Saving Private Ryan

National Review, Sept 1, 1998 by Russell Jenkins

Spielberg's Soldiers

STEVEN Spielberg's World War II movie, Saving Private Ryan, has come under fire from conservatives, including John Podhoretz in The Weekly Standard and Richard Grenier in the Washington Times. Correctly, Podhoretz and Grenier argue that Spielberg's failure to explain at any point in the film what the war was about can be read as a condemnation of war-making, even in the case of this most just and necessary of wars. It can be read that way. But should it?

When it comes to the history of that war, polls reveal a breathtaking ignorance on the part of the American public. In a recent Roper poll only 57 per cent of respondents knew that the war occurred in the first half of this century, only 30 per cent knew that Eisenhower was in charge of the European theater, and only 27 per cent knew what the term D-Day referred to. That Spielberg neglected to explain any of these things, or many other relevant facts, to an audience raised on MTV and Beverly Hills 90210 has left him open to charges that his film will pervert the average viewer's understanding of the conflict. A viewer who enters the theater not knowing why the war was fought in the first place will leave still entirely unenlightened. He might indeed conclude that the war was not fought for any reason worthy of mention.

That is troubling. But Spielberg should not be blamed for the failures of our educational establishment. His aim in Saving Private Ryan was not to undo those failures but rather to give moviegoers a picture of what the war was like at the sharp end. On a television entertainment program about the premiere of Private Ryan, a starlet opined that the conclusion to be gleaned from the movie is that no war is justified. Spielberg can't help it if an idiot watches his movie and comes away having drawn an idiotic lesson. As he has said in interviews, his intention was to tell a story that veterans of the war would find authentic. In this he has more than succeeded, making what is surely the greatest combat picture of all time. He captures all the chaos, terror, and randomness of death associated with warfare in the age of the machine gun.

In fact, the film is neither anti-war nor pro-war. For Spielberg the issue is simply one of truth-telling. This is the most remarkable aspect of the picture: the accuracy of the depictions of the range of attitudes held by the dogfaces, and the way in which the average guy on the line reconciled personal opinion with duty. If telling the truth means showing less than ideal behavior on the part of Americans, so be it. Paul Fussell has written of jails in Scotland on the eve of D-Day packed 12 to a cell with deserters. The acknowledgment that there were cowards and villains in the Allied ranks in no way diminishes the rightness of the cause. And the film's attempt to show every facet of the troops' humanity is in fact the greatest tribute that could be paid to the men who served.

The viewer may not learn from Private Ryan anything about what caused the war, but he learns a great deal about what the war was actually like for those who fought it. Spielberg handles the alien world of combat with admirable sensitivity. As any veteran will tell you, the front-line soldier's frame of reference is an extremely narrow one, delimited by the squad, at most the platoon. Combat soldiers' lives revolve around one another, and whether it is World War II, the Vietnam War, or the Hundred Years' War, when it comes down to brass tacks it is their buddies they fight for. Not their country, not any ideal, and certainly not some bunch of foreigners. There is a famous photograph taken during the Korean War of one soldier cradling another whose friend has just been killed. That image sums up the experience of battle: here are men, strangers, cast together against their will, doing things they had no desire to do in places they had no desire to visit, relying on one another implicitly, and forming bonds the likes of which are rarely found in peacetime. The combat soldier merely wants to get the job at hand over with and go home, preferably in one piece.

This is the simple but profound point of the movie. The war seems purposeless to the soldiers on the screen, because that's how many saw it. This fact will not go away if we refuse to face it.

Not incidentally, World War II veterans themselves, whom one might reasonably have expected to object to some unflattering portrayals, have overwhelmingly endorsed Private Ryan. Some have nitpicked. One complained that the film didn't show tanks running over the wounded. Another took issue with it on matters of discipline: Rangers, he asserted, would never have allowed themselves to be silhouetted when crossing a ridge, nor would they smoke or chatter with one another when filing through enemy-held territory. But these are quibbles. If, by and large, the men who went through D-Day have high praise for the film for showing as faithfully as possible the conditions under which they fought, who are we to argue with them?