SAVING PRIVATE RYAN - Though Saving Private Ryan has been hailed by many as a masterpiece, I left the theater after viewing Steven Spielberg's latest film feeling angry. In this film Spielberg has managed to bring together several first rate performances, an unmatched camera sense, a unique and innovative cinematography, a darn compelling story, and a profound, sensitive, and nuanced contemplation of the dialogue between morality and war. And, after almost three harrowing, heartbreaking, and exhausting hours manages to thematically bankrupt it in the last reel.

After the first of two (pointless) bookends, the film starts very promisingly, with GI's aboard a landing craft en route to Omaha Beach, Normandy. In an incredibly confident and assured move, the film gives barely a minute to get to know those with whom the audience is expected to identify before the carnage ensues. The move works brilliantly, because these are no superhuman he-men. These GI's are shaking, praying, sweating, and vomitting; in short, they are what the audience would be, if placed under similar conditions. The connection is made instantly, so when the door of the landing craft lowers and half the squad aboard are immediately slaughtered by machine gun fire, the effect is wrenching emotionally as well as viscerally.

And for the first half hour Saving Private Ryan doesn't let up. The movie plunges into a horrific nightmare that makes the phrase "war is hell" seem a trite, laughable understatement. This opening sequence sets up undercurrents which run throughout the film, and the horror of it resonates throughout all of the minor skirmishes that follow; in part because of the stylized camera work that Spielberg uses to shoot the combat sequences. To my untrained eye, it looks as though he shot the fighting at a higher frame rate, and discarded every other frame, so that the action looks speeded up, but paradoxically lingers on each frame a little longer than usual; which, combined with the washed out, outlined look lent by slight overexposure, gives the violence a nervous, dreamlike quality.

It is after this startling piece of cinema that the plot begins in force: a squad of eight men led by Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) search northern France for one Private James Francis Ryan (Matt Damon). Ryan's three brothers all perished elsewhere on the same day, and HQ, in an effort to avoid a public relations fiasco, has ordered that he be sent home. The plot is an episodic affair, an account of the squad's travels and what they encounter. Each episode deals in some way with the squad members coming to grips with their mission in particular, and with their trying to sort out the bizarre equations that balance the value of human life during wartime in general. If one man sacrifices himself that ten may live, is that not a great and noble thing, but if a squad of ten refuses to leave a fallen comrade behind, thereby sacrificing itself, is that also not great and noble? When is one scenario demanded over the other? As one trooper in Ryan astutely sums up: "Hey, I got a mother, too!" It is to Spielberg's credit that he firmly refuses to give pat, general answers to questions that don't have universal answers.

But in addition to asking questions about the value of a human life saved, Saving Private Ryan also ruminates on the cost of a human life taken. This theme manifests itself most compellingly when the film deals with the subject of prisoners of war, a subject which comes up at several points during the movie. The first instance of this occurs at the tail end of the Normandy landing sequence, when the allied troops have managed to escape the bloodbath on the beach and seize the bluffs above it. Faced with German soldiers with their hands raised in surrender, many allied troops fire anyway. It's a horrifying moment, to witness unarmed men being gunned down; it is made even more horrible because, after being brought through the terror of the landing, I knew how the allied troops felt. Ducking automatic machine gun fire, fighting through barbed wire, while their adversaries sat safely inside concrete pill boxes was not fighting; the Americans had been subjected to what amounted to their own mass murder. For the survivors to react in kind was not justified, but I felt their reasons, felt empathy for them, and thus was implicated along with them.

This powerful theme is developed and modulated throughout the film, painted with shades of grey in fine detail. At one point, Captain Miller's squad storms a machine gun emplacement, losing one of their number and capturing one of the German soldiers manning the emplacement. The squad has no time for prisoners, and is understandably in a bloodthirsty mood after the death of their comrade, and it looks as though there will be a repetition of the chilling scene at Normandy. The war hasn't drained all of the humanity out of our protagonists yet, though, and they manage to do the right thing: they let their prisoner go. The film explains and accepts the reality of the case of the soldiers on the bluff, but leaves us with hope to aspire to something greater.

But Spielberg isn't content to just leave this statement. In a move straight out of a Hollywood film contemporary to World War II, the German soldier* comes back to haunt them. He joins with the group of Nazi soldiers that assail the protagonists at the end of the film, and, in a piece of cheap irony, even gets in a few pot shots at Captain Miller (the character most responsible for sparing his life.) This particular soldier's reappearance isn't a "realistic" touch, or even a likely occurance (he appears with a group of soldiers that should have had a river between him and them.) His reappearance isn't dramatically satisfying, either, because it interrupts suspension of disbelief. No, this character's reappearance is due to nothing other than sheer clumsiness; either because of some kind of misguided attempt at dramatic "closure" or because Spielberg wants to Say Something.

What this character's reappearance says, however, is that the squad was wrong to spare his life, and wrong not to murder him in cold blood. He is shown to be a weasally snake, not endowed with any kind of humanity. Worse still, this is the only image of the enemy we get on a personal level, so this image speaks for the entire body of the enemy. In the light of this, Spielberg has retroactively justified the slaughter of the surrendering soldiers that took place earlier on the bluffs of Normandy, and all of the other ugly, related incidents that occured in the film. In one sweeping, careless gesture he wipes away all of the rich and challenging moral ambiguity that his (to that point) painstaking treatment of the subject had evoked and replaces it with a simple, polarized jingoism; the noble to-a-fault good guys versus the slimy sub-human bad guys. I was left angry, not at the character, but at Spielberg for wasting a well constructed treatment of a subject that, to my knowledge, has never received such a layered and complex depiction, and letting it degenerate to something on the same level of ethical maturity found in a Steven Seagal movie. This is all the more baffling because it is just this sort of simplistic didacticism in other war movies that Ryan seemingly attempts to be a comment on (and a refutation of). Strangely, the bulk of the other reviews that I have read are convinced that it succeeded in this refutation.

After the German soldier is given his Just Deserts by the timorous corporal who finally learns to stand up and Be A Man, the movie is all but over. The film might have regained some ground with me had it just left off at Miller's last words to Ryan, to "Earn this," a message which is implied for the whole audience. Given how intimately we have been just acquainted with what has been sacrificed for us, it is a powerful message with the possibility of moving at least some members of the audience to positive action. But Spielberg just won't "shut up shuttin' up" and the wholely superfluous John Williams score (which, thankfully, was omitted from most of the key scenes) swells and we still have the coda to sit through. Miller's words resonate with the old man introduced in the first bookend as he stands among the thousands of headstones in the cemetary in present-day Normandy (an admittedly arresting and effective bit of imagery, given the themes considered in the film) and begs his spouse for validation. This is promptly supplied, letting him and the audience off the hook. The film finishes with a powerful statement, but immediately removes from the audience the onus of responsibility for any kind of action or self-improvement that it may have implied.

*There is some confusion as to exactly how many times this guy appears, and what it is exactly that he is guilty of. Roger Ebert has cleared up this muddle with help from a source at DreamWorks publicity in his Movie Answer Man column. This review was written under what turned out to be the correct assumptions.