Save your tears for another day

AFI100 #71 Saving Private Ryan (1998)

This review is part of my Reel Stuff series where I watch and review each movie in the American Film Institute (AFI) 100 Greatest American Films Of All Time 10th Anniversary Edition counting down from #100.

My Rating: 81/100

Pollice Verso: 👎

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I actually went into Saving Private Ryan expecting to cry and I didn’t so I was disappointed, if that makes any sense. I know that seems perverse to want to cry in a movie, to be bummed it wasn’t sad enough, but that’s how I felt.

It’s like when your friend hypes up a restaurant. He tells you it’s the best steak he’s ever had and you need to go there. And when you decide to go — mostly to shut him up — you order the steak and it’s good. It’s good, but it’s not the best steak you’ve ever had. Now, actual quality of the steak notwithstanding, you probably would have liked that same restaurant in another universe where your friend didn’t promise you the sacred cow. But here your expectations practically served disappointment on a silver platter.

That was Saving Private Ryan. Sad, but not that sad.

Before you call me a soulless psychopath for this take, consider this:

One death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.

— Joseph Stalin

Now, ignoring the fact that I’m stealing a quote from Joseph Stalin in defense against my own psychopathy, you should see my point. SPR plays like a statistic, horrific in its death toll but hardly tragic. An inch deep and a mile wide — both figuratively and literally — as we follow Captain John H. Miller and co. across France in his suicide mission to save Private Ryan.

What makes something tragic is one death, but one very, very deep death that affects you. Think about the most famous tragedies of all time. Hamlet is so tragic because we follow the character Hamlet the entire time as he descends into madness. His uncle murders his father, he doesn't trust his mother, everything's crumbling around him, and we get deep into Hamlet's psychology. That's what makes it so tragic. If all the cast of characters just died and there wasn't this rich dialogue revealing the interiority of the character, we wouldn't really care.

And that's the whole point. In Saving Private Ryan, the characters don't feel like real people with deep layers of psychology from which to relate. They feel like numbers, like a news report or a history textbook. For that reason, I'd say the movie kind of failed for me. It should have spent much more time in the POV of one character, maybe the translator, because he seems to be the closest to someone the viewer could connect with, just filtered through his eyes watching this whole thing unfold. Spending less time on these different scenes of cataloging what's going on in a numbingly clinical way.

Major gripe with SPR aside, the only reason it deserves a place on the AFI100 comes down to production. It’s a masterpiece especially considering its release in 1998. The film opens with cinematic stress disorder in the form of an overwhelming half hour D-Day sequence. It is simultaneously the worst and best part of the entire two and half plus hours. Bullets fly in head-spinning directions. And limbs. At one point the filming submerges us underwater where you legitimately wonder whether you’ll be hit by a bullet before you drown. It’s horrifying, and yet you can’t pull your head away. This lasts for some amount of time that leaves you so numb by the end that you no longer fidget in your seat watching the bunker-gunners being burned alive.

That first scene will be etched in my memory forever. It will remind me, production-wise, of the brilliance SPR in its dealings with the macabre, rivaled only by Platoon. Not much else will be remembered, not-so-sadly.