Steven Spielberg (92 page)

Eventually, the barriers started falling when his mother told him, “You know, this was not all your dad’s fault. It was my fault, too.” Steven said that when she explained what had happened (soon after the divorce, she married their longtime family friend Bernie Adler), “I spun around and realized I had been putting too much blame on the wrong person. That’s when I began to try to figure out how I could earn my father’s love back, how could I get my dad back.” Steven began acknowledging publicly how much his father had, in fact, contributed to his formation as an artist. Arnold soon became a fixture again in his son’s life, not only at family gatherings but also as a computer expert working from its inception on Steven’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation on the Universal lot, a few minutes from Steven’s
southwestern
-style Amblin complex. (The foundation’s archives and resources were transferred in 2006 to the University of Southern California, which makes the
nearly 52,000 videotaped testimonies of survivors and other witnesses publicly available through its USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. Spielberg has given many millions to philanthropic enterprises over the years, including other educational groups, the Film Foundation,
Cedars-Sinai
Medical Center in West Hollywood, and a support organization he helped found for gravely ill children, the Starlight Starbright Children’s Foundation.)

Arnold Spielberg collaborated with his son in Phoenix on two World War II movies,
Fighter Squad
(1960) and the forty-minute
Escape to Nowhere
(1962). The latter, an action movie set in North Africa, deals with the chaotic search for a GI trapped behind Germany lines and has some of the gritty focus on up-close combat that makes
Ryan
so involving. Both movies were shot in
color
, and Arnold influenced the key aesthetic decision about whether or not to shoot
Ryan
in color. When Arnold asked Steven why he had made
Schindler’s List
in black-and-white, Steven said it was because he knew the Holocaust only through black-and-white archival footage. Arnold replied, “Well, I was alive during that time and I fought in World War II, and my experiences were in full, living, bleeding color.” That influenced Steven’s decision to shoot
Ryan
using the desaturated color he had once planned for
Schindler’s List
. He emulated the grainy, muted color of the 16mm combat footage shot during the war by John Ford for his U.S. Navy documentary
The Battle of Midway
and by George Stevens for his personal record of combat in Europe while he was filming the war for the army in black-and-white (Stevens’s unofficial
footage
was assembled by his son, George Jr., in 1994 as
George Stevens: D-Day to Berlin
).

Spielberg was also influenced by Robert Capa’s celebrated
Life
magazine photographs of the D-Day landings. Capa’s photos showing everything
shaking
and blurred as the soldiers storm Omaha Beach gave Spielberg the look and feeling he sought for the film’s stunning twenty-four-minute D-Day
sequence
. Spielberg evidently did not realize that the extreme shaking effect in Capa’s images was accidentally created in a London laboratory by a technician who overheated his pictures, destroying most and damaging the rest.
Spielberg
had the surviving photos “hung up on my bulletin board in my office, and also at home, and I stared at them relentlessly and told my group that I wanted to recreate the feel in every single one of those photographs.” The ferocious shaking of the handheld camera by Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski as the men storm the beach under fire is tremendously
effective
, and the desaturation of the color evokes the monochromatic effect of the familiar stills and newsreel coverage of the attack by U.S. government cameramen.

“As was the case with
Schindler’s List
, I did no storyboards at all,” Spielberg said of the D-Day landings in
Ryan
, which he filmed in continuity. “… I just thought it would be not very spontaneous of me to be so methodical in
shooting
that sequence as opposed to intuitively trying to figure out where I would be if I were a combat cameraman lying next to these guys who were trying
to get to safety on that beach…. I improvised the way you improvise when you’re actually fighting a war.”

Since the actual Omaha Beach is off-limits for filmmaking, and the French government wouldn’t provide the tax breaks Spielberg wanted so he could shoot on another beach in that country, he recreated the landings at Curracloe Beach at Ballinesker in County Wexford, Ireland, mixing his squad of
professional
actors with 750 members of the Irish Defense Forces, some of them veterans of Mel Gibson’s
Braveheart
. After eleven weeks of preparation on the location, the sequence took fifteen days and $12 million to shoot in June and July 1997. Spielberg follows Hanks’s character, Captain John Miller, as he makes his way along the beach with agonizing slowness while he and his men are menaced by German machine-gun fire. The many grisly details of men being shot, incinerated, and exploded start with the shocking sight of men debarking from Higgins boats having their heads blown off; Anthony Lane in
The New Yorker
called the sequence “as credible and confounding a vision of Hell as could be imagined … like high-speed Bosch.” More than a
thousand
artificial corpses and about two dozen actual amputees were used to help recreate what Spielberg described as “a slaughter. It was a complete foul-up: from the expeditionary forces, to the reconnaissance forces, to the saturation bombing that missed most of its primary targets. Given that, I didn’t want to glamorize it, so I tried to be as brutally honest as I could.”

Spielberg’s decision to follow closely on Captain Miller from boat to
beachhead
enables the viewer to inhabit this representative GI’s perspective, conveying with visceral immediacy both his terror and his dogged persistence, never more effectively than when his hearing is impaired by explosions and the soundtrack becomes subjectively distorted as he struggles to regain his bearings. The sustained fury of the sequence is one of the greatest achievements in action direction in the history of the cinema, and it is so powerful it creates narrative problems by making the rest of the film seem
anticlimactic
. Spielberg may have unconsciously replicated the standard structure of his Indiana Jones movies, which always imitate old serials by starting with the climax of another movie. He worried after shooting the D-Day sequence that he had “topped” himself, as he had with the opening of
Raiders of the Lost Ark
. “I didn’t quite know what the [D-Day] sequence was going to be, because I shot the whole movie in continuity,” with no storyboarding and lots of
improvisation
. He was right to be concerned, for while such a device works as a gag in an Indiana Jones adventure, here it makes the rest of the film a serious letdown.

The screenplay by Robert Rodat was augmented with uncredited
contributions
by Frank Darabont and others, and with frequent improvisations by Spielberg and his cast, who included several other writers and directors. After D-Day, the film turns into a relatively conventional World War II movie with the standard array of multiethnic characters. Spielberg does try to work variations on clichés familiar from more than half a century of filmmaking on the subject. The wrenching scene of a Jewish soldier (Adam Goldberg) being 
murdered at close range by a German, with a cowardly fellow GI, Upham (Jeremy Davies), failing to come to his aid, seems intended as a microcosm of the Holocaust, but cannot support that full burden; Spielberg said the
character
he most identifies with in the film is Upham, a surprising admission that sells himself short but is a measure of the depths of the director’s self-doubt. Tom Hanks elevates the film with his superb performance as a schoolteacher who worries that what he does in the war will make him unrecognizable to his wife when he returns home, a man who tries to preserve some semblance of decency in the midst of combat, a commander who maintains a gentle
discipline
while fighting to control his fragile nerves so his men won’t see how vulnerable he actually is.

Individual scenes of combat are directed with sharpness and concision, but their familiarity is disheartening after the hallucinatory, almost
avantgarde
freshness of the D-Day sequence. The climactic set piece, in which the outnumbered squad ingeniously decimates a German tank unit in a ruined French town, is elaborately and excitingly staged, but seems to violate the film’s initial vision of combat as inhuman frenzy by encouraging the audience to root righteously for the picturesque slaughter of the enemy. Earlier in the film Spielberg had shown Americans callously mowing down surrendering German soldiers, a bracingly honest departure from war-movie convention, but by the end,
Saving Private Ryan
is not appreciably different in tone from old-fashioned gung-ho staples of the genre. (The scripts for his and Hanks’s miniseries
Band of Brothers
stick more closely to the mundane lives of soldiers, admirably avoiding the melodramatic contrivances that damage
Ryan
.)

The triteness of much of
Ryan
’s plotting is a reflection of the basic
phoniness
of its premise. Miller and his men are sent to rescue Private James Ryan (Matt Damon), whose three brothers have just been killed in combat; their mother is seen collapsing in grief at her Iowa farmhouse when she hears the news. Variously portrayed in the film as a mission of compassion (by General George C. Marshall, played like a waxwork by Harve Presnell, reading
Abraham
Lincoln’s letter to Mrs. Bixby) and a PR stunt (as Miller and his men more cynically regard it), this plot device raises an artificial moral question (Is it just to risk other men’s lives to save one?) that seems a distraction from the real issues of the war. This device may evoke the line from the Talmud quoted in
Schindler’s List
—“Whoever saves one life saves the world entire”—but its deployment in
Ryan
cheapens the idea, especially since it has no direct precedent in the actual history of American involvement in World War II.

Ryan’s Irish name alludes to the five Sullivan brothers who died in the sinking of a single ship in November 1942. After that incident, the U.S.
government
forbade brothers from serving in the same unit. But the incident
Rodat
adapted for
Saving Private Ryan
is reported by historian Stephen Ambrose (a consultant on the film) in his 1992 book
Band of Brothers
. U.S. Army Sgt. Frederick (Fritz) Niland, while serving in France in mid-June, learned that his brother Robert had been killed on D-Day. Fritz hitched a ride to see
another
brother, Preston, in a platoon nearby, and learned that Preston had also
been killed, on June 7. It was later reported that a third brother, Edward, was presumed dead in the China-Burma-India Theater, and although he
eventually
turned up alive, their mother received three telegrams from the War Department on the same day notifying her of their deaths. Fritz Niland was found quickly, by a chaplain, and sent home without incident, even though he objected, “No, I’m staying here with my boys.” The chaplain told him, “Well, you can bring that up with General Eisenhower or the president, but you’re going home.”

All the drama that ensues in
Ryan
, including the sacrifice of the lives of six men (including Miller himself) to help get Ryan home, is the original screenwriter’s invention. It is hard to get as worked up as the film expects us to do by what, in reality, is only a Hollywood “high concept.” And although the film’s bookends showing an elderly veteran (Harrison Young) breaking down in the American cemetery at Normandy are based on an incident Spielberg said he witnessed while visiting there during his French tour for
Duel
in 1972, the clumsy mawkishness of the directing and acting makes the scenes
alienating
rather than affecting. Spielberg even cheats by making the audience think that the old man is Captain Miller (by introducing Miller with a matching extreme close-up of his eyes), but at the end we learn that the old man is actually James Ryan (as he morphs from Matt Damon). Not playing square with the audience but resorting to this kind of visual trickery, and hyping up the central dramatic device, is all the more damaging in a film that purports to represent history. The elderly Ryan’s anxious need for reassurance from his family that he is a good man seems gratuitous after all we have witnessed and a further sign that
Saving Private Ryan
is insecure about its emotional effect on the audience.

The film’s mendacity and contradictions help account for its wildly mixed critical reception, most of which had some validity. Although most
mainstream
reviewers heaped the film with adulation for being an antiwar statement (the
New York Times
’ Janet Maslin praised its “terrifying reportorial candor…. [Spielberg] restores passion and meaning to the genre with such whirlwind force that he seems to reimagine it entirely”; and David Ansen wrote in
Newsweek
, “When you emerge from Spielberg’s cauldron, the world doesn’t look quite the same”), Spielberg’s detractors accused it of being
flag-waving
propaganda. Vincent Canby argued in the
New York Times
that “with
Saving Private Ryan
war is good again,” John Hodgkins in
Journal of Popular Film and Television
lumped it with other 1990s films that “saw the chance to vanquish once and for all those doubts and fears that had been festering since Vietnam and return the US soldier to his rightful place as heroic icon,” and Frank P. Tomasulo claimed in an essay on the film for the collection
The End of Cinema as We Know It: American Film in the Nineties
that Spielberg’s “oeuvre stands as one of the chief cinematic purveyors of American exceptionalism and triumphalism in contemporary filmdom.”