Saving Private RyanTen Years On

Ten years ago from the writing of this, Steven Spielberg proved once again why he is considered one of the greatest film directors of all time by releasing Saving Private Ryan. There may be better war films than Saving Private Ryan, but there are very few.

Saving Private Ryan starred Tom Hanks as Captain Miller, a Ranger officer who leads his men in the invasion of Normandy on June 6^th, 1944. Other cast members included Tom Sizemore as Sergeant Horvath, a young Matt Damon as the aforementioned Private Ryan, and future big name stars Vin Diesel, Edward Burns, and Paul Giamatti.

The film begins seconds before the first wave, including Miller and his men, hit Omaha Beach. What follows is twenty minutes of the most terrifying and realistic depiction of battle that has ever been put to the film. Using a hand held camera, Spielberg moves from horror to horror as waves of men hit the beach and try to advance. Entire formations are swept away by machine gun fire, some even before their boots hit dry sand. Human beings are shredded, blown up, and abused with all the fearsome instruments of 1940s warfare. The noise is deafening. There is the sound of weapons, machine guns, rifles, artillery, grenades. There are the human sounds. Orders being shouted. Men screaming in fear. Men screaming in agony. Men making sounds that no human voice ought to make. Prayers to God. Cries to mother.

At the end of it, after the German blockhouses are taken, the viewer is physically and emotionally exhausted. Most people, even those who have worn a uniform, have never experienced what happened that day on Omaha Beach. There were anecdotal of men then in their seventies, who had known naught but peace for over fifty years, nodding to themselves and saying, "That's what it was like."

Remember those first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan when next you see someone in uniform. Bravo Steven Spielberg for showing us the cost of freedom.

It is only after the D-Day sequence that the real story starts. We meet the unfortunate Mrs. Ryan back in the United States. She's unfortunate because she has just learned that she has become a Gold Star Mother, someone who has a son who fell in battle, three times over. She has another son, though, a Private in the 101^st Airborne Division which jumped over Normandy just before Captain Miller and his men waded into Omaha Hell. He is thought to be still alive. This information comes to the attention of General Marshall, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

General Marshall, with a world war to manage, doesn't hesitate. Mrs. Ryan will be left with at least one son to comfort her in her lost. Whatever the cost, Private Ryan will be found and returned home.

And that, as John Ford would have said, was Captain Miller's department. With a group of Army Rangers, the elite of the elite in World War Two, he sets forth into war torn Normandy to find Private Ryan.

Of course, as those steeped in history would know, there is a problem. The 101^st Airborne was strewn all over Western Normandy, with units broken up, lost, off target. There was no calling on the radio to ask Private Ryan to present himself to headquarters. He would have to be physically found in the midst of a battlefield and physically returned to the next available transport out.

What ensues is an Odyssey that has a lot of talking, a few horrific scenes of combat, cumulating in a second pitched battle that frames the movie. This part of the film generated some controversy, when the screenwriter put these words in the mouth of tough, old Sergeant Horvath.

"Someday we might look back on this and decide that saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we were able to pull out of this whole godawful, shitty mess. Like you said, Captain, maybe we do that, we all earn the right to go home."

The "one decent thing?" Surely putting down Hitler and destroying his ghastly empire had the dimensions of decency? Mind, as Spielberg's historian advisor Stephen Ambrose would have pointed out, World War II soldiers rarely focused on the great issues for which they were fighting. Their concerns were more visceral. Surviving to take the next breath. Not letting down your buddies. Not being overtaken by the terror. Dreaming of the long lost comforts of home.

One mistake the critics made was to assume that the screenwriter or director agreed with every sentiment expressed by their characters. Steven Spielberg had made a film called Schindler's List. One suspects he knows the importance of the larger issues.

Sergeant Horvath's sentiments are undermined when Captain Miller and his Rangers finally find Private Ryan, a fresh faced teenager among other fresh faced teenagers preparing for battle in a ruined French town. Captain Miller informs Private Ryan that he is going home and tells him why. Pack you gear, your days of death and terror are over,

Private Ryan refuses. "Hell, these guys deserve to go home as much as I do. They've fought just as hard."

"Is that what I'm supposed to tell your mother when she gets another folded American flag?" asked Captain Miller.

"You can tell her that when you found me, I was with the only brothers I had left. And that there was no way I was deserting them. I think she'd understand that."

Where do we find men like that? As long as we can, our republic will endure.

War weary as Captain Miller is, he knows now what his real mission is. Private Ryan and his buddies are preparing to meet a German counter attack. If they cannot hold, the Germans may well reach the tenuous toehold the Americans have on the beaches. So Miller and his men decide to stay and fight alongside Private Ryan.

The battle that follows is a horror of tiger tanks and desperate fighting in the rubble. Men behave heroically or cowardly as is in their natures and the in the moment. And the film ends in the present day where an elderly veteran stands before the grave of another who never saw the sunset of that day.

Thank you, Steven Spielberg. This one will endure for as long as there is film.