Links for the Day (May 26th, 2007)

Links for the Day (May 26th, 2007)

By Keith Uhlich on May 26, 2007 in Links for the Day Jump to Comments (0)

1. "The #54 War Movie of the Last 50 Years." A Memo from the Department of Heresy: Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan is maudlin, simplistic, illogical and derivative; it's also a tacit justification of U.S. war crimes. By Sean Gilman of The End of Cinema.

["I'd always remembered that it was [Jeremy] Davies' [character] at the end of the film who shoots the POW, committing the film's major war crime. Watching it again, I was surprised at how often these murders occur. In fact, the film can easily be interpreted as a coming-of age story in which we learn how necessary it is to execute POWs because they shot at us first. After the Omaha Beach sequence, the Americans shoot defenseless Germans in a trench and murder surrendering Germans with their hands raised in the air. The emotional power (and graphic bloodinesss) of the preceding beach landing is apparently supposed to justify the murdering of these POWs, just as the death of the medic is later supposed to justify the murder of the German that Burns causes so much trouble over. These crimes reach their culmination when Davies, after cowering throughout the final stages of the final battle, assassinates the German soldier he let kill Crazy Eddie, as that soldier's telling his compatriots what a coward Davies is. Davies, of course, had been the one stridently protesting Burns's attempts to murder the other POW. Thus the audience member, after being shown their own cowardice, is asserted to be a murderer as well. It's one of the most insulting things I've ever seen on film, and I can't believe how many people are willing to let Spielberg get away with it."]

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2. "Critics Week Grand Prize to XXY." By Rebecca Leffler of The Hollywood Reporter.

["CANNES—Lucia Puenzo's 'XXY' will take home the grand prize for the Festival de Cannes' Critics Week sidebar, organizers announced Friday night. The Argentine-Spanish-French co-production, which explores the psychological challenges of an adolescent hermaphrodite, was voted upon by journalists and film critics after each screening. First-time helmer Puenzo will receive €5,000 ($6,726) and an invite to the Moulin d'Ande to hone her writing and directing skills."]

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3. "Pictures of You: If every film is a reflector, Magic Mirror says you don't make any sense." Nathan Lee of The Village Voice on Manoel de Oliveira's comedy about spirituality and class. Related: Michael J. Anderson of Tativille and MZS in The New York Times

["Academic theologians with a taste for obdurate Brechtian aesthetics, say hello to your new favorite film! Civilians, even those versed in Oliveira at his most extreme, may find their patience pushed to the limit. Thick with mirrors and breaches of the fourth wall, Magic Mirror is avidly aware of being watched, even as it rejects every avenue of accessibility. "]

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4. ""Cannes: We Own The Night." Premiere's Glenn Kenny on the new feature by James Gray, director of Little Odessa and The Yards. The trailer is here.

["To call this film a noble failure is only to apt, since its nobility actually contributes to its failure."]

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5. "Sony touts tiny, film-thin TV screen that bends." From the Associated Press.

["TOKYO, Japan (AP)—In the race for ever-thinner displays for TVs, cell phones and other gadgets, Sony may have developed one to beat them all—a razor-thin display that bends like paper while showing full-color video."]

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Clip of the Day:

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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

TAGS: links for the day

In war, moral/immoral breaks down as a useful construct. Like Newtonian physics, moral reasoning becomes incoherent at high temperatures and pressures.

Our moral faculty enables, undesigned, living together (as intuition reinforced by emotion). Its returns diminish and ultimately disappear when humans fight and die together.

This is not to encourage lawlessness. But in war, means must be calibrated to ends, not the other way around.
Posted by sargent on 2007-05-28 18:38:00 virgilx: But I take your point -- if a point this important can be widely misconstrued, Spielberg should have been more careful in how he presented it.
Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz on 2007-05-28 14:26:00 virgilx: "Magic Mirror" should be seen, but it doesn't hang together as it should; the aesthetic is very early talkie (talking, talking, talking) and the sprawling, unfocused story defeats the director's attempts to be satirical (with some exceptions, I think satire needs to be short to really have punch). "The Fifth Empire," which opens next Friday, is a more compelling movie, even though, like "Magic Mirror," it often feels like a photographed stage play. But the photography is incredible, and it was concieved with the big screen in mind. It's visually as dark a film as I've ever seen, but the gradations of darkness are very precise. It's worth seeing just for the photography, and for those moments when the characters stop talking and simply move through that enormous castle.

Re: Spielberg and war crimes: The director is often accused of making his points too emphatically. This is an instance where he takes as a given the fact that we'll know it's wrong to do what these characters are shown doing. If he approved of it, why would there even be an argument about it at the radar station, and why would he put arguments against it in the mouths of his most sympathetic characters?

Discussions like this make me think Spielberg is right to hit the nail on the head as hard as possible, just to make sure everyone knows exactly where he stands. I do think that approach usually yields the opposite of art, though.
Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz on 2007-05-28 14:19:00 This has been a fascinating discussion. Iâ€™d like to leave aside for now the murky demarcation of what is or is not in the heat of battle, and instead focus on Spielbergâ€™s sensibility. Specifically, something I heard on the commentary to Rod Lurieâ€™s The Contender. In that film, Joan Allen gives a rousing speech defending her actions in front of a congressional hearing. The speech originally played without music. When Lurie screened the film for Spielberg, he suggested adding music. Rod Lurie balked at first, saying something like â€œIsnâ€™t that rather obvious? Wonâ€™t the music step on the scene? I just donâ€™t like it.â€ To which Spielberg replied â€œRod, are you making this movie for yourself, or for an audience?â€ Lurie seemed to appreciate this wisdom and music was added to the scene. I still donâ€™t know who was right, and the anecdote has been turning over in my head ever since. It seemed to say something about Spielberg. Itâ€™s what makes me a fence sitter regarding the end capper scenes set in the cemetery in SPR. Sure, theyâ€™re â€œmaudlinâ€ like MZS says, but they also work for a popular audience. BTW, there are some terrible war movies on Seanâ€™s list.
Posted by Wagstaff on 2007-05-28 08:35:00 Yeah, I missed MASH. It's better than Saving Private Ryan too.
Posted by sean on 2007-05-28 07:05:00 You know what Matt, I'm beginning to buy or sense what you are selling.

I guess most basically I have to believe that Speilberg has an opinion about war crimes, in this case (at the movie's end), killing POW during a situation where it was completely unnecessary. And that doing so is bad. I don't think that is explicitly spelled out anywhere in Ryan, but I would have a difficult time seeing Speilberg as thinking or wanting to show otherwise.

But I guess, Speilberg does not tell us what to think or feel, or should he. I mean that at least may be what art is.

My reservation is that if he's showing this stuff, and that it can be read skewed (and dangerously so), where is the responsibility? Even assuming "[n]ot that it ought to happen, but that it invariably does", that can't be it. And the part that is missing, that's Speilberg's and Ryan's fault.

Also, I'm planning to catch Magic Mirror. Saw your take in NYTimes. It's hella short, but I'm sensing it's a pan. Right?
Posted by virgilx on 2007-05-28 05:55:00 I was going to continue contributing to this thread, but then I read Mr. Gilman's list of 53 better war movies in the last 50 years. The man has got to be fucking with his readership. He has Gettysburg AND Gods and Generals on his list. What the fuck? I'll give you Jeff Daniels fine performance in Gettysburg but that's all. The movies are Ted Turner's play things. They're not even on par with a good TNT mini-series.

He also has Good Morning, Vietnam, but leaves off M*A*S*H.

Need I say more?
Posted by Aaron Aradillas on 2007-05-28 05:39:00 Oh, man! I should really proofread my comments before I post them. Not only do I have misspelled words I have whole words missing from some sentences.

Now, that's just embarassing. :(
Posted by Damian on 2007-05-28 04:24:00 P.S. It's really no big deal, because everybody does this, but it's "Damian," not "Damien."

My apologies, Damian.

I'll be sure to check out what looks to be a fascinating project you're undertaking. And I've been looking for an excuse to fill in my own gaps in Spielberg's filmography (which I believe is everything pre-Jaws, 1941, Always and The Terminal, not counting his work as a producer).
Posted by sean on 2007-05-28 03:40:00 One of the many strengths of Spielberg's movie is that it shows that we didn't have any innocence to lose; from the turkey-shoot after D-Day to Upham's killing of the released POW at the end, the movie conveys very strongly that when you go to war, this is the kind of thing that happens. Not that it ought to happen, but that it invariably does. Not since "Patton" has such an immense, star-studded Hollywood movie about the so-called Good War depicted inhumanity by US soldiers as one of many inevitable byproducts of the decision to go to war.

I don't think you were unclear, I think we just disagree. These things (war crimes) do not "invariably happen" when you go to war; they are not an "invariable byproduct" of war. Saving Private Ryan may assert that these crimes are inevitable, and by doing so, it either justifies them or, at best, mitigates them, in the name of patriotism and generational piety.

The atrocities in "Ryan" are, in fact, maybe the best and perhaps only argument in favor of those sentimental bracketing scenes; they say to viewers, "That kindly grandfather whose sacrifices you sentimentalize might have done things in World War II that would make you nauseous."

Yu can read the film that way, and I won't say you're wrong to do so. But I'm not willing to make that leap. I think that if that was the message Spielberg was trying to send, he would have made a different film.

As for the Michael Bay comparison -- come on, dude. Really.

I know I'm damn near alone in the pro-Michael Bay camp. But you can't convince me his films don't have an original, unique, and personal style. Like him or hate him, he's an auteur, not a Ratner.
Posted by sean on 2007-05-28 03:34:00 Sean:

I obviously have no idea what goes on in Spielberg or anyone else's brain. I can only speak to what the film says to me (= what I think the film says).

That's fair enough, Sean. It never ceases to fascinate me how two different people can watch the same movie and yet actually see two different movies.

I also think it's for me to remember that what I think a film is saying and what it is actually saying aren't always the same. Naturally, all I have is my own interpretation. I can't possibly step outside of myself to understand something without my own personal experiences, prejudices, predispositions, etc. I just try to be as "open" as possible to where the filmmaker wants to take me, unless of course he/she wants to take me to morally repugnant places, which I don't Saving Private Ryan does.

I'm a Spielberg fan, but I don't think he achieves the kind of emotional and political complexity you ascribe to him until AI or, as you cite, Munich. I'm amenable to the idea that SPR was his first step in that direction, however.

I would REALLY like for you to participate in my 31 Days of Spielberg experiment this August, Sean, because I am planning to go through every single Spielberg film (starting with the "Night Gallery" episode he directed all the way up to Munich), analyzing each one, writing down my thoughts and posting them each day throughout the entire month. I have already started watching the films (doing Sugarland Express tonight) and although I am currently of the thinking that Spielberg's ability to tell morally complex tales began much earlier, I may change my mind on that.

P.S. It's really no big deal, because everybody does this, but it's "Damian," not "Damien."

Matt:

I think I'm going to bow out of this discussion now because you're doing an adequate job od addressing the criticisms of Saving Private Ryan. I'm still busy re-watching Spielberg's films and writing about them, but this conversation has given me more to think about when I eventually reach the film.

Oh, and it's a major pet peeve of mine when Spielberg is compared to Michale Bay. One might as well liken Marlon Brando to Pauly Shore.
Posted by Damian on 2007-05-28 02:50:00 Apologies for not being more clear. The "required" was intended to refer to the act of mobilizing a nation to go to war, after which point there is certain to be unconscionable viciousness on the battlefield.

I agree that Stone's "Platoon" does a better job of showing the psychological mechanics that result in soldiers committing battlefield atrocities. At the same time, though, I think there's an argument to be made for the tossed-off quality of the atrocities Spielberg shows. When we see a Vietnam film, we expect to see war crimes committed by Americans; it's part of the genre, which is all about "loss of innocence." One of the many strengths of Spielberg's movie is that it shows that we didn't have any innocence to lose; from the turkey-shoot after D-Day to Upham's killing of the released POW at the end, the movie conveys very strongly that when you go to war, this is the kind of thing that happens. Not that it ought to happen, but that it invariably does. Not since "Patton" has such an immense, star-studded Hollywood movie about the so-called Good War depicted inhumanity by US soldiers as one of many inevitable byproducts of the decision to go to war. And "Ryan" doesn't go through anything remotely like the self-justifying contortions of "Patton," which justified the general's coldness, brutality and Napoleonic attitude as a necessary part of what made him such a great historical figure. The atrocities in "Ryan" are, in fact, maybe the best and perhaps only argument in favor of those sentimental bracketing scenes; they say to viewers, "That kindly grandfather whose sacrifices you sentimentalize might have done things in World War II that would make you nauseous."

As for the Michael Bay comparison -- come on, dude. Really.
Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz on 2007-05-28 00:42:00 He's not saying, "Patriotism is bullshit when you look at all the blood we had to spill in this Good War." He's saying something more like, "This entire war was a grand gesture, and the actions required to carry out the gesture are brutal and horrifying, and often reduce us to the level of our enemies."

It's the "required" there that I disagree with. The specific brutality that SPR seems to assert is required is the killing of POWs. And I simply don't think that is a requirement for prosecuting a war successfully, anymore than I think the suspension of habeas corpus is required to successfully fight the "war on terror".

Compare Saving Private Ryan to Platoon in the way it deals with war crimes. I'd argue that only Stone's film takes a clear stand against them, while still showing the ways in which war can turn everyone involved in it into a monster.

But I certainly agree with you that Spielberg's strength lies in the visceral and not the philosophical (perhaps like one Michael Bay?). It's in that area that SPR is most successful.
Posted by sean on 2007-05-27 23:47:00 Thanks for joining the thread, Sean.

I disagree that Spielberg's showing US troops executing prisoners who have alread surrendered tacitly endorses such action. I think it's part of the complexity of this superficially simple, accessible film. The opening shot of the sun shining through a tattered American flag - literally announcing, "Let's look through our collective memory of World War II - makes Spielberg's intentions clear. He's not saying, "Patriotism is bullshit when you look at all the blood we had to spill in this Good War." He's saying something more like, "This entire war was a grand gesture, and the actions required to carry out the gesture are brutal and horrifying, and often reduce us to the level of our enemies."

Beyond that, Spielberg is primarily interested in showing us what it must have felt like to be in that situation. He's a visceral filmmaker, more concerned with sensations and feelings than rhetoric.

To some degree, all of his historical dramas gravitate in that direction. They use commercial movie language to get there, and to bring as many people along as possible. That leads to some instances of poor taste, moments of "power" that in retrospect feel like mere showmanship, and a tendency, to quote a line from a NYTimes profile of Spielberg that really summed up his biggest weakness, to put ketchup on a perfectly good steak. I wish "Ryan" didn't have the framing devices; they're brilliantly photographed and moving, but maudlin, and they make the film seem less complicated and self-aware than I believe it is. I don't think the bracketing scenes in "Schindler's List" were necessary, either, and for that matter, I could have done without the scene where Schindler breaks down and cries about how he could have saved just one more life -- better to let him get in his car and drive off and remain an enigma. But the great directors often have great flaws, and Spielberg, one of the greatest, routinely does things that make me roll my eyes, even in films that I think are close to perfect, for what they are.

Jonathan Potts' post in support of Gilman is here.
Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz on 2007-05-27 23:17:00 As I wrote over at my own blog after reading Sean's post, my first reaction--and maybe that's the best indication of the film's quality--was that it was visually stunning and emotionally wrenching, a good film. But the more I thought about it, the more the film troubled me. And when I was watching it for the first time, I found Davies' character--a symbol of intellectualism--rankly offensive.
Posted by Jonathan Potts on 2007-05-27 13:23:00 War crimes aside, what about Spielberg's crimes against taste in SPR? The present-day scenes with the busty granddaughter in the background who'd presumably rather be on Ibiza, the Ted Danson ex machina, the "earn this" speech?
Posted by Anonymous on 2007-05-27 12:49:00 Thanks Matt, for the link, and everyone else also for the interesting feedback. A few responses to some of the objections raised here:

Jeffrey writes:

And the war crimes stuff? Give me a break. It's not pretty, but there's a difference between shooting an unarmed man in the heat of battle and diabolically plugging Jewish prisoners in a camp. One is terrible, the other inhuman.

In SPR the unarmed men aren't shot in the heat of battle. They're shot after the battle, with their hands raised in the air after surrendering. It may not be the systematic extermination of a people, but it's still a war crime.

Regarding the homage stuff - since when has paying homage to predecessor meant you're not creative?

I've no problem with homage. But I fail to see how an homage can be lauded as original.

Pearl Harbor. Wow!

Yup. I think it's more visually distinctive and less ideologically problematic. It's pretty close though. Pearl Harbor's probably #53.

jj and others point out that the German Davies murders is Steamboat Willie, and not the one who killed Mellish. I've seen the film three times and never caught that Willie returned at the end. I always thought it was the soldier who witnessed Davies cowardice that got shot at the end. Hence the error in my essay. I apologize for the error, but I had honestly never heard this explanation of the events of the film before today.

I'd like to believe, with Matt, that Spielberg is not being literal when he posits this (im)moral (Kill the Enemy whether he's surrendered or not, otherwise Tom Hanks will die) and is instead being ironic, or at least skeptical. But the earnestness of every other aspect of the film prevents me from taking that leap.

I suspect (though obviously can't know) that if these kinds of questions and contradictions were what Spielberg was primarily trying to address, he would have made a very different film. Instead, with the film he did make, the whole POW issue is a subplot, crowded out by the powerful images of patriotism and nostalgia.

Matt writes:

Just because some viewers might come away reading "Ryan" as a simple, sentimental, gung-ho action movie that reinforces stale ideology doesn't mean the movie itself is doing that. The movie's not either/or, patriotic or questioning, middlebrow or sophisticated, familiar and new -- it's all those things at once, and the contradictions are enfolded in the narrative.

And I couldn't agree more. This statement does raise the question, though, of how responsible it is to leave the murder of POWs an open moral question.

Damien writes:

When the soldiers just "let the Germans burn" in the beginning I am not excited or pleased, I am horrified. And yet, although that is my onw personal interpretation of the images, I am not necessarily prepared to say that's what Spielberg "wanted me to feel." However, that is precisely the "leap" that many critics of the film make. They take their own reaction to the material and deduce from that that it was the "effect that was intended by Spielberg all along."

I obviously have no idea what goes on in Spielberg or anyone else's brain. I can only speak to what the film says to me (= what I think the film says). The totality of the film, however, convinces me that Saving Private Ryan is in earnest and not a critique of the images it presents. The present day scenes, the scenes in Washington, the overwhelming sentimentality and piety of these sequences simply cannot be reconciled (in my mind) with a view that the actions of the US soldiers depicted in the film are to be condemned. At best, the film seems to convey the idea that war is horrible because it makes people do horrible things, and one of those horrible things it makes people do is kill POWs. And we Americans should all be thankful those people killed those POWs for us 50 years ago.

I'm a Spielberg fan, but I don't think he achieves the kind of emotional and political complexity you ascribe to him until AI or, as you cite, Munich. I'm amenable to the idea that SPR was his first step in that direction, however.
Posted by sean on 2007-05-27 10:32:00 You guys a bunch of freakin apologists.

"Given all this, what was the "right" thing to do at the radar station?"

And before that: "I think Spielberg is saying, "Yes, the need to not face an enemy again is a very solid, self-interested reason to kill him while you can." But I also think he's saying, "But killing him would be wrong." Sometimes the right choice exposes us to great danger."

Come on, Matt. What does what happened in the radar station have to do with the "right" thing at the movie's final sequences?

In the end, war crimes are cool, revenge is cool. Yeah, revolutionary, big ideas from Spielberg.
Posted by virgilx on 2007-05-27 07:16:00 When I first saw Saving Private Ryan I was on the side of the critics who thought it was a flawed masterpiece. Now, I think it is one of the most sophisticated war movies ever made, ranking with Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. (My only complaint, then and now, is the performance of Edward Burns. He's too modern an actor to be in a period war movie.)

I can still remember the audience's reaction to the scene of Uphan shooting the German. Living in San Antonio, the audience broke out into appluase. This scared me. I remember thinking how stupid the audience was for getting off on such a complex scene. I remember telling some of my firends that I thought the Uphan character was the one audiences were meant to identify with the most. They aruged with me because how could anyone side with such a coward. I felt vidiciated when Spielberg told the students on Inside the Actors Studio that the Davies character was a stand-in for him and the audience. This blew my mind because this seemed to go in the face of being a son of a WWII veteran. But Spielberg has almost always been undrrated when it comes to the complex issues he tucks away in his supposedly mass-appeal blockbusters.

I realize now that the San Antonio audience's reaction was a perfectly justified one. They were responding to the surface of the movie. Saving Private Ryan is one of the greatest men-on-a-mission action movies ever made. Like Scarface and GoodFellas, you can get your fill just by looking at the pretty surfaces of everything. If you look closer you'll find more challenging ideas being examined. Saving Private Ryan is very a ptriotic movie, but it knows that patriotism can come with a price. I remember some critics not responding to the scene where Hanks and Sizemore are talking about the mission. Hanks tells Sizemore that this Ryan better be worth it. He better go home and invent a longer lasting lightbulb. Some critics thought Spielberg hedged his bets by not asking what if Ryan went home a turned into a unexceptional man. Spielberg does answer this question. The thing is that Spielberg answers his questions through action, not words. By the time of the final battle the men have decided that saving one man's life is the same as aving your own.

One more thing. I think Spielberg used Ambrose more for historical informantion than ideology. Spielberg doesn't embrace everything Ambrose believes in. Oliver Stone has gone on record as stating that Ambrose doesn't know shit about war. A little harsh, but I take his point.

P.S. GoodFellas kicks major ass! Pesci is the fucking MAN!
Posted by Aaron Aradillas on 2007-05-27 02:16:00 I think Spielberg portrays these killing as a necessary element of all war -- not defensible, just a fact. I think he's aware of every irony inherent in the story and lets it be there so we can argue about it -- that in other words, it's all done on purpose. Just because some viewers might come away reading "Ryan" as a simple, sentimental, gung-ho action movie that reinforces stale ideology doesn't mean the movie itself is doing that. The movie's not either/or, patriotic or questioning, middlebrow or sophisticated, familiar and new -- it's all those things at once, and the contradictions are enfolded in the narrative.

I am in complete 100% agreement with you, Matt, and I was actually going to address some of these very things in my analysis of Saving Private Ryan for the 31 Days of Spielberg experiment. It is interesting to me that most of the people who criticize Saving Private Ryan as being a blindly patriotic film that celebrates war crimes, refer to the very same images that I often remember as highlighting the inhumanity and cruelty of war. When the soldiers just "let the Germans burn" in the beginning I am not excited or pleased, I am horrified. And yet, although that is my onw personal interpretation of the images, I am not necessarily prepared to say that's what Spielberg "wanted me to feel." However, that is precisely the "leap" that many critics of the film make. They take their own reaction to the material and deduce from that that it was the "effect that was intended by Spielberg all along."

Personally speaking, and I know I've said this before and will no doubt say it again, I don't think they're giving him enough credit. At this point in his career, I think Spielberg is now finally capable of putting images out there without telling us what to think/how to feel about them. To let the ambiguity of the events/characters depicted in films like Saving Private Ryan and Munich (which I believe to be his most morally complex film to date) serve as the basis for dialogue. They say that art questions and propoganda answers. I see more questions in Spileberg's films than answers.
Posted by Damian on 2007-05-27 01:35:00 Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that the soldier who kills Mellish is the same guy they let go at the radar installation -- I knew that. My point is, they let the guy go, then he turns up in the final battle, obviously on the German side. (He didn't suddenly become a pacifist or apply for US citizenship.) That arc does raise the idea that maybe it wasn't so smart to let this guy go.

However, I think it's a very complicated subplot, morally; the German is let go, he shows up in the final battle against the Americans, he shoots Miller without knowing he's Miller, he has a moment of connection based on that past experience at the radar station, and Upham shoots him. Given all this, what was the "right" thing to do at the radar station? There is a sense that Miller wouldn't have died if they'd killed that POW when they had the chance. But the whole thing is so tangled -- as it would be in life -- that I don't think it's possible to build a simple cause-and-effect explanation for what happened and why.
Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz on 2007-05-27 00:59:00 JJ sez:

--They're two totally differant guys.

--The German who Mellish fights and who walks past Upham on the stairs is wearing a differant uniform (it's got a camoflauge pattern) and is part of an SS shock troop assault unit.

--"Steamboat Willie", the guy who they let go from the radar installation and who shoots Miller, is wearing the same standard issue German army uniform he does when we see him earlier. He's not supposed to recognize Hanks because Miller's helmet is obscuring his eyes (this, according to Speilberg, is why you see the shooting from "Willie's" point of view), and it's why he's surprised to see Upham later--he does'nt know this is the same bunch of guys who let him live. And he's not telling the others that Upham's a coward. Where did this guy get THAT from? According to the German speakers I know, he's saying something like, "Upham! Upham, it's me! It's alright, I know this man, he's fair, he's a good man." And then Upham blows him away.

--I always thought one of the most affecting parts of SPR (a film which, as much as I like it, I still find flawed, and which I thought Spielberg, as a producer, really surpassed with Flags Of Our Fathers--it was like he allowed that film to say a lot of the more overtly critical things that are just implied in Ryan) was what happens to Upham. He becomes a soldier, a warrior, a "man", but he without question loses at least part of his soul in the process. In essence, he becomes one of the callous, cynical, violent soldiers we see shooting prisoners on the beach at the beginning. Speilberg seems to be saying that it does'nt matter how much society, the media, or whoever sanctions what you do in battle; in combat, you kill other people, you commit murder. Moreoever, some people realize that, and not only can accept it, but having done so, can start to enjoy it.
Posted by Anonymous on 2007-05-27 00:15:00 I'm not definite on this - but I heard third hand that the German they let go and the German that shows up in the climax (walking down the stairs) are two separate actors. I've also heard, third hand, that Spielberg has basically said that the resemblence was unintended. I think IMDB might confirm that first part, but I'm not sure that a resemblance was not intended - except that if it was, why not use the same man?
Posted by Jeffrey on 2007-05-26 23:02:00 Steve: I don't think Gilman is saying that war is clean and perfect. I think he's saying that the narrative of "Saving Private Ryan" frames certain acts (acts defined as war crimes) to be necessary, and he objects to that.

I love this movie (with certain major reservations) but I linked to Gilman's piece because it's an unapologetic contrarian view, and it intrigued me.

I think he has a point about the movie presenting certain war crimes as necessary -- particularly the whole subplot where the American GI's let the German prisoner go rather than kill him, and he turns up in the final act, fighting against them on the German side. I think Spielberg is saying, "Yes, the need to not face an enemy again is a very solid, self-interested reason to kill him while you can." But I also think he's saying, "But killing him would be wrong." Sometimes the right choice exposes us to great danger. The story of the movie -- a platoon of U.S. soldiers die rescuing one man, mainly for PR reasons -- raises many of the same conundrums on a larger scale.

Critic Curtis White was disturbed by this as well: "I have discussed the movie with several distinct groups of friends as, it seems, many viewers of the film have, both in the privacy of our homes and on the messy public airwaves of "talk radio." I have been surprised that my friends--intelligent, sophisticated people on the whole--had no idea what I was talking about when I elaborated my understanding of the film's "lesson." At one level, Private Ryan is about a command not to kill a German prisoner who then goes on to kill several members of an American platoon. Thus the movie's frightening lesson (one that I've come to think of as archetypically North American) is: Always choose death, for if you do not, death will come anyway, later, multiplied."

He goes on to write, " I think a reading can expose this film for what it is, a crypto-fascist work of historical revision. It's not even revision. It's: "Remember what we used to think? About patriotism? The glory of war? Let's think that again, and really mean it, so that it will be harder than hell to dislodge next time." Which is to say, this is a very dangerous movie."

I think Spielberg portrays these killing as a necessary element of all war -- not defensible, just a fact. I think he's aware of every irony inherent in the story and lets it be there so we can argue about it -- that in other words, it's all done on purpose. Just because some viewers might come away reading "Ryan" as a simple, sentimental, gung-ho action movie that reinforces stale ideology doesn't mean the movie itself is doing that. The movie's not either/or, patriotic or questioning, middlebrow or sophisticated, familiar and new -- it's all those things at once, and the contradictions are enfolded in the narrative. By the same token, "Goodfellas," an equally complicated popular movie -- a sociopath's point of view on a life of crime -- is sometimes enjoyed uncritically by people who think it's badass. That's not Scorsese's fault, either.

Just more stuff to argue about.
Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz on 2007-05-26 21:36:00 Sean has a few good points. The movie did have a doughy center - but I just can't see where his hostility towards it comes from. His bad points outnumbered the good. And the war crimes stuff? Give me a break. It's not pretty, but there's a difference between shooting an unarmed man in the heat of battle and diabolically plugging Jewish prisoners in a camp. One is terrible, the other inhuman.

Regarding the homage stuff - since when has paying homage to predecessor meant you're not creative? If that's the case: everytime Kurosawa uses blowing dust it's a ripoff of William S. Hart, and ever shot of Pulp Fiction is stealing some specific movie before it, so on & so forth. The idea is ludicrous. Spielberg's D-Day invasion borrowed techniques from every which way, but the result was new for movies.

And check the list of 53 movies he considers better than Private Ryan and you'll find.... Pearl Harbor. Wow!
Posted by Jeffrey on 2007-05-26 20:49:00 While Gilman's attitude is to be lauded, his understanding of the film is flawed and incomplete. Why couldn't he go after a truly morally flawed war movie, like 300?
Posted by jeffmcm on 2007-05-26 20:44:00 It must be fun to live in Sean Gilman's fantasy world where war is clean and perfect.
Posted by Steven on 2007-05-26 18:37:00 "I'd always remembered that it was Davies at the end of the film who shoots the POW, committing the film's major war crime. Watching it again, I was surprised at how often these murders occur."

Gilman must be forgetting the involvement of Stephen Ambrose in the creation of "Saving Private Ryan"; Ambrose was a defender of such actions, for instance the incident referred to by Paul Fussell as "the turkey shoot" where American soldiers shot a group of disarmed German prisoners standing below them in a hole.

Such barbarism was probably a fact of life on both sides but certainly should not be celebrated or justified.
Posted by JD on 2007-05-26 14:38:00

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