The Spielberg Ending: Saving Private Ryan

Besides the movies themselves, it's hard to know exactly what, if anything (and maybe not even the movies), influences Academy members as they fill out their Oscar ballots. That said, I've always considered Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman's spring 1999 column in Premiere magazine to have been a deciding factor in the Oscar-night victory of Shakespeare in Love, a well-marketed, high-quality piece of piffle. (Whether or not Goldman was actually that influential, he felt he was, firing up a for-real campaign in 2003 against Martin Scorsese winning Best Director for Gangs of New York.) Goldman, who the year before had used the same space to correctly assess the worth of Titanic's undervalued screenplay, tore into Spielberg's WWII drama Saving Private Ryan, calling its conclusion "fifty-plus minutes of phony manipulative shit." Goldman is hardly the only one who lodged Ryan-related complaints, but he does it so exhaustively (and with such disdain for the ending) that he provides all the necessary talking points (complete with subheads, if you want to track down the reprinted column in his 2000 collection "The Big Picture"). Taking his cues:

• Having found Pvt. Ryan (Matt Damon), Capt. John Miller (Tom Hanks) is stymied in his mission to extract Ryan from France by Ryan's refusal to leave his unit. The brass want Ryan out because his mother has already suffered the deaths in action of his three brothers; Ryan, meanwhile, doesn't want to leave "the only brothers that [he has] left" because the unit is understaffed and responsible for a tactically critical bridge. Goldman can't believe for a second that Miller wouldn't just shanghai Ryan and pull out — "Inconceivable," he says, quoting himself — but how is it unlikely that a captain would elect to reinforce a crippled unit being led by a corporal who has no idea how he's going to defend his location? Especially when Miller and his company already consider their own effort to be little more than a "public relations mission"?


• Goldman lambastes Damon's purported ad lib regarding the last time he and his brother were all together — a deeply unsympathetic anecdote about Ryan's eldest brother trying to score with a girl "who took a nose dive off the ugly tree" before he headed to basic training. Goldman calls it "the most damaging speech of the movie," "not exactly endear[ing]" and "atrocious," as if that were not exactly the point. Ryan is not a sympathetic character, and Miller is not taken with him in the least — Miller, a teacher, says "I had a thousand kids like you" (with Hanks' perfect resignation) when Ryan confesses to having been a classroom terror. If Ryan was deeply likable (and if not for Damon, he wouldn't be likable at all), it would change the dynamics of the mission. But he's not, and Miller's unit never stops resenting their charge. More on this in a minute.


• Miller is shot by the same German soldier that, earlier in the film, he is talked out of killing by Cpl. Upham (Jeremy Davies). Goldman says this appears contrived and throws the movie out of balance compared to the realistic recreation of D-Day, which depicts war as "totally beyond human comprehension," and he's right. It's a significant miscalculation. Part of it must be Spielberg's desire to have one Nazi the audience can identify and truly come to hate, since the politics of the war are on the movie's sidelines. More significantly, though, I think it's due to Spielberg's excessive excoriation of Upham, the tweedy, reedy combat-shy translator attached at the last minute to Miller's unit. Watching the film, Upham seems to come across as Spielberg's proxy — nebbish, intellectual, peacenik, observer. Upham causes no end of havoc for Miller and his crew and is, as mentioned above, tacitly responsible for Miller's death; he's not fit for the soldiers alongside whom he serves. It's an exaggeration that doesn't serve the movie's well-formedness, but does testify to the magnitude of Spielberg's awe for soldiers that I wager he feels he could never imitate.


• Dying, Miller croaks to Ryan, "Earn this … earn it." Goldman has "zero idea what that can posibly mean," and there's certainly nothing that can be done to "earn" the sacrifice made by those who served us in wartime. But I don't know if the metaphor is meant that broadly. If we treat this as a human moment between a teacher and the callow youth for whom he has given his life, it becomes an altogether reasonable request. Miller could have been impressed with Ryan's soldierly devotion and willingness to risk his mother's complete bereavement, but if that were the case, then he wouldn't tell Ryan he had anything to earn. We flash-forward from this scene to Ryan as an old man (Harrison Young), taking his family to visit Miller's grave, and he kneels at the headstone, saying

  My family is with me today. They wanted to come with me. To be honest with you, I wasn't sure how I'd feel coming back here. Every day, I think about what you said to me that day on the bridge. I've tried to live my life the best I could. I hope that was enough. I hope that, at least in your eyes, I've earned what all of you have done for me.

  and then salutes before departing. Goldman finds this all very corny, and it can be read as instruction to us all to live up to that generation's sacrifices. But there's that "at least in your eyes," setting up Miller as the standard and the teacher to whom Ryan feels personally indebted to a degree that has nothing to do with repressing European Nazism.


• Goldman also can't stand that the old man at the cemetery (who we meet in the film's first scene without knowing who he is, before we flash back to Normandy) is Ryan, as opposed to someone from Miller's unit who could have actually had that flashback because, unlike Ryan, they were actually at Normandy. This is a fairly easy complaint to discount, as the 1944 portion of the movie contains all kinds of scenes at which no one character is commonly present, including a scene on the Ryan homestead; even in France each soldier has his private moments. By citing those exceptions, you might think I'm taking Goldman too literally, but extend the argument to see that Goldman is taking the conceit of the flashback too literally. Having the old man be Ryan makes sufficient story sense, but more importantly it makes all the emotional sense in the world.


• Now, the final "four agonizing minutes of pretentious syrup," per Goldman. Ryan turns to his wife and pleads, as an extension of his graveside monologue, "Tell me I have led a good life. Tell me I'm a good man." There's nothing special about her affirmation, but the neediness of the request is significant — how would the movie have been different if Ryan had the self-esteem or self-confidence to believe it were true without asking? Put another way, we wouldn't believe that anyone who served under Miller (save Upham) would ever have to ask that question in the presence of the captain's memory.
  
  And then there are 20 seconds of the flag waving — "I guess reminding us that God and Steven Spielberg are on the same side," says Goldman — but I think it's worth noting that there have been black-and-white movies where the flag has looked more red, white and blue than it does here. Shot with the sun directly behind it, it's the monochrome skeleton of a flag, and it does not stir patriotism in an American viewer the way that a vibrant, lush picture of the flag might be expected to. Frankly, it's a subversion of the flag — the time it takes you to grapple with its unusual appearance delays your instinctual response to it, making it one of the few contemplative photographs of the flag in memory. As a prelude (the film opens with the same shot) and coda, it succeeds — it prepares you to enter the story and gives you time at the end to come out of it.

Saving Private Ryan has its problems — quoth Spielberg, "It's an antiwar film only in that if you want to go to war after seeing this picture, then it's not an antiwar film." I can't makes heads or tails of that, and I have to say the same about the expression of similar sentiment in the movie. It seems everyone in the movie is as miserable as they can be — and yet it's also spectacular. The siege on Ryan's outpost may be Spielberg's most fantastic bit of action filmmaking (an arena in which he is hardly a slouch) and a patent piece of hero worship. The thrills take the edge off the fact that the events of the movie would otherwise be completely unbearable to watch, but they also make the movie transcendent. Still, flag shot to flag shot, the movie is clearly of a piece.

Introduction | A.I. | Minority Report | Catch Me If You Can | The Terminal

E-mail Sean Weitner at sean at flakmag dot com.