One of the Best World War II Movies Ever and One of the Best of 1998
Fine. Saving Private Ryan is great. Are you happy now? But it isn’t the greatest World War II movie ever; it isn’t even my favorite World War II movie of 1998, though it is in the top three for that year. This doesn’t make it not great—because it is. The movie might be called sappy or corny; some might even call it mawkish, but I wouldn’t. I might call it corny or manipulative, but it is also exciting and moving. It’s a landmark; it’s a masterpiece.
The movie is well done. The sound design is good. The effects are excellent. Everyone seems to have appropriate haircuts and equipment. Everyone associated with the production is apparently good at his, her or gender non-binary’s respective job. It’s loaded with strong actors, including a young Paul Giamatti and a younger still Nathan Fillion in small supporting roles. I hear that its star Tom Hanks is pretty good at acting, too.
It is directed by Steven Spielberg. Spielberg is not the most subtle director—that’s not his thing—but he is also great at his job. The combat scenes are both chaotic and entirely clear. You know where everyone is and what they are doing, even if the characters don’t understand what they’re doing in the midst of battle. You believe them, and you understand them. There’s a clear point to everything, which is something he does well.
At the end of the assault on Omaha Beach that opens the film, as Tom Hanks’ character, Captain John H. Miller (kind of a generic name, when you think of it), looks over the carnage of the beach, we see the destruction, but we also see his hand trembling uncontrollably, an important character point, and we end on the body of one the dead brothers of the title character, which gives that narrative information and leads us to the next scene, where typists find that Private Ryan’s mother is about to be informed that three of her four sons have died and her remaining son is somewhere in Normandy.
So we didn’t just pan across the beach to see dead soldiers and fish or just to reinforce the traumatic experience of crossing the beach Miller just had, or the terrible cost in human lives; we also get one more piece of narrative information. This small piece has a beginning and an end, gives us a great deal of information and points us to the next thing.
But not every scene moves us forward. The following clip illustrates my quibble with Spielberg—and “quibble” may not be a strong enough word. We don’t strictly need this scene where Private Ryan’s mother is informed that all but one of her sons has died. We’re aware he has a mother, the point of the scene with Fillion is that everyone has family, but Spielberg shows the mother anyway, and he does it masterfully. She’s a simple hardworking woman doing the dishes on the family farm, who has a banner with four blue stars and a picture of four young men by the door. Note that the mother collapses only when she sees the priest exiting the car—now certain it is terrible news, though we know she cannot suspect how terrible.
This scene gives us no new information—it exists to tug at our heartstrings, to get an emotional response—not to move the story. This is manipulative; it demands you feel sad. And you may well now be asking: what are artists supposed to do? My criticism may be unfair, but I kind of resent this scene, though I acknowledge it is well done.
Overall, there is very little fat in this film. The only other possible extraneous bits are where individual squad members tell stories from home. Ed Burns’ character doesn’t have to tell a story of a zaftig women, but everybody else gets to tell a story from home, and most of the other ones also move the characters’ arcs. These might seem extraneous, but they usually help reinforce character’s humanity or bring up information that will pay off later, making injuries or deaths we see more meaningful.
The dialogue in these between the battle scenes is also some of the best written I’ve heard. Many of the small human moments in The Longest Day, The Big Red One or Sea of Sand are corny. Here, sure they’re corny, but they’re authentically corny—those are corny things real people might say between battles, and they move stories along.
The big speeches that Matt Damon and Hanks give are also corny, but they work—they are genuinely moving, and they are moving because they are well performed and because the weight behind them—the gravity of the character’s situations—feels real. When I know I should find them overly sentimental, I am instead moved. That’s Spielberg’s thing—he is authentically corny, and he knows how to move an audience, damn him.
However sentimental the movie may be, for good or bad, the combat scenes and the character moments within them make this movie worth watching.
The majority of the action is in two scenes nearly bookending the film, and they are the main reason to watch. There’s a climactic final stand battle against overwhelming odds, which is apparently a thing to do in war movies, and the early scene of the D-Day landing on Omaha Beach; maybe you’ve heard about that.
One clear reason this movie is moving is that Spielberg, perhaps ironically, earns our involvement with the scene at Omaha Beach. This scene is widely and wildly praised. This praise come primarily because the scene is great. This scene is better than the Omaha landings depicted in The Big Red One and The Longest Day, which are both very good indeed, and we don’t need to tear them down to build this one up. This one is tense, thrilling, exciting and awe-inspiring.
They spent a couple of bucks on this shot
There are at least three glaring cliches in the scene (in one, an extra narrowly escapes death, someone calls him a “lucky bastard,” and he is then, of course, instantly killed.) that are there, in part, because Spielberg wants to give us everything, but the cliches aren’t what stick in your mind. You barely have time to say “what a cliché that is” because there’s always a new next moment to react to. Inside the chaos are small moments like a wounded soldier hesitantly picking up his severed arm from the sand, not himself sure if that is the appropriate response. We quickly move away from his dilemma because there’s no time to linger—there is too much to take in.
We follow Captain Miller’s personal struggle through explosions and tracers, with small cuts to see the dead, the dying, the fearful and the determined, and the Germans firing onto the beach. The moment the ramp opens in his landing craft has stuck with me since I first saw the movie. He wades laboriously through the water and the sand, twice trying and failing to save individual soldiers. All before firing a shot.
Then he leads an assault on a German position that seems tremendously authentic and exciting to me while also introducing thematic elements. The scene is a masterpiece. Why should I describe it? The very least you should do is watch the landing scene and then tell me how great it is.
And when American forces finally break through after being slaughtered mercilessly and kill surrendering Germans or continue to shoot already dead ones, you feel they have earned the right to do this. How can you expect someone who has crawled past the dead and dying—as we have—under constant threat of death, to allow the people who moments ago were trying to kill them to just throw up their hands and say “game over; don’t shoot me. I have my hands up”?
However you might feel about shooting prisoners before or after this scene, Spielberg makes it clear we cannot judge or condemn these men. And throughout the rest of the movie while they deal with their traumas, they can give rousing speeches that might not work in other movies. Okay, maybe Tom Sizemore didn’t earn the right to use the movie’s title in his big speech, but I don’t think it’s his performance—it just may never work to give the movie’s title in a speech.
And the whole ending is a pretty big cliché. “Let’s have big grand final battle while resolving all the character arcs,” but the final battle is executed with the technical and artistic excellence Spielberg and his team have demonstrated throughout the film.
If, by some odd twist of fate, you’re reading a review from this site and haven’t already seen Saving Private Ryan, see it—unless you’re my aunt or something: Ruth, it has a lot of graphic violence.
Recommendation
Why not buy it? Sure, it’s probably available on a television service you subscribe to, but it’s really good. The Steelbook is, of course, better but also currently prohibitively expensive, unless there’s a stray copy on eBay or at your local Best Buy–and there might be. The Steelbook DVD is not prohibitively expensive.