'Ryan’s’ hope

Steven Spielberg doesn’t think like anybody else; he’s wired differently Ð his head is filled with distinct images. The first shot of Saving Private Ryan is a backlit American flag, light pouring through so that the stars look black, as if to symbolize the lives sacrificed in World War II. That image spells out the cultural revisionism that Spielberg has planned.

Spielberg’s movies always re-examine important themes, but Ryan may be the most perfect mesh ever between this director and his material. As well-meaning and powerful as Amistad was, the ideas and spirit Spielberg was trying to express were trivialized by the dialogue. Not so in Saving Private Ryan. Many pictures have been awarded the sobriquet Best Movie of the Year in 1998 -The Truman Show seemed ready to retire the phrase -so audiences should be wary about believing midyear hype. This movie, however, is truly remarkable, and I have no reservations about lauding it to the fullest: Saving Private Ryan is, most likely, the best American movie of the year.

Ryan features what is going to be the most talked-about sequence of the year. After we see an old man walk slowly past the graves of men who’ve given their lives in service, Ryan fades from a close-up of his eyes -which seem an antiqued version of that flag, rheumy with red where the whites once were, faded hints of blue flashing in the middle -to the eyes of Capt. John Miller (Tom Hanks), who has landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day. This scene is, literally, explosive; the landing crafts are peppered with assault weapons by the Germans.

It’s also here that the key elements of the movie are introduced: surprise and fear. We never know where we are, and this dizzying sensation of being off-balance permeates the film. In one of the brutal, unforgettable instances, a soldier, whose helmet has stopped a bullet, peels the lifesaving device off and stares at it in wonder -a shell smashes through his forehead a heartbeat later. The fear becomes almost intoxicating, and it’s Spielberg’s masterful stimulation of this dread that makes Ryan something altogether different.

Generally, fear is generated in movies as a cheap device, to keep us awake and manipulated. Here, Spielberg creates fear because it’s necessary for us to experience it in the exact way that his characters do. There’s no escape from the terror and carnage. Even the soldiers who tumble over the side of a boat into the ocean are chased down by death, as slugs silently cut through the water and them. Spielberg has always been prone to startle with the unexpected, but in this case he pummels us emotionally as we never have been before.

Spielberg and writer Robert Rodat seem to have absorbed World War II historian Stephen Ambrose whole; his most recent volume, Citizen Soldiers, could be the blueprint for this picture. (Ironically, Spielberg says Citizen Soldiers was just being published as he was completing filming on Ryan.) The hand-held camera movement in the D-Day sequence, with its awkward spins and close-ups, sticks us squarely in the action. Spielberg’s fearlessness is such that he stages this invasion in real time, with none of the distancing techniques. The random, forceful violence is so powerful that after we get through, the picture seems to slow down.

That’s seems; the fear never fully dissipates. It becomes like an aphrodisiac. Spielberg is constantly teasing us with it, fashioning an equivalent to Ambrose’s observation that what one couldn’t see, one could sense. Ambrose also writes of his subjects stating that, in order to survive and do one’s job, fear had to be managed. Spielberg shows how difficult such a feat was. He does so by giving World War II the jittery, confusing immediacy of the Vietnam War -he takes the moral clarity of movie heroism and replaces it with something more ambiguous and real.

Miraculously, Miller and his team survive the landing and set off on their mission, to locate Private Ryan (Matt Damon) and bring him home. Three of Ryan’s four brothers have already died in the war, and the orders from on high are to get him back home to his family, alive. "He’d better invent a longer-lasting light bulb," Miller grumbles, "or cure cancer." As the men move toward their objective, the resentment begins to boil among the men, assembled like the standard WWII movie crew. There are smart-aleck big-city boys (Adam Goldberg and the annoying Edward Burns), a Bible-quoting Southerner (Barry Pepper), the extremely competent noncom (Tom Sizemore), the efficient and sensitive medic (Giovanni Ribisi). (By not including any minorities in the troop, Spielberg also deals with the low-keyed racism of World War II; Ambrose points out that, despite what we’ve seen in movies, the armed forces were strictly segregated.) The familiarity of these men and their place in the war -as we’ve seen in countless rah-rah WWII flicks -actually serves to subtly increase the alienation and dread we feel as the movie’s darker side becomes more apparent. The lush beauty of the European countryside, for example, becomes a fool’s paradise, a terrain that masks the terror hidden just beyond the next turn.

This is an adult movie about violence. When the carnage begins, Ryan slips into that shaky verite camera style, to remind us of the reality of chaos that’s a heartbeat away. As stirring and magnificent as Schindler’s List was, it’s impossible to separate our responses to the real-life atrocities from the filmmaking. As noted, it’s easier to make the separation in this case, because of the man’s-man stereotypical nature of war films. Spielberg is playing on our recognition of the genre to raise the stakes.

Hanks, perhaps the best ensemble actor of his generation, uses his skill to unusual effect in Ryan. Rather than employ his trademark generosity and likability, he’s more withholding in manner, a mystery to his squad. He’s decent and capable, but despite the lean boyishness of his features, he’s playing a grown man, using his authority as a blunt object and refusing to fall back on movie-star charm. Hanks knows he can play it close to the vest and we’ll lean in to pay attention. His calm is transfixing. He is simple and scrupulous in achieving his effects, shading each line reading with a grim reluctance, a marvelous contrast to Spielberg’s sly style.

This may be Spielberg’s most mature movie, partially because it feels like an apology for the Indiana Jones films, in which he used WWII and Nazis for quick, punchy action-comedy. It may be his most grown-up work because of the emotional weight he has given to a genre movie. The film’s look has purpose, too: He leaches the color from Ryan so that it appears rendered with the palette from a GI’s footlocker; there’s a world of gradation in all of those greens and browns. The sun always seems to be threatening to break through the grimy haze of low clouds and gunfire smoke but never does so. This neatly mirrors our expectation of a bright, shiny resolution.

As much as the D-Day invasion has been written about, it’s the last cataclysm of Ryan that will make you bolt upright in your seat. Spielberg builds coolly, methodically to an operatic climax, and it’s a stunner. Its fluidity is illustrated in one of the most amazing shots I’ve ever seen. A nervous corporal (Jeremy Davies, who becomes the focal point of the film) dashes around the site of the final battle, helping with preparations. Before you know it, you realize that Spielberg has followed all of Davies’ actions in one shot, and it’s so breathtakingly dexterous you’ll want to applaud. Of course, we’re denied the chance to enjoy it and revel in Davies’ growing confidence; the joy is shattered by the dislocating carnage. Davies is the audience’s surrogate, and we taste the horror through him. His failure to act at a specific moment, and its repercussions, will haunt you for a lifetime.

Saving Private Ryan is such an extraordinary piece of work in so many ways that its flaws don’t do it in. The wrap-around device -the old man at the graveyard begins and ends the movie -is a damp piece of sentimentality. (It’s also a cheat -not up to the rest of the picture.) Spielberg seems to lose his footing when the scenes are based in the States; he pushes too hard on the scenes at the War Department and the delivery of the news to Ryan’s mother. And Hanks taking Ryan aside to deliver the film’s message is gilding the lily -too on the nose. He needn’t spell out the message so directly. It’s quite clear what this film is about: the price of freedom.

Elvis Mitchell won first place in Division III for newspapers with circulations between 175,0001 to 300,000.

He has been the Fort Worth Star-Telegram film critic since December 1997. He is also the longtime film critic for National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition, with an audience of millions, and is a correspondent for CNN/Entertainment Weekly Newsstand. Elvis previously was film critic for the Detroit Free Press and the New Times newspaper chain. His work also has appeared in Premiere and Rolling Stone magazines. Elvis is a native of Detroit and a graduate of Wayne State University.