The strangest choice of Saving Private Ryan is how much the film needs to justify itself. At every turn, characters must comment on and debate the morality and potential pointlessness of their ridiculous rescue mission, risking the lives of many to save just one, so that the boy’s mother doesn’t have to receive a fourth folded-up American flag. The story—inspired by a number of real instances of almost entire families of American brothers wiped out in WWII, particular the Nieland brothers, whose Fritz jumped on D-Day as a part of the 501st and was later rotated off the European theater—is at once obvious for a Hollywood film due to its highly personal stakes, but completely bizarre as a work of historiography.
Out of all the questions the men ask themselves about their purpose in Normandy, they never wonder why saving Pvt. Ryan would be the one good thing they can bring out of this mess, when they’re simultaneously fighting for the righteous side of a conflict. Would liberating Europe from Nazism not be enough to make sense of the war? Steven Spielberg seems to think not, because otherwise he wouldn’t have made a movie this way. One could argue that Spielberg’s goal with Saving Private Ryan is not to be historic, but present. His making sense of nihilism on the battlefield is much more akin to Boomer disillusionment versus the Greatest Generation rah-rah war films that the director grew up on. It could be a matter of taste, as well, with Spielberg choosing to pair the patriotism and shocking documentary of John Ford’s The Battle of Midway with the elegiac and personally tragic nature of his immediate post-war work They Were Expendable. But what results is a film that’s texturally grounded while contextless. When Lewis Milestone opens A Walk in the Sun with the odd quietude of a landing vehicle, the image is immediate for an audience in 1945. Spielberg showing Dog Green Sector of Omaha Beach in 1998, it’s slipping out of living memory, one which he wants to reintroduce to people through the violence of water splashing and soldiers hurling.
Spielberg’s blood-and-guts, bleach-bypassed documentary look, in attempting to present the visceral experience of reality, belies everything that’s overtly modified and manufactured to be cinematic. Maybe it’s just a mistake that ramps on Spielberg’s Omaha beach are facing the wrong way—where they are supposed to point away from the tide so as boats ride up them and tip over, in Saving Private Ryan they face into the channel—but the acute wooden triangles balance the composition and visually signify the hard-stopping barrier that the beach is.
Most of the “mistakes” in the film can be attributed to this push towards the cinematic, like the climactic finale wherein Tom Hanks and his men mount a doomed defense of a bridge, nonsensically staging themselves on the oncoming side of the attack before falling back over the river. Strategically, it’s suicidal and pointless, but in sequencing a battle for the cinema, it’s a brilliant multi-layered and dynamic landscape for Spielberg to violently kill his toy soldiers on.
This documentary aesthetic approach is always at tension with Spielberg’s Hollywoodisms at a storytelling level. Spielberg expends all his energy trying to make it feel like it might have felt for soldiers in WWII by borrowing from the visuals of newsreels and archive photos, and winds up in a narrative corner where the ridiculousness of the plot has to be acknowledged again and again and, ultimately, resolved in a way satisfying for a mass audience. That’s how Spielberg winds up making the story be about how someone has to earn the life they were given out of chaos, rather than the more obvious historic purpose of D-Day, which his premise fits onto like a LCVP coming into a trap-filled beach at high-tide. The story and its veracity—both emotionally and historically—is one of deception, no different than the camera moving into the old man’s eyes at the start of the film to make the audience think we’re in the memories of Tom Hanks’ character, only to pull the rug and have the camera come back out of Matt Damon’s. Spielberg’s goal isn’t in creating a didactic narrative (even though he does), but to play a trick to make people cry.