Adam@Home by Rob Harrell for March 05, 2010

I didn’t say it was far-fetched, I said it was silly. Risking eight men’s lives to save one man whose only significance is that his brothers all died is strategically stupid, whether it happened once, never, or a hundred times.

Yes, all those men who died to save Ryan allowed Ryan’s children and grandchildren to live. By the same token, the act of “saving” Private Ryan, taking him from a front-line postion where he wanted to stay and where he presumably had as good a chance as any of surviving, resulted in the non-existence of those other men’s future children and grandchildren. Spielberg didn’t choose to mention THAT, of course. Instead, he played the “survivor’s guilt” card, which, because of his experiences with the Shoah Project, he was surely familiar with. The idea that those who died in the camps (or in the trenches, in this case) were somehow BETTER than the ones who made it out alive… It’s a natural psychological state, but it’s unhealthy and false. “Why couldn’t worthless old ME have been the one who died, instead these others who were better than me?” It’s cheap manipulation to instill or indulge that in the audience, like it was cheap to have Oskar break down at the end of “Schindler’s List” and weep “Why couldn’t I have saved JUST ONE MORE?” That ain’t what Schindler actually did. It’s button-pushing gamesmanship that Spielberg indulges in when he’s aiming to be “taken seriously”. Just because a movie’s depressing doesn’t make it significant. There was one movie of the five nominated which wasn’t constantly threatening to topple over on itself as a result of its gravitas - “Shakespeare In Love.”

Many would argue that “Saving Private Ryan” wasn’t even the best World War II film nominated in 1999. Many critics put Malick’s “The Thin Red Line” at the top of their lists that year, and that surely split the vote. “Life is Beautiful”, which you also mentioned above, was another “Gosh those Nazis were so EVIL” movie that probably cost “Ryan” votes. Don’t get me wrong, I love hissing at Nazis as much as the next guy, despite being a Fritz. My favorite movie of all time is “Casablanca”, but the problems of three little people – or ONE, in Ryan’s case – don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

“Ryan” was nominated for 11 awards, but look at the ones it won: Editing, sound, sound effects editing, cinematography, and of course director. “Shakespeare” was nominated in 13 categories (including director, editing, sound, and cinematography), but look at the ones it won: lead actress, supporting actress, music, costumes, and SCREENPLAY.

“Ryan” won for the technical categories, “Shakespeare” won for the creative categories. Spielberg got his due as a technician, not an artist, like Cameron did for “Titanic” (and may likely do for “Avatar”). Spielberg is a far better director when he allows himself a light touch, like in “Jaws” or “Raiders of the Lost Ark”; in a suspense-horror movie, or an action-adventure, emotional manipulation is part of the fun.

All five Best Picture nominees that year were, oddly, period pieces: three set against World War II, and two set in Elizabethan England (one early, one late). Before the Awards telecast, I saw a panel discussion (I think on the History Channel) featuring a group of historians weighing in on the five from their own perspective. The consensus was that all five were historically inaccurate to varying degrees, but the distortions that troubled them the least were in “Shakespeare In Love”, in that it alone was not intending to be seen as historically accurate. “Ryan” got kudos for that opening sequence of the Normandy Invasion, but of couse that was again technique, the effective showing of what it might have been like if we had had documentary footage of WWII combat like we had of Vietnam combat. But that’s only the first 20 minutes or so of its nearly 3-hour run time. (That’s another sign of its own inflated sense of importance: It’s perhaps as much as 50% too long for the demands of its plot.)