Another Day: SAVING PRIVATE RYAN

On July 24th, 1998, I walked out of a movie theatre with my younger brother in tow. Neither one of us were speaking – likely because we just didn’t know what to say after the three hours we’d just experienced. Minute after minute passed, and we just couldn’t begin to talk about the film we’d watched…we weren’t even trying. We were looking out opposite windows of the car on the drive home, sad, stunned, and silent.

In the years since that unforgettable afternoon, I have watched the film a few dozen more times (as many of you know, it has become a personal favorite). These subsequent viewings have helped allow perspective and context to seep in, and made me consider things I didn’t at first. Specifically, I have begun to look at much of what happens beyond those intense opening twenty-five minutes, and as such I might have even found the real core of the film…and it rests on two characters. But first some set-up.

As the tagline says, “The mission is a man”, and much of the rest of the film’s runtime will be spent with soldiers trying to come to understand that counter-intuitive order. For me, the decision to make the order feels short-changed. Between the discovery of the Ryan brothers’ fate, and Gen. George Marshall reading the words of Abraham Lincoln, it feels like there’s a step missing. A conversation should have been had, pros and cons weighed, even a few lines about what this decision would ultimately cost. The decision would ultimately have been the same, but it might have given just a bit more nuance to the decision between the mission and the man.

Because this conversation never happens, we have to take the mission as “the human thing to do”. It makes it a little difficult for us to completely accept this deployment of shepherds looking for one missing sheep. As the platoon sets out across the French countryside, the first of the two core characters pipes up.

War stories are built on sacrifice; on the notion that men and women have died so that we might live. It has happened through all of recorded history, and will continue to happen until we ultimately destroy ourselves. But the sort of sacrifice SAVING PRIVATE RYAN demands feels like a sacrifice that will never be outweighed. It comes off as a decision made by the men ordering the deployment, and not the ones being deployed themselves. It comes from the men drinking hot coffee and shaving with steaming water as a weary Captain Miller looks on hungry and scruffy.

Miller will provide the very logic that’s being torn up. He can tell you precisely how many men have died under his command. What helps him remain a good leader and a great officer is the fact that he knows every life is offset by lives saved – two, sometimes ten, perhaps twenty to one. It’s cold hard math. But with Ryan, he’s staking eight lives for Ryan’s one, leading him to mutter that Ryan had “better be worth it”. And that’s the tragedy: He’s not. Nobody is. Who could possibly justify the notion that six people died so that they alone could live?

Jackass that he might be, Rieben sees this illogicality early on. It will gnaw at him the entire mission, just as it would with many of us. He stands in for any of us who have been asked to do something that seems backwards and contradictory at work…except in his line of work, lives are at stake. And just like anyone continually pushed to do something that doesn’t make sense, he eventually has to let it out.

But then one has to consider the fate of Corporal Tim Upham – often considered the stand-out character of the film. Upham is not a grunt nor a warrior. He’s an educated kid who is grabbed by the collar and folded into the mission out of complete necessity. Not like many of these men would be completely equipped to handle what they experienced anyway, but Upham comes in especially ill-equipped.

What’s fascinating is the way he stands in for a different part of us than Rieben. Upham is the part of us that would try to reach out in kindness, only to get our hand slapped away. He tries to verbally re enforce the mission, even if he doesn’t completely understand it himself. Eventually, it will be him that will beg for humanity when it seems to be all but lost.

Upham’s first test comes when the Nazi soldier is captured after the firefight that costs the platoon their medic Technician Wade. With the rest of the unit (not co-incidentally including Pvt. Rieben) calling for a blood execution, it’s Upham’s pleading that convinces Cpt. Miller that the rules of engagement should be respected. He is a soldier who does not really believe in killing, and embodies our sense of clemency by arguing for the Nazi’s life.

Once you’ve reminded yourself that there are actual rules for warfare – guideline by which this madness and violence is supposed to uphold to – ask yourself if you’d have the fortitude to stand up to armed men twice your size and speak up for the enemy? In this instance, a twerp like Upham becomes a bigger man than most of us, and he seems to be doing the humane thing.

The tragedy of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is that “the humane thing” costs the mission dearly. Since he can’t muster up the courage to engage his enemies, Upham then has to watch as the very man he sets free kills a man from his own unit (namely, his commanding officer), along with potentially countless other men from the unit they joined up with in Ramelle. In short, doing the “human thing” – the very backbone of the rescue mission – cost more lives in the long run.

While all of that is happening, Rieben finally gets his answer. After walking for miles and loathing the very idea of “Private-James-Francis-Ryan-from-Iowa”, he finally meets the man, and is surprised and perhaps even impressed that Ryan thinks the mission is bullshit too. The part of us that believed, as Rieben did, that one man’s life is not worth eight suddenly has to shut up when that man doesn’t think so either (he even shoots down the angle of considering his mother’s feelings). It stops Rieben’s resentment dead in its tracks, and in one of the film’s most beautifully subtle moments, he is able to let his animosity to all things Ryan go…give him a nod, and fight right next to him.

Upham sadly isn’t given this sort of solace. He has watched his humanity be spit upon. At first his open hand wasn’t accepted by his own unit, but his open hand being slapped away by his enemy destroys any sense of human mercy he had left. He has been reduced to the sort of soldier we met at the end of the D-Day sequence…the sort who will execute a man who has surrendered. He represents the part of us that might decide to momentarily forget about quarter, and his shell shocked expression as we leave Ramelle is a sign of the guilt he will carry the rest of his life.

The sacrifices of war come hand in hand with Upham’s calls for empathy, and Rieben’s questions of judgement, and that is the core of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. It’s not just to tell us that war is hell (though it is), or that our ancestors sacrificed much (though they did). It wants to tell us that in trying to do “the right thing”, the method is never entirely simple…and we might very well have to walk a long road before the method can make any sense. If it ever does.

Matineescore: ★ ★ ★ ★ out of ★ ★ ★ ★