Realism, Genre, and Saving Private Ryan

Landon | Realism, Genre, and Saving Private Ryan Review Phil Landon University of Maryland - Baltimore County landon@charm.net Realism, Genre, and SavingPrivate Ryan The allied forces face fierce German opposition during the massive D-Day invasion. The remarkable critical and box office success of Stephen Spielberg's, Saving Private Ryan, has been widely attributed to the film's uncompromising realism. In it, Spielberg offers his version of the D-Day landings on the Normandy Beaches during June, 1944. The story begins in the memory of the title figure, now a man in his seventies making a pilgrimage to the battlefield where he had landed with the 101st Airborne Division a half century earlier. As Ryan (Matt Damon) kneels before a grave, the film cuts to 58 I Film & History landing craft filled with a company of Army Rangers led by Captain Miller (Tom Hanks). They are among the first troops to land Omaha Beach, and, for the next half hour, the film plunges the audience into the midst of their hellish experience in what has been described by military historians and D-Day veterans as Hollywood's most grimly realistic and historically accurate depiction of a World War II battlefield. The Omaha Beach sequence is the first of three relatively self-contained movements which make up the film's Regular Feature | Film Reviews central narrative. The second begins a day later when Miller and six survivors ofhis shattered company are ordered to search the landing zones of the 101st Airborne for a Private Ryan. The paratrooper's three brothers have been killed in action (two of them on D-Day), and Chief of Staff General George Marshall (Harve Presnell), out of pity for their mother, decides to save her last surviving son. As Miller and his men, now joined by Corporal Upham (Jeremy Davies), a translator and linguist with no combat experience, move inland, their meditations on the meaning of their battlefield experience and the moral justification of their mission become as important as finding the last Ryan brother. When they do find him, he is among a small, leaderless group of paratroopers charged with preventing a bridge on the Mederei River from falling into the hands ofcounter-attacking Germans. Ryan tells Miller that the men in his unit are the only brothers he has left and refuses to leave his post, setting the scene for the third and final movement of the narrative. With Miller in command, the rangers and paratroopers prepare a last ditch defense (complete with a bunker they name The Alamo)against an advancing German armored unit. In a sequence filled with events that recall a generation offilms about World War II, the outnumbered Americans manage to hold the bridge until fighter bombers and members of the 29th Infantry Division arrive to relieve them and turn back the German counter attack. The cost, however, is very high, for Miller and most ofhis men are killed. Ironically, one of the survivors is Upham, who cowered in terror throughout the battle. With Miller's death, the film returns to the present where viewers see that Ryan is kneeling before Miller's grave tormented with doubts about his having lived a life which can justify the cost ofhis salvation. The film ends leaving unanswered the question which haunts the aging veteran: "Have I been a good man?" Saving Private Ryan is in many ways an extraordinary film. Spielberg has not only given fresh dramatic life to a Hollywood genre widely dismissed as moribund, but he has invested it with a tragic seriousness seldom found in World War Two combat films. In addition, he uses the generic conventions to explore the moral ambiguities of what studs Terkel has called the "last good war," ambiguities which those conventions commonly disguised or displaced. From the screen-filling image of the American flag which opens the film and recalls the opening of Franklin Schaffner's Patton (1970), to the story line adapted from Lewis Milestone's A Walk in the Sun (1945), to the characterization of Captain Miller which is modeled Lt. Walker (Robert Mitchum) in William Wellman's The Story ofG.I. Joe (1945), Saving Private Ryan is filled with appropriations from...