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Reviews:
Saving
Private Ryan
by JE De Matteo
Huge
At
the time of Saving Private Ryan’s
release there was so much talk about
the brutality in the scene of the
landing at Normandy I couldn’t
believe it.
I remember viewing this talk as
just another sign of the
‘pussification of America.’
Then I saw the movie, and it was
brutal; I wasn’t prepared for it. My mind was on a completely different emotion than the one
the film evoked.
In
retrospect, I must admit that I should
have known better.
Besides all the interviews
I’d heard around the time of the 40th
Anniversary of D Day, when veterans
were all over TV and radio describing
their experiences in great detail, I
had a catalog of personal conversation
that I’d had over the years to draw
from.
Conversations with men I knew
and worked with, men who had been
there and survived the horrors of
Omaha and Utah beaches, men who’d
parachuted, as did James Ryan, behind
German lines.
I
should have known better, yes, but
I’d never thought of the stories
I’d heard as anything but stories.
Saving Private Ryan puts a face
to the fear of anticipating…what?
Battle?
Certainly these men anticipated
a fight once they got to the beach, a
fierce fight to be sure.
A fight that would take those
of them that survived up the beach to
the German positions; a fight that
wouldn’t end until the German
fortifications were destroyed.
The
anticipation of the battle alone was
enough to frighten any man or boy
heading toward it.
As they got closer to the
battle, bullets zinging overhead and
ricocheting off the steel hull and
flat nose of the LST (Land Sea
Transport), and the disorientation
caused by the small boat’s gyrations
in the rough seas were added to the
mix. Spielberg masterfully depicts 20 renderings of the reaction
to the fear factor in the bobbing
craft grinding its way toward 20
destinies.
And
when the flat nose of the LST slowly
transforms itself into a ramp, it’s
like a door opening into hell, loosing
demons and wraiths and other unimagined
horrors.
As in a nightmare the
participants are driven forward,
however it is no dream but reality
that they plunge into.
Whether static or in motion
they enter hell and are embraced by
the arms of a gruesome destiny.
Gruesome
indeed, the beach was a veritable
lottery of horrors, made more perverse
by the carnage and screams of the
maimed and dieing.
You
see this is what I’d missed: the
personal brutality endured by the men.
And this is exactly what
Spielberg and Robert Rodat, the
director and screenwriter, slap us
with over and over again: The
inhumanities suffered and inflicted,
the personal, and what had to be,
unimagined horror of it all.
Men at deaths door crying,
“Mommy;” people dragging half a
body to safety, men searching for a
lost limb, only to pick it up and walk
off with it.
Oddly,
the thing that made me re-watch Saving
Private Ryan at this time was a sermon
at Mother’s Day Mass last Sunday.
The priest is a Chaplin with
the Army Reserves (during the
aftermath of 9/11 he’d celebrate
Mass with combat boots and fatigues
visible beneath his vestments…but
that’s another story).
In talking about the importance
of Mothers, he told us how amazing it
was that hardened soldiers, in the
fear and pain of a severe wound, would
call out for that anchor in their
lives, their mother.
That regardless of how common
it is, it is still always remarkable
to witness.
The
horror and fear that would turn a
war-hardened fighter into a whimpering
little boy, the achievement of
spawning a deep empathy to the
brutality personally experienced by
character after character is what the
moviegoers were talking about and
that I misunderstood. That brutality,
and the rising to it by heroic men is
the story that Rodat and Spielberg
tell in Saving Private Ryan, and they
do so magnificently.
DVD
The DVD is excellent;
it boasts the highest quality
resolution and imagery,
according to its billing.
And as far as this view
is concerned the movie looks
great.
The Spielberg short is
interesting (if you like this
go to http://www.DDayMuseum.org).
The behind the scenes
segment on the DVD has some
excellent interviews that are
worth seeing.
Joe De Matteo |
Saving
Private Ryan
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