From here on out, it's a decent but somewhat repetitive movie, building up to another "big" climax dealing with the troop defending a bridge from the advancing Nazis. The cast is solid, with Tom Sizemore and Henry "Penis Breath" Thomas especially good, and Giovanni Rabisi as annoying as always. Our generation remains sharply divided on Giovanni Rabisi, who has had my enmity ever since I saw the X-Files episode "D.P.O." involving a kid who "is lightning." Yuck. I know that Rabisi has his supporters, but I say, show me the money! (Points awarded for awkward Jerry Maguire reference, too early to be kitschy, yet too late to be trendy.)

Hanks is very good, also as usual. Matt Damon, in the title role, is not very good at all, except in one scene where he weeps uncontrollably, but that's just because I'd like to see that fuckhead weep his life away. The film cripples itself with an even more Titanic-esque ending in which Damon's face morphs into the elderly man's face, who cries as his family reaches out to support him. Double yuck! The movie completely did not need this idiotic and very forced bookend, and would have had a pretty amazing ambivalence without it. Spielberg comes very close to making a deep movie, but drops all his cards.

That said, it's definitely worth seeing, and in parts is thoroughly enjoyable. My objections to it seem to be more intellectual than practical, as I did enjoy watching it, for the most part. I'm sure I'm not the only one who wishes Spielberg would stop crying so much about how Hollywood tacitly hates him,a nd just make a movie that proves how great he can be. Schindler's List was certainly a great movie, but a lot of people attributed that to the subject matter. Spielberg needs to make a great, low-key drama and keep all his "bigness" in check. Plus, it's very difficult to enjoy a movie when Jerry Orbach is nowhere to be seen – I'd recommend him for the lead in the next Spielberg production.

Review by Tula O'Toole