Apocalypse Then
How do you portray violence
in movies nowadays so that it isn't a turn-on? Nearly 30 years ago, Sam
Peckinpah devised a massacre at the climax of The Wild Bunch that he
thought would take the casualness out of killing. He lingered on it, slowed it
down, fastened on blood-spurting bodies as they hurtled through the air--and
ended up making it lyrical, aestheticizing it, distancing it. Less
well-intentioned filmmakers followed in the wake of "Bloody Sam," turning
carnage into spectacle, even into rock 'n' roll. What Steven Spielberg has
accomplished in Saving Private Ryan is to make violence terrible again.
Nothing in the movie's melodramatic narrative can diminish the shocking
immediacy of its combat scenes.
The
opening battle might be the most visceral ever put on film. After a solemn but
predictable modern-day prologue--an old man and his extended family trudge out
to a cemetery to view row upon row of white crosses--there's a shock cut to the
boats of Allied soldiers surging toward Omaha Beach in Normandy, France. It's
D-Day, 1944. Trembling hands open a canteen. They belong to a familiar
star--Tom Hanks--but everything that follows is alien. The camera is down in
the surf, pitching, as young men pray and vomit. They've barely beached before
the first bullets come--before these smooth-faced, overgrown kids begin to get
blown through. We don't see the enemy machine guns or rifles, but we hear the
pops and the ceaseless whine of bullets, and we watch the men as their chests
and heads explode. Some drop underwater, but still the bullets come in near
silence, producing squalls of blood; above the water, the din resumes with a
vengeance.
The images are supersharp, as if viewed through too-strong
glasses, yet they streak and pixilate--break into shards--as the camera jerks
wildly left, then right. Color has been drained from the frame: The greens of
uniforms and browns of earth are muted, the sky rendered a neutral gray.
Against this monochromatic palette, the brackish blood leaps out of the screen.
That blood is everywhere. A helmet full of seawater turns out to be full of
sloshing gore; a soldier with a gushing arm socket picks up his severed limb
and staggers aimlessly; a man with his intestines on the outside wails through
a last, protracted hemorrhage. A soldier's helmet stops a bullet with a clank;
he removes it in wonder; his brains are then blown out.
For nearly
half an hour, the horrors come one upon another, unaccompanied by music and
unrelieved by any point of view except that of the soldiers in the middle of
the slaughter. There are no objective, "establishing" shots and no possibility
for emotional distance. Nauseated, I fixed on Hanks because I knew the star
would survive until at least the last reel. But even that reassurance seemed
precarious. In Saving Private Ryan , death can come at any instant, from
any direction. For the rest of the film's running time (nearly three hours,
total), each action--even a small one, such as the eating of an apple--is thick
with potential finality.
This is not the work of the Spielberg we've
come to know. After Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters of the Third
Kind (1977), he could afford to build any set, throw money at any creative
problem. His mise en scène became increasingly synthetic: He seemed to
lose touch with the texture of life. Even Schindler's List (1993) edged
into the movie-ish. Deciding to shoot Saving Private Ryan as if it were
a war documentary gives Spielberg's art a new orientation. Or rather, a new
disorientation. He shoots battles so that we can't always see what's happening,
our vantage is frighteningly restricted, and the world of combat is reduced to
pure sensation. This isn't about "bravery" or "heroism" but getting from Point
A to Point B without being torn apart by bullets.
Saving
Private Ryan , from a script by Robert Rodat, doesn't remain as feverishly
abstract as its imagery, but at its best, early on, it feels
undiagramed--unmapped. A squadron of Omaha survivors, led by Capt. Miller
(Hanks), is sent behind enemy lines to find one Pvt. Ryan, whose three brothers
have been killed on the same day in separate battles. The seven men under
Miller's command are furious with what they see as a PR mission and a
misallocation of military resources; they can't believe they're risking their
lives to rescue one anonymous private. But we in the audience know that the
mission is more than PR--that Gen. Marshall (Harve Presnell, sounding like Bob
Dole) has ordered it out of a Lincolnesque compassion for all the families
ripped apart by war. Freighted with such symbolism, the odyssey cannot help but
amount to something .
Miller's journey into the bowels of the war--through
rubbled villages and fields strewn with rotting corpses--attains the surreal
intensity that Francis Ford Coppola strove for in Apocalypse Now (1979),
except without the self-conscious Golden Bough stabs at myth-making.
Spielberg stages an agonizingly prolonged encounter with a German sniper in a
mounting drizzle, the life of a wounded, exposed soldier streaming out of his
body with the rainwater. The next assault is different, an attack on a concrete
Nazi "pillbox" that's barely glimpsed through the thick smoke, the action
viewed through the eyes of the squadron's skinny, bookish translator (Jeremy
Davies). After the shooting subsides, the tenderfoot hurries ahead to discover
the group's medic (Giovanni Ribisi) mortally wounded, being ministered to by
squadron mates hysterically pressing the dying man for instructions on how to
stop his bleeding. It's no wonder that, later, the men go through piles of dog
tags taken off dead Americans with little more than numb irritation and that
when they finally stumble on Pvt. Ryan (Matt Damon), they can barely contain
their hostility.
Soldiers
in war movies are usually undercharacterized--it comes with the territory. But
these young actors register. Vin Diesel's loping charisma made me sad to see
him blown away so early, and Barry Pepper gives a stock part--the sniper who
prays fervently before he kills--a monomaniac concentration. Mellish, Adam
Goldberg's nervy Jew, who can't keep from taunting captured Germans with his
religious identity, is a study in aggression, like Groucho without punch lines.
There are stellar turns by Davies, Ribisi, Tom Sizemore as a plodding but
good-hearted sergeant, and Edward Burns, whose acting is less mannered when
removed from his own movies. Tom Hanks' efforts to submerge his moody-wise-guy
personality dovetails movingly with his character's struggle to keep his
humanity in check. I find Damon's proletarian integrity deeply suspect but must
admit that he holds the camera like a star and that finding Pvt. Ryan is not an
anticlimax.
The battles in Saving Private Ryan make
most World War II pictures seem like Hollywood kid stuff--even the bleak,
"existential" ones like Sam Fuller's Steel Helmet (1951) and Don
Siegel's Hell Is for Heroes (1962). These sequences carry a post-Vietnam
aura of futility, and the scenes between the skirmishes are similarly modern,
full of rambling talk and post- Godot waiting around. But the movie's
overall vision is surprisingly old-fashioned. In most Vietnam films, authority
is insane. Here, orders from on high bring meaning, a glimpse of a more divine
purpose. The mission has the opposite end of the one in Apocalypse Now :
not the war's heart of darkness but its heart of light.
There's
another, more virulent way in which the movie is old-fashioned. In the course
of the endless massacre of Americans on Omaha Beach, I wrote in my notebook,
"No one who experiences this scene will ever cheer for a war again." But when
the tide of the battle turned and the Germans started getting their heads blown
off, I wrote "YES!!!!" And when a pair of Allied soldiers, fresh from
witnessing their buddies being blown to bits, shot several pleading Germans
rather than take them prisoner, I didn't applaud the act, but I didn't feel
much like grieving, either.
The Germans are faceless with one exception: a captured
pillbox Nazi who babbles and cajoles for his life, sings American anthems,
extols Betty Grable's gams, and screams "Fuck Hitler!" Reiben (Burns) and
Mellish want to blow him away, but the translator--who has almost never fired a
gun--protests vigorously that such an act would be a war crime and that the
German must be taken prisoner or freed. It would be wrong to give away what
happens next, but the consequence of the squadron's action is ham-handedly
predictable and, morally speaking, takes the picture down a peg. Too bad.
It goes without saying,
however, that Spielberg makes the case that soldiers' morals explode like land
mines amid the terrors of war. This is not, after all, where they live. It's
hard to recall a more chilling stretch in modern movies than the one before the
last big battle, when the American soldiers, surrounded by the debris of a
devastated town, listen to the echoey, piped-in strains of an Edith Piaf
recording--and then hear the first low rumbles of approaching German tanks,
each man alone in the shared knowledge that this foreign music will likely be
the last they'll hear.
