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>> Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan can't see the war for the battle

by JOANNE LATIMER

"How do you find decency in the hell of warfare?" asks director Steven Spielberg in the press notes for Saving Private Ryan. Actually, it's a full-colour, 31-page book about the film that would fill the Department of Veteran Affairs or the War Amps foundation with budget envy.

So, Spielberg wants to show decency amidst the chaos of battle. That's fine, if he can avoid falling in love with his battle footage and instead bother to say something poignant about the horrors of warfare. But he doesn't. Saving Private Ryan is five-eighths battle film. The rest is, essentially, a sentimental American buddy movie that happens to be set around the D-day invasion.

Spielberg was up to the challenge of capturing the scope of carnage during the landing. The first 45 minutes are comprised mostly of gory deaths--up close. There are leg stumps, blown-up heads, shell attacks, chest wounds--you name it. The water runs red, literally, and many young American men die. In this, you could say that Spielberg exposes warfare as traumatizing folly. He certainly doesn't avoid the physical reality of war.

But wrap me in an American flag and set me on fire if this movie doesn't glorify war more than anything else. The romanticism of dying for/with your buddies in battle is, apparently, the brand of decency that Spielberg has come up with. Tom Hanks plays Captain John Miller, a good-hearted leader who has won the devotion of his platoon. Ed Burns plays the skeptical kid from Brooklyn, Adam Goldberg is the Jewish kid from Yonkers, Barry Pepper is the Bible-quoting cracker from Tennessee (a pro sniper) and Tom Sizemore plays Sergeant Horvath, the only believable soldier in the bunch.

The troop is sent behind enemy lines to fish out one Private Ryan and deliver him home safely, since all three of his brothers were killed in battle. With swelling music in the background, General G. Marshall decided that Mrs. Ryan should be spared her remaining son. This means that Hanks' entire troop is jeopardized on a mission to find one man. There's some bickering about it, but orders are basically followed.

Is it worth it? Well yes, we're to understand, when Private Ryan turns out to be Matt Damon. What an easy out. He's like the trump card in a buddy film these days, and Spielberg justifies Hanks' entire mission by making Ryan such a guy's guy. Imagine if he turned out to be a skinny egghead? Burns' character would've shot him while whistling the "Star Spangled Banner."

With Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg will never have to worry about an investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee. There's an old-fashioned patriotic tone here that overrides Spielberg's gruesome exposé of warfare.

Inspirational music is laid in quiet behind every important scene (i.e. any with dialogue) and the nobility of self-sacrifice remains intact. Saving Private Ryan does nothing to dispel European criticism that Americans think they single-handedly won the Second World War. If anything, the film simply hands more ammunition to that sentiment.

Saving Private Ryan opens Friday, July 24