I have a long history with this movie. This is one of the few R-rated pre-17 movies my parents let me watch during my adolescence. They had seen it previously and, like Braveheart before it, deemed it historically important enough to watch despite the language, violence, and adult situations. My aunt and uncle sought to prepare me by saying that I shouldn't eat anything before or during the opening battle scene. So, my parents, brothers, and I ignored them and chowed down on pizza during the carnage of Omaha Beach. I didn't ralph. I didn't even get queasy.
While I was thankful for that, I look back and wonder why. What transpired on screen was a bloody mess. Soldiers dying horrible deaths. Blood coloring the water in the ocean washing against the dead bodies. Lost limbs. People crying out in anguish. Mentally, I knew it was horrible. Physically, I didn't really have an expected response. It's easy to say I had already been somewhat desensitized by violence in the media I took in by that age, and that's true. However, it was because I was distanced from the event. It was happening right in front of me, albeit on a television screen, but it was a moment from long ago. Something which I had never experienced directly or really indirectly at that point. It was only after I had gotten to walk along with the eight men in search of Private Ryan that I felt a gut reaction to the horrors of war. I personally got to know the men. Their conversations, while characteristic of male soldiers (I'm guessing), were familiar enough for me to connect to them. The danger around them began to seem more immediate.
It helps that the cast is incredible. I can't believe more of these guys didn't break into the A-list with their wonderful performances. Giovanni Ribisi, Adam Goldberg, Jeremy Davies, Barry Pepper, Tom Sizemore - all give amazing, career-defining performances.
Then there's the A-list duo of Tom Hanks and Matt Damon. I thought it was a rip off when ole crazy (Roberto Benigni) won the Best Actor Academy Award over Hanks and proceeded to leap onto the seats in the theater and stepped on Spielberg's head on his way to the podium. I liked Benigni's performance in Life is Beautiful, but a lot of his performance was grandstanding. Hanks was more natural in his performance, showing a full range of believable emotion and underplaying big scenes, sometimes allowing his co-stars to share and even steal the spotlight. Damon is only seen in the last parts of the movie, but he makes a great impression in a scene where he recounts to Hank's Captain Miller the last night he and his brothers spent together before the war. He moves through the dialogue cautiously, truly putting together a memory that had been forgotten until that moment. This is one of the scenes where Hanks allows a co-star to shine by employing perfect reactions. It's a wonderful and important scene. The whole movie has been looking at the mission as just that rather than a man, the namesake Ryan. Hanks has to be convinced that staying put and helping save the bridge is a good move when his character had previously said that his goal was to save Private Ryan to get closer to going home to see his wife. He agrees to stay, but he doesn't see how Ryan is a man rather than a mission until that conversation. You can see Hanks warm to him as he tells his story, seeing Ryan is worth saving not only for Hank's trip home, but also for the sake of saving a good man. It's a wonderfully written and acted scene.
Take everybody but Edward Burns and you have one of the best casts of the last ten years. Edward Burns has one mode of acting in all his movies - he coasts through as the macho New Yorker with either a chip on his shoulder or love in his heart, sometimes both. He pushes through dialogue as though he is an actor who has memorized his lines and decided long before shooting how bland and fake he's going to be. For a character exhibiting so much anger, doubt, and wit he has very little believable lines. Close the guy's mouth for the length of the movie and you'd have a better performance. I guess I just get tired of every single thing that he's says being soaked in bravado. I can see that the way his character is written lends itself to bravado, but Burns has no sense of how to temper bravado with a sense of naturally occuring moments. His whole performance seems incredibly calculated, planned to the point that any spontaneity probably died in him during the first read-through.
As I have stated before, the conversations between the eight soldiers are well-written, well-directed, well-acted pieces of cinema. They all reveal so much about the characters without coming right out and saying anything. Take Ed Burns story about the bra and the woman. Take Giovanni Ribisi's story about his mom coming home from work. I love that talk, coming to a realization about something from your past that only materializes in places far from anything you knew. Ribisi is so wonderfully understated, not showy at all in a moment that is his for the taking. It's a quiet moment stolen from the battles and gunfire and explosions. The quiet moments among men telling seemingly meaningless stories end up to be defining moments for the actors. Even Burn's aforementioned scene is well done.
I could gush for a long time about the movie, and all you would really learn is that I am more a loyal fan of the fan rather than an impartial critic analyzing the film. I will say that all these years after the first viewing with the pizza and the family, I have found the final moment to be too heavyhanded. I want to say the movie earned the right to push the moment, heighten the importance. Perhaps it did. All I can say now, a little cinematically smarter since that first viewing, is that it seems forced. I hear all sorts of talk about how Spielberg tacks on those happy, sentimental moments on the end of his movies, but I never really felt bothered by his loyalty to happy endings. This is probably the only time I have been bothered by his final choices. I love the framing of the film with the flag - it's not subtle, but it certainly says a lot with one image, especially at the end of the film after seeing all the horror these men had gone through in response to the call of duty. But the thing right before that (you who have seen the movie know what I mean) is the problem, in large part due to the fact that the old man is the worst actor in the film.
****
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