 The "Unequivocally Reprehensible" Memo Praising Private Ryan There's Something About Dumb Comedy |
Praising Private Ryan... Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan may be the best movie ever made about heroism and honor in wartime. And that's because it shows how heroic conduct can be extraordinarily difficult, instinctive, impulsive, deliberate, and lucky -- all at the same time. In the chaos of the landing at Omaha Beach, soldiers' flesh rips away like wet tissue -- when metal meets muscle, the latter doesn't have a chance. Men are dropping right and left, before they -- or anyone around them -- even knows what's hit them or where it came from. In a situation like this, a person is reduced to pure survival instinct. And pushing up the beach -- particularly surviving the push up the beach -- becomes a heroic act. As Sam Fuller's alter ego put it at the end of The Big Red One (Fuller's 1980 platoon-movie masterpiece, starring Lee Marvin and based on his own WW II experiences): "The only glory of war is survival." The Big Red One makes you feel the truth in that statement, and Saving Private Ryan explores it even further. (I wish Fuller could have been around to see this movie; I would love to have heard his reaction to it.) For all the nostalgia about WW II as "The Last Good War," Spielberg demonstrates that combat is combat -- and to the people in the middle of it, it's a pure hell of chaos and horror -- whether in a French village or a jungle in Vietnam. At the end, a man who survived WW II, and whose comrades died in part to save his life, asks his wife to tell him he's led a good life, been a good man. That, the movie suggests, is also a definition of heroism: If the deaths of soldiers are to have some meaning, then the burden is on the living to make their lives worth while -- to "earn it," as one character says. I'd begun to despair that anybody even bothered to think about "being a good person" or "doing the right thing" anymore. Most of the people I'm around day to day seem to worry mostly about their career and financial ambitions rather than "leading a good life." The idea of doing something just because it's good and right, and not because of the fear of damnation or some other external threat or force, may strike us as all the more extraordinary in the late 1990s. And I sure didn't think anybody would make a movie that could put across such an idea with such power and conviction. Anthony Lane in The New Yorker (you know, that magazine Tina Brown used to work for...) has a phrase that perfectly describes what Spielberg achieves in his battle footage: "high-speed Bosch." It puzzles me, though, how Lane (and a number of other critics I've read) have sought to praise Private Ryan by dismissing the filmmaking skills behind it. Just because you don't notice them, doesn't mean they aren't there. It's just that Spielberg's masterful technique, his astonishing fluency in the medium, is employed for a different purpose here than it was in, say, "Close Encounters." Lane writes that the half-hour opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan "provides what must be the most telling battle scenes ever made, largely because they tell you almost nothing. They just show." Well, nothing could be further from the truth. In movies, there's no such thing as "just show" -- from the crudest cinema verite to the slickest big-screen music video, the medium is the message. Technique is technique, artistry is artistry, whether you're conscious of it or not. Lane is quite right when he says that the "sense of historical duty weighed heavily on the body of the action" in the much-praised Schindler's List. But I don't think I'm merely quibbling if I take issue with his next sentence: "The Omaha Beach sequence, on the other hand, simply throws a barrage of detail at you and leaves you to work it out for yourself." There's nothing "simple" -- or random -- about the way the Omaha Beach sequence is put together. Oliver Stone may mix film stocks and speeds to no particular end, but Spielberg knows exactly what he's doing from shot to shot. The sequence wouldn't be anywhere near as effective if he didn't. One moment, the images are jerky and blurry, charged with nervous energy like a slightly under-cranked silent newsreel. Bullets and explosions whiz and bang all around. Then, there's a concussive blow, and the action shifts into slow motion -- your ears filled with an equally disorienting roar. Conveying impressions like these, getting you to see through somebody else's eyes (whether it's a soldier at Normandy or a suburban kid), is what moviemaking is about. When Lane acknowledges that "Spielberg's objective in these opening minutes is to... make a film that doesn't look like a film -- or, at least, to arrange his drama so carefully, and with such instinctive fidelity to the illusion of chaos, that people watching it will forget that they are sitting in a movie theater" -- well, he's right on the mark. In contrasting Spielberg's approach to gunfire in Private Ryan with Sam Peckinpah's in The Wild Bunch (and Cross of Iron), Lane says, "This is not to deny that Spielberg himself is ceaselessly artful; it's just that his art is relentlessly self-camouflaging." OK, but I still think what he's observing has less to do with those movies than it does with the way we're conditioned to respond to certain stylistic devices. Give us some grainy black-and-white stock, or smeary video, and a hand-held camera and what we see feels more visceral, spontaneous, "real" -- like a documentary. But those techniques are the result of the choices just as deliberate as the ones behind a majestic CinemaScope crane shot. When The Wild Bunch was new, Peckinpah's jarring shifts between wide shots and close-ups, rapid-fire images and slow-mo ones, quick cuts and excruciatingly drawn-out ones, hit like a series of punches to the gut. People cringed, flinched -- even fainted. For a perfect illustration of this, see (Spielberg pal) Brian DePalma's brilliantly subversive 1970 political/porno comedy, Hi Mom! In the middle of the movie, it suddenly turns into a b&w "National Intellectual Television" documentary called "Be Black, Baby," about a theater troupe that abuses its audience to give them the "experience" of what it's like to be black in America. Of course, it -- and the movie of it, which is presented in a little round-cornered frame in the middle of the otherwise black screen, like a little TV -- is totally staged. But because of the "documentary" style, this segment makes audiences very uncomfortable; every time I've shown it, people have walked out in the middle. The illusion of aesthetic distance is gone -- until the movie's protagonist (Robert DeNiro) shows up playing a cop, and then you can almost hear people sigh in relief: "Oh yeah, it's only a movie..." NEXT: Something About Dumb Comedy
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