Film Language
Jaquandor posts here about his ten least favorite films, and ends with a brief pan of Saving Private Ryan, probably one of my all-time ten favorite films. The pan is brief, and basically alludes to a criticism screenwriter William Goldman made in Premiere magazine the year Ryan was up for several Oscars.

(Saving Private Ryan spoilers follow)



I have the essay Jaquandor refers to in Goldman's The Big Picture, and the thrust of his argument is that the movie is basically one big cheat. See, the film opens with an old man in contemporary times visiting a grave in Normandy with his family. The man breaks down at the grave and as his family moves to comfort him we zoom in for a close up of his face and the film goes back to the D-Day invasion. Part (and not a big part, really--the film hardly nags on this mystery) of the engine of the film is the question of who that old man was--which one of our main characters. We are maybe led to believe that the old man is the film's chief protagonist, Capt. John Miller, played by Tom Hanks. And as the film winds on, and members of our core cast are killed, we have a kind of Ten Little Indians thing going, as old man candidates are eliminated. By the end of the film only a few of our main characters are alive--if memory serves, Miller; Pvt. Richard Reiben, as played by Ed Burns; and the titular Private Ryan, as played by Matt Damon. Ryan has not been introduced until basically the last act, the narrative thrust of the film being Miller leading a band of soldiers to find Ryan, who has earned a free ticket home by virtue of his three brothers all having been killed.

The old man turns out to be Ryan, and Goldman's argument is that this is bullshit, since that opening grave scene flashed back to the Normandy beach, which Ryan wasn't part of. Goldman goes on to say that the whole movie is bullshit since of course the whole film being his flashback makes zero sense--since he isn't around until the end of the film. This would be a valid criticism if you accept Goldman's positing of the whole movie as a flashback. My point is that there is no reason to do so. Just because we close in on the old man's eyes before flashing back does not therefore imply that we are seeing his memories. To my mind, to start a movie in the present and establish that the main story is in the past is not to imply that the main story comprises any one man's memory. One could structure a film like this of course, but there is no real reason to assume Spielberg has done so here. Goldman is taking that zoom shot into the old man's eyes as an established communication in film vocabulary that "we re now going to see this character's memories." But why? Just because many a film has used such a shot to do just that doesn't mean that's what it means here. I think Goldman is falling prey to assuming things he wants to assume--to being, in essence, a lazy viewer who is taking other films he's seen and applying their vocabulary here. The error he ends up watching the film with isn't, therefore, the film's fault.
Spielberg hasn't cheated at all.

Now Goldman has other issues with the film which are more a matter of taste than anything else, but his essay makes clear that this is his chief problem with the film, and I think it's an entirely unfair one. Ryan remains for me a brilliant film, and easily a top ten choice.

Until Whenever