A brutal masterpiece.

'Saving Private Ryan'

If you've read anything at all about Saving Private Ryan, you've read about its violence. Yes, it is appalling. But most screen violence nowadays is appalling, and if Steven Spielberg's depiction of the carnage of Omaha Beach and of subsequent battles and skirmishes during the week following D-Day offered nothing more than shock through verisimilitude, there would be little reason to discuss it. After all, do we really need to be told once again that war is hell? Haven't hundreds of movies from The Big Parade to Platoon all told us the same thing by administering large or small doses of fabricated battlefield horror? What could Spielberg do except spend a few million more, ratchet up the special effects, set off a bigger bang?

But there was something more for him to do and he has done it. In the opening sequence of the Normandy landing, from the point of view of the protagonist, Captain John Miller, we see and hear not just the obliteration of hundreds of lives, not just the tearing of flesh and eruption of fluids, the screams of pain and whimpering for mother, the unleashing of sadism by expediency and the abrasion of dignity by squalor, but an awfulness above and beyond the isolated horrors: the evaporation of meaning within the furnace of war. Captain Miller, good soldier that he is, presses on but we feel what he feels: consequence is leaking out of the universe.

Nothing seems to work. In vain does A try to give birth to B. Disembarking soldiers are dragged under water by the very gear that is supposed to empower them; some are drowned, some are stilled by bullets whizzing through water as ineluctably as through air. On the beach, a soldier walks around looking for his severed arm, finds it, picks, it up, wanders off. A clump of Germans surrenders; one is gunned down, the rest are spared. Why? Another pair surrenders, both are killed, their murderers crack moronic jokes over the bodies. After frenzied effort, a medic stops a soldier's bleeding; at once a bullet pings right through the soldier's helmet and, in humane fury, the medic rips off the bandages and hurls them away, probably feeling that he would like to hurl them in the face of God. Nearby, a bullet bounces harmlessly off another helmet and its owner takes it off to stare at it in dumbfounded gratitude; a bullet crashes into his skull. After a while, one begins to feel dread each time the camera singles out a young man's face because, in this sequence, a close-up is a harbinger of death.

Spielberg must have realized that no single method of filmmaking could encompass such horror. He shot some of it in documentary fashion with nervously jiggling cameras, but other moments are captured in fluid slow motion with the sound switched off so that Miller seems to be bogged down in a nightmare from which he can't awake. Though much of the battle is viewed from inside the captain's head, Spielberg often shifts to other parts of the battlefield, even to the viewpoint of the enemy, so that we can understand why the American troops are trapped in a particular area and can't move. This alternation of simulated cinema verite with grisly lyricism, subjectivity with omniscience, captures the diapason of horror. And Michael Kahn's virtuosic editing holds it all together.

Finally, the nests of German gunners are taken out and the Allied troops can move forward. But after such horror, what follows? What drama can possibly unfold in such a meaningless world?

The rest of the movie is the answer. A mission Miller is assigned to lead, the search for a Private Ryan whose three brothers have all been killed, has been initiated by General George C. Marshall for the sake of Ryan's mother. The audience knows the charity and essential sanity of the quest, for we have seen the moment when Marshall makes his decision not on impulse or for the sake of public relations but out of deeply founded compassion. (And the actor who plays Marshall, Harve Presnell, makes him every inch the Zeus you want a great general to be.) Furthermore, we have also been present when Ryan's mother receives the news of her family's near-total destruction, so we want her to have her only remaining hope fulfilled.

But back in Normandy, Miller and the other men on the patrol, desperate for a bit of respite, can't see the mission as anything but nonsense. Why should they risk their lives for one man when so many have died on the beaches? And the patrol itself seems to lead them deeper into absurdity. Even compassion brings on absurdity, as in the scene in which a soldier's pity for a French family in a bombed-out building nearly gets a little girl killed while Miller's apparent indifference saves her. A still won't give birth to B.

But mankind cannot bear very much absurdity. By the time the patrol locates Private Ryan, his continued survival has become not just an assignment to them but a gauntlet flung in the face of chaos. And if Ryan, unable to digest the shock of his brothers' deaths, selects not to go home but to stay with his company at a bridge that a German panzer unit must not be allowed to cross, so be it! They will stay with him. These dogfaces have become grungy Sisyphuses.

Indestructible humanity masked by indifference is the keynote of Miller's character. Since he's a man constitutionally less able to bear the horrors of combat than anybody else in his patrol (except for his translator, an intellectual radically out of place), and yet is expected to show the most fortitude, he must maintain an unfissured facade of stoicism. Amazingly, the bluff pretty much works and gives Miller breathing space enough to recover his wits in tight situations. Yet a palsy has taken hold of the captain's right hand and won't go away. (His men see it and, in embarrassment and dread, avoid mentioning it.) This quivering is war itself, coursing through his body and destroying him from within. But it is also an index of his humanity. If the rest of him were to commence shaking, he would soon be a useless wreck. But if the hand were to stop shaking, he would be a true creature of war, that is, a monster. Miller keeps marching, searching, commanding, killing, sparing, rescuing, trembling. He remains a civilized human being at war.

He is also the one fully realized, three-dimensional character in the film, for let it be admitted that most of the others seem based on the types usually found sharing patrols in Hollywood war pictures. There is the Tough Sergeant, the Wise Guy Malcontent (last done by Denzel Washington in Glory), the Four-Eyed Intellectual, the Hillbilly Sharpshooter now bagging Germans instead of possums. But all these are so superbly acted and supplied with such lively dialogue by Robert Rodat that I wasn't aware of the schematicism until I saw this movie a second time.

The character of Miller works on a higher level because scenarist and director have employed a more daring strategy in creating him. While the characteristics of the others are revealed at once, Miller, an unalterably private man, remains fairly opaque throughout the movie, sharing just a glimpse of his civilian past with his men, and even then only as a maneuver to distract them during a particularly explosive situation. In fact, Miller would be completely mysterious if it weren't for the effortless way Tom Hanks draws us close to him and siphons his thoughts and feelings to us. Hanks brings all sorts of emotions close to the surface and then blocks them before they become too apparent. For that is what this great performance is - a series of stifled outbursts within a man who cannot afford to feel too much.

Spielberg's skills are at their zenith here - not just his oft-celebrated talent as an action director (the panzer tanks project the same thudding menace as Jurassic dinosaurs), but also his less remarked-upon ability to control tone and to modulate from one emotional key to another. One example: In the scene in which two soldiers, German and American, battle each other for control of a knife (the only weapon at hand), the fury of the hand-to-hand combat gives way for just a few seconds of queasy black comedy as the German, trying to distract his opponent, starts babbling to him in German. But, as the knife sinks slowly into the dying American, pity and horror grip the viewer and that instant of black comedy evaporates, leaving not the slightest suggestion of sadism to curdle the viewer's reaction. Throughout the film, Jamusz Kaminski's photography certifies and amplifies everything Spielberg struggles to achieve. Kaminski often deliberately lowers the audience's expectation of natural beauty by desaturating colors; consequently, wherever color is momentarily allowed back onto the screen, even so banal a sight as cows grazing on greenery under an overcast morning sky leaps up to comfort the viewer just as it may comfort the emotionally battered soldiers.

Saving Private Ryan is a great movie, but I don't necessarily recommend it to you because I don't know who you are. Masterpieces aren't for everyone, nor are they right for all seasons and moods. W.H. Auden said they should be reserved for "high holidays of the spirit." This film might inaugurate a universal Yom Kippur. It almost physically assaults the viewer for much of its length, yet its conclusion doesn't leave you spiritually jangled or raddled. Before the fade-out, an old man, fifty years after Normandy, contemplates the graves of the men who fought beside him and on his behalf. He turns to his spouse: "Tell me I've led a good life." He wants to be worthy of the sacrifice of the dead. But what kind of life must one lead to deserve such a sacrifice? What kind of life should any of us be leading in view of the sacrifices made by our fathers and grandfathers? A creative life? A spectacularly virtuous one? A merely peaceful one? The graphically portrayed suffering we have just witnessed forbids any quick answers but injects the question right into your soul.