Saving Private Ryan (1999, DVD)

Part One: The Movie

If 1993's Schindler's List was Spielberg's soul-searching and ultimately redemptive examination of why we fought the war (the movie graphically shows the Third Reich's true nature as an evil regime), then 1998's Saving Private Ryan is the emotional bookend that depicts the sacrifices made by citizen-soldiers who put their lives on hold -- and often lost them -- to save the world from becoming a charnel house ruled by Adolf Hitler and his Axis partners. It is a powerful if viscerally graphic film that has, in retrospect, reawakened our nation's interest in World War II and made us realize, however belatedly, how much we owe to the men and women of the rapidly dwindling "Greatest Generation."

Spielberg's film begins with a deceptively calm opening: a shot of a seemingly faded -- it's really only backlit by a very bright sun -- and fluttering Old Glory, waving in a stiff sea breeze blowing across the American Military Cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach in Normandy, France. We then see an old ex-GI, his wife and grown children in tow, stopping in front of a particular grave marked by one of the nearly 9,000 white crosses and Stars of David, one for every soldier who died during the Normandy campaign in 1944. The old man, an ex-paratrooper from the 101st Airborne Division, collapses with grief in front of the still unidentified soldier's grave and Spielberg focuses on his face and especially the eyes, blue eyes that seem to be looking past the crosses and not seeing the concerned expressions of his family.

It will be the last moment of relative peace for the movie watcher, for Spielberg uses the focusing-on-the-eyes as a transition from the old vet's eyes in the 1990s to those of Capt. John Miller (Tom Hanks) as the Higgins boat carrying a platoon of Army Rangers approaches one of the sectors of Omaha Beach. The men, some of them veterans of previous landings like Miller and Sergeant Mike Horvath (Tom Sizemore) but mostly green and untested in combat, are seasick and tense. Some pray, others get violently sick, but all of them just want to get off those landing craft and onto the beaches. But as soon as the ramps drop and the Rangers try to step into the seemingly shallow water, all hell breaks loose as the Germans open fire with everything they have.

What follows is the most intense and realistic cinematic depiction of the D-Day invasion, certainly far more violent and bloody than Saving Private Ryan's closest cinematic cousin, Darryl Zanuck's The Longest Day. Although that 1962 classic is an earnest attempt to portray the Normandy invasion truthfully, it doesn't show such vignettes as the "lucky bastard" whose helmet saves him from getting killed, only to have his brains blown out when he takes it off to examine the bullet holes the soldier who drowns when he gets snagged in an underwater obstacle .the Higgins boat that catches fire when a GI's flamethrower is hit by a German bullet and sets the contents off in a spectacular fireball and the brief but horrifying glimpse of a one-armed 29th Division soldier wandering on the beach and picking up his severed arm.

The first harrowing 20 minutes center on the Rangers' attempt to get off the beach and destroy a German pillbox. Here Spielberg shows us how the junior officers and NCOs (represented by Miller and Horvath) rallied the confused and intermingled soldiers of the first wave and led the way inland to take the war to the Germans. Using the various techniques learned over time in North Africa and the Mediterranean, the veteran captain and first sergeant get their makeshift company of Rangers and soldiers from other units past the seawall, up a bluff, and into the pillbox itself.

Spielberg also uses this sequence to introduce us to a few of the eight men who will be sent on a daring rescue mission, including Carpazzo (Vin Diesel), Reiben (Edward Burns), Jackson (Barry Pepper), and Wade (Giovanni Ribisi).

Saving Private Ryan's main storyline begins with a wide shot of the invasion beaches that gradually narrows to a close-up shot of a single dead GI lying on the surf line, with RYAN, S. stenciled on his backpack. Immediately we go from the beaches of Normandy to the somber and almost grave-like quiet of the War Department in Washington, DC. As overlapping voiceovers read excerpts of letters from commanding officers to newly bereaved relatives and spouses of dead soldiers, one secretary gets one letter, then another, then a third examines them, then rushes to her military supervisor, who takes them to his own superior, and then finally to Gen. George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff (Harve Presnell). The reason: an Iowa woman is about to receive three telegrams informing her that three of her four sons -- all of whom are in the Army -- have been killed. Two were killed on different beaches at Normandy, the other in New Guinea. The fourth son, Private James Ryan of the 101st Airborne, is somewhere in France, his status unknown.

In spite of opposition from one colonel (Dale Dye, the military advisor who trained the cast for the combat scenes), Marshall makes a decision. "We are going to send someone to find him," he declares firmly, "and get him the hell out of there."

Of course, this means Capt. Miller and a select squad has to be diverted from their assignments to find and save Private Ryan, and not everyone is happy about it. Horvath is shocked ("They took your company away?" he asks his CO), Reiben, the cynic BAR man from Brooklyn is bitter ("Would someone explain the math of this to me? What's the sense of risking the eight of us to save one man?"), but orders are orders, and plucking a company clerk, Timothy Upham (Jeremy Davies, last seen playing Charles Manson in CBS' remake of Helter Skelter) to replace their now-dead translator, off go Capt. Miller and his small "band of brothers" to find James Francis Ryan (Matt Damon) and get him back to his mother.

Part Two: Why I Watch This Film

For as long as I can remember, I've had a deep and abiding fascination -- almost an obsession, really -- with World War II. Even as a kid at the peak of the antiwar movement during the Vietnam War (which I was much too young to understand), I'd plop down in front of the TV and watch such fare as The Sands of Iwo Jima, Tora! Tora! Tora! , The Halls of Montezuma, and just about any war movie aired by the then-indy television station WCIX (Channel 6) in Miami. I still remember that I convinced my mother to let me stay up way after my 10 o'clock bedtime to watch The Longest Day on the CBS Late, Late Movie in the pre-David Letterman 1970s, and I distinctly remember spurning Star Wars to go see Richard Attenborough's 1977 flop, A Bridge Too Far twice.

Steven Spielberg, too, has had a similar obsession with World War II. His father Arnold was a radio operator-gunner on a B-25 in the China-Burma-India Theater of Operations during the war, and young Steven grew up listening to his dad's stories about the war and watching some of the same movies I'd watch 20 years later as a kid. Among some of his early boyhood movies, the future Oscar-winning director filmed two "war epics" called Fighter Squadron and Escape to Nowhere. Later, World War II would surface in more than half of his feature films, either peripherally (as in the Indiana Jones Trilogy) or directly (1941, Empire of the Sun, Schindler's List, and Saving Private Ryan).

Although I don't share most critics' opinion that Spielberg had not done any "grown up" films until both Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan were released (as if The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun had never been made!), I do think they are his true masterpieces. Yes, certain Spielbergian touches are present in both films -- he always has a scene involving children, and he is always technically adept, using film in ways no other director had before. Yet, he never seems remote and cold, as Kubrick sometimes was, and he never falls prey to the temptation to show his GIs as paragons of virtue. Indeed, some Americans are shown to be prone to cold-blooded vengeance: after the pillbox is assaulted and two Czech inductees attempt to surrender, an American private shoots them, then when his buddy asks "What did he say?" the shooter smiles and says, "Look Ma, I washed for supper!" They are not always brave, either; in the climactic battle for the bridge at Ramelle, Upham freezes in the stairway of a house where one of his squad mates has just been killed, letting the contemptuous SS soldier pass him by.

Part Three: The DVD's Features

The 1999 DreamWorks Home Entertainment Special Limited Edition DVD features the 2-hour, 49-minute film in its original 1.85: 1 anamorphic widescreen format, with English captions and two audio tracks (Dolby 2.0 and 5.1 Surround. As in all DVDs of Spielberg-directed films, there is no director's commentary track. However, there is an exclusive message by Spielberg about the National D-Day Museum (which hadn't been opened yet at that time), two theatrical trailers, a making-of featurette, "Saving Private Ryan -- Into the Breach," and production notes with cast and crew bios.