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" Last summer, Steven Spielberg&amp;#039;s Saving Private Ryan surfed on the sort of hype that transcends its own nature--hype with a halo. Newsweek&amp;#039;s cover story led with the haggard recollections of real-life Normandy vets, practically obliging moviegoers to thread their popcorn into a rosary. The New Yorker lauded Ryan&amp;#039;s lack of ideological agendas, an astonishing claim to make about a movie that begins and ends with a luminous Stars and Stripes filling the screen. Vanity Fair&amp;#039;s James Wolcott not only hailed Spielberg for &amp;quot;getting it right&amp;quot;--one of the hoopla&amp;#039;s mantras--but preemptively bashed any &amp;quot;media-savvy smart-asses&amp;quot; cynical enough to be unmoved. (Talk about the pot painting itself red, white, and blue, if I may speak for the kettles.) On a PR tour undertaken, so he said, only to warn under-fifteens off his movie&amp;#039;s graphic carnage, the director piously deprecated its box-office potential, which in $400-mil-and-counting hindsight makes him look like a man wetting his finger to test the breeze while standing inside a wind machine.  And poor Bob Dole, out of luck as usual. If the damn thing had come out two years earlier, he might be president today. A state-of-the-art Spielberg thrill ride disguised as a patriotic hymnal--and vice versa, which was its double-whammy genius--Ryan was the pinnacle of our new idolatry of World War II and the generation that fought it, a cultural tic I&amp;#039;d attribute partly to those fin-de-millennium blues and partly to the boomers&amp;#039; predictably startled recognition that their parents are about to die. In a fallacy that, since Schindler&amp;#039;s List, Spielberg has all but patented, to dislike his movie was to proclaim your snickering contempt for the hell that Dad (or Granddad) went through.  The choir&amp;#039;s silliest sing-along was the chant, led by the director, that every previous war flick had been a jingoistic cheesefest starring John Wayne. But Wayne actually made only a handful of uniformed shoot-&amp;#039;em-ups--westerns were his m\u00E9tier--and the most famous, Sands of Iwo Jima, is one of the few movies in which he dies, on a sacrificial note that&amp;#039;s not much different from Ryan&amp;#039;s blubbery finale (except for being less overwrought). It&amp;#039;s also an anomaly, since, after V-J Day, few of Hollywood&amp;#039;s plenitude of serious-minded war films in the forties and fifties played up battlefield heroics. Flagrant cartoons like 1967&amp;#039;s The Dirty Dozen don&amp;#039;t feature action any more rabble-rousing than Spielberg&amp;#039;s pull-out-the-stops last battle, and even movies made during the war didn&amp;#039;t go further in portraying the enemy as subhuman. However puerile they could be, one appeal of yesteryear&amp;#039;s World War II films is that they were made by and for people who remembered the real thing, lending a been-there-done-that equanimity to their jauntiness that I far prefer to Ryan&amp;#039;s fetishistic hysteria. Spielberg&amp;#039;s stunning combat scenes were praised for their greater realism by critics chary of admitting that lustrous technology and filmmaking flair also make them more sensational--a turn-on.  If sentimental oomph is the yardstick, nobody can say Spielberg doesn&amp;#039;t deliver the goods. Working your adrenal glands and tear ducts simultaneously, he manages something impressive enough to deserve being called dangerous: He makes nostalgia exciting. But in light of the platoon of Oscars that Ryan&amp;#039;s likely to take marching home this month--which its technical wizards and splendid cast deserve--last summer&amp;#039;s binge could use a bucket of cold water, and this media-savvy smart-ass had his doubts from the get-go. It&amp;#039;s absurd for a movie so romantically, primitively rah-rah to be acclaimed for setting the record straight; Ryan would hardly be the ultimate World War II film as ultimate Spielberg lollapalooza if it didn&amp;#039;t incorporate every clich\u00E9 of the genre in a way that looks new mostly because it&amp;#039;s out to flatten you.  Ryan bets the farm on its opening Omaha Beach sequence--instantly famous as the most harrowing portrait of battle in movie history. No question it&amp;#039;s intense--hectic but amazingly detailed; the turmoil and clatter never let up. Yet there&amp;#039;s often an appalling disjunction between the chaotic slaughter being re-created and the ostentation of the virtuoso filmmaking on display, bragging up distractingly showy effects (the blood flowering from the men shot underwater) when it isn&amp;#039;t indulging in pat ironies (the soldier who catches a bullet in the head while marveling at his narrow escape).  More to the point, the intro fudges the average soldier&amp;#039;s experience on Omaha in one crucial aspect, which you could figure a glorifier like Stephen Ambrose wouldn&amp;#039;t call Spielberg on even if America&amp;#039;s favorite D-day wannabe hadn&amp;#039;t been on the Ryan payroll the whole time Newsweek et al. were trotting him out to vouch for its accuracy. Back in bland old 1962, even a spectacular as bowdlerized as The Longest Day affectingly showed what Ryan does not--that the miserable men on the beach stayed huddled there, panicked into paralysis as the casualties mounted, for several hours. Depicting the same event on a budget most high school pageants would scoff at, for-real invasion vet Samuel Fuller&amp;#039;s The Big Red One featured a haunting image: the recurring shot of a dead soldier&amp;#039;s wristwatch lapped by surf, the water turning redder--the part Spielberg filches--as the morning crawls by. Ryan&amp;#039;s beach attackers face a much costlier (in both senses) inferno, which does look more believable. But they also recover to storm the German pillboxes in twenty-five minutes of what&amp;#039;s presented to us as real time, lionizing exactly the sort of dauntless heroics the movie was praised for downplaying. Spielberg has gotten huge credit for showing us combat&amp;#039;s terrors, but except for Tom Hanks&amp;#039;s brief, mute aria of dazed shock, he doesn&amp;#039;t show us any of his good guys acting terrified--which means they&amp;#039;re superhuman. On top of that, the celebrated opening is actually superfluous to the story. But it&amp;#039;s a brilliant piece of showmanship, since the big number Spielberg pulls off up front half cows and half wows the audience into accepting that the whole movie has been made in the same somber, gritty spirit. It hasn&amp;#039;t, of course; commercially speaking, he&amp;#039;s not that big a fool. Once Hanks&amp;#039;s Captain Miller and his men set off on their rescue mission, trudging from encounter (the reprise of Full Metal Jacket&amp;#039;s sniper sequence) to encounter (Ted Danson as the world&amp;#039;s oldest paratroop officer) across what no longer looks much like Normandy, the movie comfortably dilates into the longest, most overblown episode of the old TV series Combat ever filmed. Measured against the complexity and tension of comparable parts of The Wild Bunch--a movie Spielberg&amp;#039;s far more indebted to than his interviews suggest but whose opening massacre, unlike this one&amp;#039;s, is integral--Ryan&amp;#039;s let&amp;#039;s-argue-about-the-mission-when-we&amp;#039;re-not-killing-Nazis scenes are psychologically and thematically vapid.  For all their sententious airs of high purpose, Spielberg&amp;#039;s shaggy-dogface stories just mark time until the slam-bang finale--which the director, ever the movie buff, mounts as a set-piece imitation of the climax of Rio Bravo, right down to the mortar rounds being lobbed by hand, just like the sticks of dynamite hurled in the Howard Hawks film. However impressively staged, the last half hour is comic-book stuff on a grand scale, crammed with visual stunting more reminiscent of the Spielberg who directed Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark than the one who did Schindler&amp;#039;s List--the panzer bursting into view as menacingly as Bruce the shark, the gag of Miller seeming to have blown it up with a pistol shot until the fighter plane that did the job zooms by. In the guise of apotheosizing the GIs&amp;#039; valor, this Sgt. Fury extravaganza insults the opening&amp;#039;s jittery verisimilitude. One enthusiastic write-up deemed Ryan&amp;#039;s big finish &amp;quot;almost unbearably thrilling,&amp;quot; which it is. But given the movie&amp;#039;s pretensions, didn&amp;#039;t it cross anyone&amp;#039;s mind that maybe it shouldn&amp;#039;t be?  One reason the onscreen debates about the mission&amp;#039;s value go in such circles is that the down-to-earth answer to the movie&amp;#039;s big question--is one man&amp;#039;s life worth risking eight?--is so screamingly obvious: No. It&amp;#039;s a weird reversal of the usual proportions of the selfless-gallantry genre, in which one man dies to save many. As a parable of this nation&amp;#039;s World War II sacrifices, the story would be truer to what the GIs deserve being honored for if Ryan were a European. Then again, Saving Monsieur Renault might not have gripped the modern Stateside audience: Who cares about some damn snail eater? Instead, in a way that&amp;#039;s both solipsistic and tautological, saving the world gets redefined as saving ourselves--which must mean we are the world. It isn&amp;#039;t lack of patriotism that makes me despise the simplemindedness of the coda&amp;#039;s blessing on America--the wife&amp;#039;s affirmative answer when the aged Ryan asks, &amp;quot;Have I led a good life?&amp;quot; which symbolically validates our history in the fifty far-from-irreproachable years since World War II. Since the guileless farm boy that Matt Damon plays so marvelously (especially in his big monologue) is also a Jesus figure, the movie amounts to an extrapolation of what must be the ultimate American fantasy--one in which our guns and courage prevent the crucifixion, letting Jesus move to the suburbs and, in old age, take the kids on sentimental journeys back to Golgotha.  But that&amp;#039;s only because the saintly Miller has died for him, with an exalted grandeur--far in excess of any earlier World War II film&amp;#039;s--that left me more appalled than inspired. To call this an antiwar movie is lunacy; if I were seventeen, I&amp;#039;d have left the theater with a woody to enlist. Ryan&amp;#039;s ending elevates a gallant death into the noblest of romantic destinies while transforming the grim necessity of defeating the Axis from a past test of national resolve--which indeed we did meet--into a mystical summons to future greatness: &amp;quot;Earn it.&amp;quot; (Question: Even if Americans had just sat on their duffs and played pinochle after 1945, would that mean the GIs died in vain? Of course not.) Hanks has often recounted how his character evolved from the original script&amp;#039;s bellicose Medal of Honor winner in-to the average guy he plays. But the movie&amp;#039;s most treacherously brilliant piece of double-dealing is that Miller&amp;#039;s actions weren&amp;#039;t revised to match; it&amp;#039;s precisely because his martyrdom is presented as a triumph of humdrum, ordinary decency--qualities the herrenvolk myth claimed, too--that the hero&amp;#039;s Wagnerian finale should leave us queasy. The actor&amp;#039;s wonderful performance has moments of great beauty--Miller&amp;#039;s bemused reaction to the German loudspeakers blaring, &amp;quot;The Statue of Liberty is kaput,&amp;quot; his long scene with Damon. But it&amp;#039;s an incoherent part; there&amp;#039;s no reason why someone like Miller would keep his past a mystery, except as a gimmick to set up the big speech about fighting to get home that&amp;#039;s more shameless than anything in Bataan.  The speeches that Spielberg got congratulated for leaving out are the wheezers about fighting to save democracy. But I&amp;#039;d have welcomed some reminder that the United States is one. Ryan is actually more reverential of authority, and less tolerant of dissent, than the average Wayne (or war) film--discomfitingly so, since its dulce et decorumest therapy for our soft epoch is explicitly divorced from merely utilitarian justifications. The only lesson that Spielberg&amp;#039;s robust, good-hearted GIs learn on their way to Valhalla is that they&amp;#039;re better off obeying even orders they can&amp;#039;t rationalize. For all its pretenses of regret, the movie depicts Americans as a great warrior race--often in distastefully supremacist terms, with the paratroopers who save Miller&amp;#039;s men in one shoot-out looming up like olive-drab Terminators; it&amp;#039;s as if the only thing wrong with SS men was which side they were on. In a bygone movie era, Barry Pepper&amp;#039;s divinely inspired, Scripture-quoting sharpshooter would have been played as a psycho--for satiric purposes in the sixties, and just for yuks after that. Spielberg turns him back into Sergeant York, and his feats make the real one&amp;#039;s look like tiddlywinks. Meanwhile, the enemy is shown as lice to be exterminated--people who don&amp;#039;t deserve ordinary decency, because they&amp;#039;ll only use it against you--and noncombatants are painted as insignificant, if not unworthy. Honestly, I can&amp;#039;t see much that Hitler would have wanted changed in Saving Private Ryan, except the color of the uniforms.  The giveaway is the Jeremy Davies character--the lily-livered egghead attached to the squad (note that this weak sister isn&amp;#039;t even allowed to belong to it), who&amp;#039;s treated pretty much the way a Jew would be in a Nazi film. Naturally, he isn&amp;#039;t one; instead, Davies&amp;#039;s Corporal Upham is an Anglo-Saxon--suspect because he&amp;#039;s educated enough to speak foreign languages--whose ultimate baseness is his failure to rescue the strapping, all-American Jewish GI played by Adam Goldberg. But the stereotyping is no less vicious for being reversed. In symbolic terms, it&amp;#039;s also tripe; whatever their sins, liberal U. S. intellectuals were hardly spineless about opposing Nazism. In a movie otherwise in control of its own flamboyance, the delirium of this rabid, baiting caricature of the thinker as traitor and coward is a jaw dropper. As soon as he&amp;#039;s introduced, Upham grabs a tattletale German helmet instead of a good American one, then gets hit with a scrawny-dick joke--Hanks holding up the stub of pencil that defines him. At a crucial point, he&amp;#039;s also used as Spielberg&amp;#039;s indictment of his own kind, peering at action he can&amp;#039;t participate in and doesn&amp;#039;t understand through a rifle scope that subs for a director&amp;#039;s viewfinder. When the other men want to shoot a German prisoner, it&amp;#039;s Upham who insists that they play by the rules; then the perfidious kraut turns up at the climax, making Upham metaphorically responsible for Miller&amp;#039;s death.  There&amp;#039;s an obvious paradox here, because when he isn&amp;#039;t behind a camera, Spielberg, like Hanks, is among Hollywood&amp;#039;s best-known liberals. Yet he&amp;#039;s made one of the most mindlessly adulatory war movies of all time--one that treats combat as horrific, but only on the way to making it sublime, and calls the result the ultimate tribute to our national character while egging us on to live up to it. (How? This movie makes fighting Nazism look like an opportunity younger generations have been cheated of.) While I don&amp;#039;t think he&amp;#039;s a hypocrite, that&amp;#039;s mainly because hypocrisy requires some forethought; for all his gifts, Spielberg is less reflective than almost any movie director of his caliber. Now that he&amp;#039;s decided to be mature, he&amp;#039;s making the witlessly earnest mistake of equating artistic seriousness with momentous topics--the Holocaust, slavery, and now the &amp;quot;good war.&amp;quot; But all he can think of to say about them is to state the obvious smashingly--working us over with his full panoply of techniques for inducing excitement and going for primordial effects while remaining oblivious to their implications.  If anything, Saving Private Ryan proves just how unreal World War II has become to Americans. There&amp;#039;s no way a movie like this could have been made about an event that still felt like part of our national experience. Maybe every last piece of equipment is accurate, but the meanings and behavior are so magnified they&amp;#039;re sci-fi; the director is so intent on having us worship these men that he never lets us identify with them. Just like plenty of people who&amp;#039;ve gushed about Ryan, I had a father, too. Mine spent D-day on a destroyer escort off the sector of Omaha that&amp;#039;s depicted in the film. So I&amp;#039;m all for tributes, but the fact that we can think a Steven Spielberg blockbuster is an adequate one doesn&amp;#039;t mean we&amp;#039;ve learned how to honor our past. It just means we&amp;#039;re movie-mad. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a1490/riefenstahl-nationalism-0399/>