The Basic Plot in Five Words or Less: Risking eight to save one.

My Basic Ramblings: First things first - I cried during this movie.  I cried lots. I cried because I was happy that I lived in the 90's, not the 40's, and I wouldn't have to worry about sending Chris off to war.  I cried because I was upset that I never got to thank my grandfather (he died in 1995) for all he did in the war.  I cried because of all those crosses and Jewish stars. I cried because people actually had to go through what was up there on the screen.

Everyone says "This is the movie that was never made in the 1940's. The World War II movies of that time were all 'Go USA!' jingoistic, happy-ending fests." Well, of course this movie wouldn't have been made in the 1940's! Movies were never that bloody and violent back then. The Hayes Code people would've had a field day over this movie. (They were upset over having a scene in Citizen Kane set in a whorehouse; I think they would have edited the Omaha Beach sequence from 25+ minutes to about thirty seconds.) In movies back then, when you were shot, you just kind of fell over.  No blood. Bloody, intense scenes like that didn't become cinematically acceptable until the late 60's, early 70's, Bonnie and Clyde and James Caan's tollbooth execution in The Godfather time frame. (I am basing this statement on my one semester of Film History class I took in college, so if I'm wrong, please correct me.)

I had problems keeping all the characters straight. I knew Miller (Tom Hanks), Ryan (Matt Damon), Upham (Jeremy Davies, previously from Spanking the Monkey, the movie that introduced me to the music of one of my favorite groups, Morphine), the guy that Ed Burns played (Ed Burns), but everyone else (the guy from the "D.P.O." episode of the X-Files, the guy I thought was Doogie Howser's friend from that show but just turned out to be the guy from Relativity, and the rest) kind of blended together into a "Not Movie-Star Beautiful" group.

Then there's the "elderly person going back to the scene of the incident and reliving the whole thing" bookends, previously seen in Titanic. One would think, if Titanic and Saving Private Ryan are flashbacks (as they would appear to be, set up from their bookending shots) that the characters doing the remembering (Rose and Ryan, respectively) would have to be in every single scene from then on, as they couldn't have flashbacks of things they didn't see and therefore can't remember. (I have heard legitimate explanations on why Saving Private Ryan is not a flashback, but can see no corresponding explanation for Titanic.) [I will say, however, that they did a bang-up job of finding an actor who looks like a seventy year old Matt Damon.]

Flashbacks in movies are lame, anyway. If you were telling someone about something that happened 40/60/80 years earlier, you would not be able to remember it with a movie-like quality. I'm sorry.  You'd have gaps. You'd have things wrong. Someday, I'm going to write a scene in a movie where someone discusses something that happened eighty years earlier, and the scene will be constantly changing - the characters will wear different clothes in different shots, things'll move around in the back - it'd be a continuity coordinator's nightmare, but it'd be more true to the way a person's mind works.

But going back to Saving Private Ryan.....the audience was comprised of more men over the age of sixty than I've ever seen at one time in my entire life, and I'm including the time I spent as a waitress at a retirement village. Also - except for at the very, very end, the audience was silent. No one said anything. It was eerie, especially when I am still trying to recover from my Men in Black viewing experience. (It also probably had something to do with the fact that the youngest person in the theater looked to be about seventeen.)

There was a quote somewhere, I forget where (I think it's in one of my Film Flubs books) where a person talks about how seeing a shot of the sun haloed (or something like that) ruins the movie for him, because it reminds him that it's a movie, and that the actors are mere feet away from the food cart and warm trailers and the like. There were a few instances where I was immediately reminded I was watching a movie (blood droplets on the camera lens on Omaha Beach; a few scenes where the lights refracted in streaks, kinda like when your contact lenses go screwy), and although I know that the actors didn't have trailers and food carts nearby (they went through their mini Boot-Camp), it reminded you it was a movie.

If you remember, dear Reader, when Mrs. Ryan gets the visit from the Army men, and she collapses on the porch, there is a picture on the bookshelf of four young men in uniform. It's relatively safe to assume that these are her four sons. This contradicts James Ryan's statement that the last time the four of them were together was the night in the barn, the day before Daniel (?) went to training. [It also contradicts with the statement that the Ryan brothers were all in the same unit and were split up to avoid all of them being killed.]

But don't let all these nit-picky things make you think I didn't like the movie, or appreciate its efforts to educate the world about the true horrors of WWII. Anytime I talk about the movie to someone, I can feel the tears welling up behind my eyes. I think Paul Tatara said it best about this movie when he said "It's not perfect, but...it makes you want to find a Veteran and throw your arms around him in gratitude."

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