by Rich Elias, Jul 23, 1998

• Rated R
• 170 Minutes
• 4 Stars

Miller's reward for surviving the assault is to lead a squadron into Normandy looking for Private Jimmy Ryan (Matt Damon), whose three brothers were killed in battle. The squadron is a recognizable mix of city boys, country boys, Jews, Italians, Czechs -- the kind you see in every war film. But writer Robert Rodat and Spielberg are clear that "Saving Private Ryan" is not like any other war film.

The creative team must have made a list of every World War II movie cliché and then asked themselves, "How can we avoid them?" One approach was gruesome, graphic realism, images of men being blown apart or cut in half by machine gun fire. Director of photography Janusz Kaminski muted the color scheme and forced the film to give "Saving Private Ryan" the look of authentic combat footage. Spielberg also used hand-held cameras in battle scenes to force us to watch the action from the soldiers' point of view.

But you can't make a movie out of battle scenes alone. You need a story. Rodat deliberately turns war movie formulas inside out, hoping that this makes his story more authentic. What we expect to happen almost never does. Private Rieben (Edward Burns) has "Brooklyn NYC" written on the back of his jacket, but he never talks about Brooklyn, unlike every other Brooklyn-born grunt in World War II movies. In fact, the soldiers never talk about their lives before the army. Captain Miller is so reticent that no one in his squadron knows where he comes from or what his civilian job was. (These facts are revealed suddenly and unexpectedly in an astonishing scene.) None of them daydreams about Marge next door or going home to marry Gracie. And the only soldier who mentions Betty Grable is a captured German ("Great gams").

One subplot involves a young soldier (Jeremy Davies), a translator, whose curiosity about Miller's past distinguishes him from the others. He's a thinker, another key difference, with a conscience that makes him seem cowardly. A critical scene late in the movie puts him to the test. The test itself comes straight out of older war movies but its outcome is very different.

You get the feeling in scenes like these that Spielberg and Rodat know more about war movies than about war, despite advice from experts such as historian Stephen Ambrose. But the focus on Captain Miller helps humanize the story. We listen closely when this quiet man says anything at all. The Army tells officers that for every man killed in combat under their command, ten others are saved. Miller says he's lost 93 men and can only hope their sacrifice saved a thousand. He can't believe it.

Hanks, a two-time Oscar winner, gives the greatest performance of his career. The impact of "Saving Private Ryan" depends as much on the bone-deep weariness in Hanks' face as on the noise and blood in the battle scenes. Flanking him is Tom Sizemore as Sergeant Horvath, who has fought by Miller's side for a year but still doesn't know the man. It's up to Sizemore and Edward Burns to make the trickiest scene in the movie work for us, a confrontation between the two. Thanks to their talent, the scene is astonishing and ostentatiously dramatic. It's not entirely convincing, but lesser actors would have exposed more of its flaws. John Williams composed the score, but much of the movie runs without music underneath the action to further heighten the realism.

Viewers expecting another "E.T." or soft Spielberg should be warned that "Saving Private Ryan" is a tough picture to watch. It's the Spielberg of "Schindler's List," another World War II drama. Like that movie, "Saving Private Ryan" makes its point through impact rather than argument. Can we brand the movie pro-war or anti-war? It doesn't glorify war, far from it. But it isn't endorsing pacifism either. Its main point is that men in war can become heroes without wanting to or caring much either way. They reach the point of self-sacrifice only after war's horrors have squeezed much of the humanity out of them. Every time he kills a man, Miller says, he feels farther away from home.

Spielberg was born one year after World War II ended. He came of age during the Vietnam War years. Yet events that ended before his birth seem more compelling to him. Why not a movie about Vietnam rather than World War II? Vietnam may still be too controversial for Spielberg, a director who stifles controversy engendered by his serious films by the massive power of his sincerity, all of it right there on screen.

But there may be an underlying reason for Spielberg's fascination with World War II. He and I are the same age, Jewish, and we grew up at a time when parents and uncles and aunts were trying to forget the war and get on with their lives. You never heard the men talk about their wartime experiences, never. Even in high school, our American History course ended just after the first World War. The last three chapters in the textbook weren't covered at all. As for the Holocaust, the subject of Spielberg's "Schindler's List," I heard stories about relatives killed in Europe but, again, that was the old world and we were living in a brand new row house and buying a new car on time every four years.

I have to think that Spielberg's boyhood experience in California was somewhat like mine. We were haunted by experiences almost none of our elders wanted to confront or burden us with. (And for many Jews in that era, the Holocaust -- not yet called by that name -- was simultaneously a horror and an embarrassment as our families tried to assimilate into American life.) So we smiled through the happy days of the 1950's. But now, in his early 50's, Steven Spielberg is using his Hollywood clout and enormous talent to do something profoundly moving and intellectually audacious: he is re-creating the past he was denied, and he does it brilliantly.