Saving Private Ryan (1998)

Academy Award for Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Sound Editing, and Best Sound Mixing. Nominated for 6 more including Best Picture.

directed by Steven Spielberg

starring Tom Hanks, Tom Sizemore, Edward Burns, Matt Damon

I watched some of the special features after this movie was over - maybe not the best choice, but it wasn't like I'd be focusing on something unrelated anytime soon...the intensity of the movie left me in a sort of awe. But as I watched the actors and crew extolling the virtues of what I had just seen, I realized that this film hadn't made me proud to be an American - it made me feel ashamed as a human being.

This film came out when I was six years old, so the long, gritty opening of D-Day wasn't quite a surprise. That battle had always been spoken of with a tinge of grief and regret. Watching it is something else entirely, though. You know that there's a greater cause somewhere, that this is a step against Hitler - but all I could think as I was watching boatfulls of men die before they hit the water was: Why? How could this happen? These soldiers weren't any older than me. They weren't necessarily more suited for war. It's tempting to think of them as brave heroes, out of the realm of comparison...but the truth is, they were probably just as scared as I would have been. God knows I would have been just as dead as many of them were by the end of the day. It's easy to remove such foreign experiences from contemplation, but if there's one thing this film does well, it forces the audience to live those horrors - and, in doing so, it reminds us that they were absolutely, terrifyingly real.

The carnage of D-Day is the perfect set-up to the main plot. Just as the audience is struggling to connect this slaughter to a greater purpose, the protagonists recieve a mission with an even more questionable objective: the rescue of a single man. I knew the plot of Saving Private Ryan going in, and I was relieved that the characters were just as skeptical about their assignment as I was. While their superiors may see this attempted rescue as a shining picture of the American Spirit, no one else is fooled. There's a beautiful moment where Capt. Miller (Tom Hanks) struggles with the decision to put his men in danger for the sake of one life:

"You see, when...when you end up killing one of your men, you see, you tell yourself it happened so you could save the lives of two or three or ten others. Maybe a hundred others. Do you know how many men I've lost under my command? ...Ninety-four. But that means I've saved the lives of ten times that many, doesn't it? Maybe even twenty? And that's how simple it is. That's how you...that's how you rationalize making the choice between the mission and the man."

The film follows Capt. Miller and his men as they fight their way through France and toward some sort of solace about their fate. It's terrible, but if it's as true as the praise tells, it may be one of the most important movies ever made. There's something precious in the collective human memory; if the ugliness, if the indecision, if the blindness and the bravery of this war aren't treasured, we may find ourselves asking the same awful question: How did it come to this?