Cinema: Steven Spielberg: Reel War

First, there’s the flag. It snaps bravely enough in the breeze blowing in off the sea. But there’s something just slightly off about the image. Old Glory looks, well, old in this backlighted image–thin, faded, antique, like the unambiguous emotions it used to stir in an age less given to irony and selfishness than our own. Steven Spielberg, in his new film, Saving Private Ryan, wants us to think about that, about how “the deep pride we once felt in our flag” has given way “to cynicism about our colors.”

Then there’s the memory of those distant days, now preserved by faltering old men. One such, accompanied by his anxious wife and middle-aged children, shuffles up the shady walk edging the military cemetery that stands where the guns once looked down on Omaha Beach, where American troops began the bloody business of liberating Europe in World War II. He makes his way through ranks of crosses, their fearful symmetry broken here and there by a Star of David. Finding the grave he seeks, he falls to his knees sobbing, overwhelmed by that flood of memories it is Spielberg’s business to reimagine, then to incise on the minds of a generation dismayingly heedless of history.

Now comes the chaos that challenges patriotic fervor as well as the mind’s capacity to comprehend horror–the D-day landing on Omaha: seasick soldiers slaughtered the minute the ramps on their landing boats are lowered; other men clambering over the sides trying to avoid the fire, only to drown under the weight of their packs; the surf turning red with the blood of the slaughtered; some who make it to the narrow beach huddling immobilized yet pathetically vulnerable behind what little cover they can find. A few inch forward, hoping perhaps that being a moving target is safer than being a stationary one.

It makes no difference. Whether you live or die here is entirely a matter of chance, not survival tactics. Spielberg’s handheld cameras thrust us into this maelstrom, and his superb editing creates from these bits and pieces a mosaic of terror. We see as the soldiers see, from belly level, in flashes and fragments, none more vivid than the shot, rendered almost casually, of a soldier staggering along, carrying his severed arm–the struggle against mortality encapsulated in what amounts to a sidelong glance.

It is quite possibly the greatest combat sequence ever made, in part because it is so fanatically detailed, in part because the action is so compressed–all that panic in such a tight spot–in part because the horror is so long sustained, for more than 20 relentless minutes. “I wanted the audience in the arena, not sitting off to one side,” says Spielberg. “I didn’t want to make something it was easy to look away from.”

But perhaps the most remarkable thing about this passage is that it is not what it would be in a more typical war epic, a virtuoso end in itself. For Spielberg it is something to build on, not build toward, and that says much about his confidence as a filmmaker and the stubborn, instructive earnestness with which he approached Saving Private Ryan. To him, this carnage–his vision of which has moved strong men to run from the screening room and caused the Motion Picture Association of America to give the film an unusual (for the director of E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark) R rating–is merely context, one of the premises on which the delicately nuanced “morality play” that preoccupies the remainder of his film’s nearly three- hour running time rests.

For throughout the battle on the beach (filmed in Ireland using some 3,000 performers), Spielberg and screenwriter Robert Rodat have been introducing us to members of a small Ranger unit commanded by Tom Hanks’ Captain Miller, in effect bonding us with them as they pass through this inner circle of hell, feeling their fear, enduring their losses, sharing their weary triumph when they destroy the enemy pillbox that commands their sector. They–we–have done enough. Time now to rest, regroup.

But no, that’s not to be. Private Ryan, one of the paratroopers dropped behind the lines on the eve of the invasion, is missing, and no less a figure than General George C. Marshall, the Army’s Chief of Staff, has ordered his rescue. For Ryan is the last survivor of four brothers sent to war from an Iowa farm family. The memory of the five Sullivan brothers, killed together when their ship went down, is fresh in Marshall’s mind. He will do anything to avoid a repetition of that tragedy. Or rather, he will ask others to do anything to avoid it.

Therein lies the moral dilemma posed to Miller and his squad. They are being asked to risk their life for a young man no better than they are, no different, really. Yes, they understand, there’s an element of compassion in their mission. But there’s an element of news management as well: the upper levels of government don’t want to burden the home front with another shocking story of loss. “I asked myself throughout, Is this a mission of mercy or a mission of murder?” says Spielberg. “But I can’t answer that question. I don’t think anyone can.”

What one can say is that Saving Private Ryan is a brilliant commentary on a certain kind of war movie–those depicting a small unit with a job to do. They form something like a tradition, one with roots snaking back to silent-picture days but flourishing with particular energy during and just after World War II. You know the drill: griping guys of disparate backgrounds do their duty–holding a vital position, taking a crucial hill–in the process bonding and absorbing acceptable losses.

Those elements are present in Spielberg’s film. The eight questing men here include a rebel (Edward Burns), an omnicompetent sergeant (Tom Sizemore) and, most important, Upham, an intellectual clerk-typist (Jeremy Davies), who learns more about himself than he will ever be able to confess in the book he wants to write. “He was me in the movie,” says Spielberg. “That’s how I would have been in war.”

If Upham represents the unheroic realities of war, Hanks’ character will remind viewers with long memories of figures like Robert Mitchum’s stoic platoon leader in William Wellman’s The Story of G.I. Joe or of the men of the PT-boat squadron grimly enduring decimation in the greatest of all paeans to American dutifulness, John Ford’s They Were Expendable. Hanks is surely our age’s Everyman, as compelling as any star of the classic era and for the same reason: the reserve beneath his openness, hinting at unspoken competencies that make us, like the troops he commands, willing to follow.

In this case it is into a surreal landscape where death and absurdity come at you with equal fury and suddenness. Spielberg says it was another Wellman film, the “watershed” Battleground, that inspired the harsh reality with which he presents combat. It was, so far as he recalls, the first movie in which men cried out for their mothers when they were struck down. He also cites a more obscure influence: Sydney Pollack’s Castle Keep, for the way it blended black humor with brutality in a combat film.

It is an emotional nexus to which Spielberg constantly reverts. There’s the discovery of the crashed glider that has fallen from the skies, killing all aboard, because it was specially armored to protect a general’s ass. There’s the sequence in which a French father hands his little daughter over to the Americans for safekeeping. Immediately the soldier trying to protect her is killed. And when the child is hastily handed back to her father, she begins slapping him hysterically for his seeming abandonment of her.

There’s finally Private Ryan (Matt Damon). Found at last, he refuses to be rescued. Like all infantrymen in Spielberg’s view, he fights not for grand abstractions but for his buddies, the survival of the unit. In the film’s final, heartbreaking passage at arms, where the losses are anything but acceptable, he fights beside his would-be saviors.

Here Spielberg, the creator of Schindler’s List, the film that more than any other justifies the justness of World War II, asks us to examine the war’s morality in a different light. He is saying now that the lives that were given up in this conflict were every bit as valuable as the lives saved by those sacrifices. “Earn this,” Captain Miller grunts to Private Ryan in that final fire fight. Was he worth the price other men paid for him? We do not know. And that flag is impervious to the question. What we may hope is that Saving Private Ryan will be perceived for what it is–a war film that, entirely aware of its genre’s conventions, transcends them as it transcends the simplistic moralities that inform its predecessors, to take the high, morally haunting ground.