Saturday, August 8, 1998

Director's D-Day frighteningly real

By Donald Kaul

Your average summer movie blows up things: warehouses, skyscrapers, the White House, whatever. Who has not thrilled to the trailer showing the hero leaping straight at you while the building in back of him explodes into clouds of flame? It's all in good fun; nobody gets hurt.

"Saving Private Ryan" isn't like that. When something gets blown up in that film, it stays blown up. And none of it is in good fun.

Surely the first 25 minutes of the film, depicting the Allied invasion of Normandy, present the most harrowing vision of modern warfare ever committed to screen.

Imagine yourself on a landing craft in the English Channel on June 6, 1944. The weather is vile and the flat-bottomed boat pitches sickeningly in the choppy water.

Finally the boat thumps to a halt, the forward ramp flops down and ... a machine gun opens fire in your face. The troops at the front are literally blown back into the boat, dead before they can set their feet in the water.

You clamber over the side to escape the devastating fire and plunge into frigid water over your head.

Your pack and weapon drag you to the bottom. Perhaps you're able to escape the straps, perhaps not. If not, you drown.

But maybe you're one of those who doesn't drown, who makes it to shore to wade through a surf made maroon with American blood, to stagger onto a beach strewn with the dead and dying. The roar of battle is deafening.

Perhaps, by some miracle of good fortune, you evade the still withering machine gun fire and make it to cover, where the man next to you is blown to bits by a mortar shell.

Welcome to World War II.

Steven Spielberg, who directed the film, doesn't just ask you to imagine that reality, he imposes it on you.

War movies tend to fall into one of several categories: War is hell ("All Quiet on the Western Front"); war is insane ("MASH," "Catch-22"); war is a terrific adventure ("The Dirty Dozen," "The Guns of Navarone").

"Ryan" is all of those at one point or another, but in that first 25 minute, war-as-hell is given its due. One writer has said that "The Longest Day," another story of the D-Day invasion, made you wish you'd been there to take part in so heroic an enterprise. "Private Ryan" makes you grateful you were not.

The film makes it easy to see why so many World War II combat veterans were reluctant to talk about their experiences for so many years. Memories like that are for nightmares, not for nostalgic reminiscence.

But Spielberg is, above all, a Hollywood director who makes Hollywood films. So, after that initial scene, the film lapses into the heroic mode, complete with the model Hollywood rifle company (the wiseguy kid from Brooklyn, the Jewish soldier who takes the war personally, the good ol' Southern boy who can shoot, a kid with glasses who reads a lot).

The squad, under the command of a captain (played with great intelligence by Tom Hanks), is sent on an improbable mission: to rescue an American paratrooper from the perils of combat because his three brothers have just been killed in the war and Chief of Staff George Marshall doesn't think his parents should have to suffer another loss.

It winds up as mission accomplished, but not before the brave Americans, in a scene that would have been at home in a John Wayne movie, hold off a Gotterdammerung assault on a bridge by a vastly superior German force. The audience, laced with men old enough to be World War II veterans, broke into applause when the coward in the film finally gets up enough nerve to shoot a treacherous German soldier who is attempting to surrender. Seemed like old times.

Whatever its flaws and compromises, "Saving Private Ryan" secures its place among the great war films in that first 25 minutes, portraying of the horror, cruelty and nobility of the D-Day invasion.

Yet perhaps the single most moving moment of the film is a quiet one. It takes place in Iowa, on the porch of the Ryan farmhouse, early in the film. Mrs. Ryan sees a car come up the drive and goes out to meet it. We watch from the door of the house while a priest and a military officer -- there to tell her of the death of her sons -- get out of the car, and she slowly sinks to her knees under the weight of the news she has not yet heard, but apprehends.

War knows many kinds of hell.

© 1998 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.