After Cinqué gives Adams the insight about the importance of invoking his ancestors, the elderly man’s summation before the court, which Hopkins makes one of the most brilliant speeches in the history of the cinema, uses that theme as its centerpiece. Adams’s allusion to his father, former President John Adams, and his reconciliation with his legacy and that of the other Founding Fathers take on a dual meaning in the context of Spielberg’s body of work. This moment, emphasized with a camera movement toward Adams as he reaches the key line in his speech, goes beyond the immediate text to represent Spielberg’s reconciliation with his own father and the flawed father figures that populate so much of his work. Adams is surrounded by busts and paintings of his father and the other founders, whose stated ideals in the Declaration of Independence became compromised in practice. “We have long resisted asking you for guidance,” he says, addressing the founders. “Perhaps we have feared in doing so, we might acknowledge that our individuality, which we so, so revere, is not entirely our own. Perhaps we’ve feared an appeal to you might be taken for weakness. But we have come to understand, finally, that this is not so. We understand now, we’ve been made to understand, and to embrace the understanding, that who we are is who we were.”
The emphatic camera movement, the gravity of the performance, and the centrality of the idea to Spielberg’s body of work come together to make this the climactic moment of his career. The filmmaker’s obsessive, career-long theme of struggle with flawed father figures is, symbolically, put to rest in this moment of intergenerational acceptance. Adams is coming to terms with his own previous sense of inadequacy and his acceptance of the imperfect but powerful heritage he represents. The personal theme is placed in the context of the national family and the backdrop of impending civil war. Adams even accepts that tragic possibility (“And if it means civil war, then let it come”) to preserve the national union, the national family: “And when it does, may it be, finally, the last battle of the American Revolution.” The only flaw in this scene is Spielberg’s decision to underscore it with insipidly valorizing music by John Williams. The composer’s score, otherwise one of his best with its rich incorporation of African idioms, is an unnecessary distraction from Hopkins’s words. Not trusting words to carry a scene is a trap into which Spielberg sometimes falls.
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DAMAGED by controversy, Amistad was a relative flop with its domestic gross of $44 million (on a production cost of $41 million) and was bypassed at the Oscars, receiving four nominations but no awards. But Spielberg’s next film, Saving Private Ryan (1998), a joint venture of DreamWorks and Paramount, became an unexpected box-office smash, grossing $479 million worldwide on a production cost of $65 million, and won him his second Academy Award. Spielberg had worried that the World War II movie, with its overwhelmingly intense and visceral early sequence depicting the D-Day invasion, would prove too painful for most audiences to bear, as, perhaps, had been the case with his evocation of slavery. He was “flabbergasted” by the popular success of Ryan, which vindicated his desire to “resensitize people to the realities” of war, as he had done in Schindler’s List. He said that in Ryan, “I’m asking the audience—and it’s a lot to ask of an audience—to have a physical experience, so that they can somewhat have the experience of what those guys actually went through.” The audience reaction vindicated the seriousness of his mission. By evoking the sacrifice and heroism of ordinary Americans so vividly, Ryan captured the Zeitgeist in a year of national reconciliation with father figures, the same year Tom Brokaw’s history of what he called The Greatest Generation became an influential best seller by eulogizing Americans who had lived through the Great Depression and fought the war against fascism.
“I made Saving Private Ryan for my father,” said Spielberg. “He’s the one who filled my head with war stories when I was growing up…. When I first read the script, I said, ‘My dad is going to love this movie.’” Arnold Spielberg had been a U.S. Army Air Forces radio operator in the China-Burma-India Theater of operations. When Steven’s name was called as winner of the Oscar, he kissed his wife and hugged his father, with whom he had been so publicly at odds for many years. Their previous conflicts over Steven’s choice of a career, which the son exaggerated in memory, overlooking his father’s active encouragement of his early filmmaking efforts, were definitively buried by Steven’s gesture of paying cinematic tribute to his father’s generation of veterans. Ryan was an outgrowth of the process of reconciliation that culminated in Amistad. “Am I allowed to say I really wanted this?” Spielberg told the audience when he was handed the Oscar. He went on to declare, “Dad, you’re the greatest. Thank you for showing me that there is honor in looking back and respecting the past. I love you very much. This is for you.” Ironically, though Arnold expressed gratitude for the film, he complained that it was not about the war in Asia. So eventually Steven began planning a cable television miniseries called The Pacific (2010). He was an executive producer on the series with Saving Private Ryan star Tom Hanks, with whom he had collaborated in producing the 2001 World War II miniseries Band of Brothers, also set in the European campaign.
Steven’s reconciliation with his father in the late 1990s was such a momentous development in his life and work that it was chronicled by Life magazine in a 1999 cover story entitled “Steven Spielberg and His Dad: Healing a 15-Year Rift.” Steven recalled how he had blamed his busy father for his frequent absences from home, particularly when they lived in Arizona, but recognized that Arnold made the effort to go with him on Boy Scout camping trips, “maybe the happiest memories of my childhood.” But his parents’ divorce and his resulting anger toward his father (even though, at the time, he blamed his mother more) created, he said, “a distance between us. And when my father remarried, it separated us even further. I didn’t like the person he married.” Steven stopped telephoning his father and “began looking for fathers” in other men, such as his “surrogate father figure” Steven J. Ross of Time Warner. “In my heart, I loved my dad. But resentment can build up layers and barriers, and I just felt more comfortable not thinking about it.”
Eventually, the barriers started falling when his mother told him, “You know, this was not all your dad’s fault. It was my fault, too.” Steven said that when she explained what had happened (soon after the divorce, she married their longtime family friend Bernie Adler), “I spun around and realized I had been putting too much blame on the wrong person. That’s when I began to try to figure out how I could earn my father’s love back, how could I get my dad back.” Steven began acknowledging publicly how much his father had, in fact, contributed to his formation as an artist. Arnold soon became a fixture again in his son’s life, not only at family gatherings but also as a computer expert working from its inception on Steven’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation on the Universal lot, a few minutes from Steven’s southwestern-style Amblin complex. (The foundation’s archives and resources were transferred in 2006 to the University of Southern California, which makes the nearly 52,000 videotaped testimonies of survivors and other witnesses publicly available through its USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. Spielberg has given many millions to philanthropic enterprises over the years, including other educational groups, the Film Foundation, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in West Hollywood, and a support organization he helped found for gravely ill children, the Starlight Starbright Children’s Foundation.)
Arnold Spielberg collaborated with his son in Phoenix on two World War II movies, Fighter Squad (1960) and the forty-minute Escape to Nowhere (1962). The latter, an action movie set in North Africa, deals with the chaotic search for a GI trapped behind Germany lines and has some of the gritty focus on up-close combat that makes Ryan so involving. Both movies were shot in color, and Arnold influenced the key aesthetic decision about whether or not to shoot Ryan in color. When Arnold asked Steven why he had made Schindler’s List in black-and-white, Steven said it was because he knew the Holocaust only th
rough black-and-white archival footage. Arnold replied, “Well, I was alive during that time and I fought in World War II, and my experiences were in full, living, bleeding color.” That influenced Steven’s decision to shoot Ryan using the desaturated color he had once planned for Schindler’s List. He emulated the grainy, muted color of the 16mm combat footage shot during the war by John Ford for his U.S. Navy documentary The Battle of Midway and by George Stevens for his personal record of combat in Europe while he was filming the war for the army in black-and-white (Stevens’s unofficial footage was assembled by his son, George Jr., in 1994 as George Stevens: D-Day to Berlin).
Spielberg was also influenced by Robert Capa’s celebrated Life magazine photographs of the D-Day landings. Capa’s photos showing everything shaking and blurred as the soldiers storm Omaha Beach gave Spielberg the look and feeling he sought for the film’s stunning twenty-four-minute D-Day sequence. Spielberg evidently did not realize that the extreme shaking effect in Capa’s images was accidentally created in a London laboratory by a technician who overheated his pictures, destroying most and damaging the rest. Spielberg had the surviving photos “hung up on my bulletin board in my office, and also at home, and I stared at them relentlessly and told my group that I wanted to recreate the feel in every single one of those photographs.” The ferocious shaking of the handheld camera by Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski as the men storm the beach under fire is tremendously effective, and the desaturation of the color evokes the monochromatic effect of the familiar stills and newsreel coverage of the attack by U.S. government cameramen.
“As was the case with Schindler’s List, I did no storyboards at all,” Spielberg said of the D-Day landings in Ryan, which he filmed in continuity. “… I just thought it would be not very spontaneous of me to be so methodical in shooting that sequence as opposed to intuitively trying to figure out where I would be if I were a combat cameraman lying next to these guys who were trying to get to safety on that beach…. I improvised the way you improvise when you’re actually fighting a war.”
Since the actual Omaha Beach is off-limits for filmmaking, and the French government wouldn’t provide the tax breaks Spielberg wanted so he could shoot on another beach in that country, he recreated the landings at Curracloe Beach at Ballinesker in County Wexford, Ireland, mixing his squad of professional actors with 750 members of the Irish Defense Forces, some of them veterans of Mel Gibson’s Braveheart. After eleven weeks of preparation on the location, the sequence took fifteen days and $12 million to shoot in June and July 1997. Spielberg follows Hanks’s character, Captain John Miller, as he makes his way along the beach with agonizing slowness while he and his men are menaced by German machine-gun fire. The many grisly details of men being shot, incinerated, and exploded start with the shocking sight of men debarking from Higgins boats having their heads blown off; Anthony Lane in The New Yorker called the sequence “as credible and confounding a vision of Hell as could be imagined … like high-speed Bosch.” More than a thousand artificial corpses and about two dozen actual amputees were used to help recreate what Spielberg described as “a slaughter. It was a complete foul-up: from the expeditionary forces, to the reconnaissance forces, to the saturation bombing that missed most of its primary targets. Given that, I didn’t want to glamorize it, so I tried to be as brutally honest as I could.”
Spielberg’s decision to follow closely on Captain Miller from boat to beachhead enables the viewer to inhabit this representative GI’s perspective, conveying with visceral immediacy both his terror and his dogged persistence, never more effectively than when his hearing is impaired by explosions and the soundtrack becomes subjectively distorted as he struggles to regain his bearings. The sustained fury of the sequence is one of the greatest achievements in action direction in the history of the cinema, and it is so powerful it creates narrative problems by making the rest of the film seem anticlimactic. Spielberg may have unconsciously replicated the standard structure of his Indiana Jones movies, which always imitate old serials by starting with the climax of another movie. He worried after shooting the D-Day sequence that he had “topped” himself, as he had with the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark. “I didn’t quite know what the [D-Day] sequence was going to be, because I shot the whole movie in continuity,” with no storyboarding and lots of improvisation. He was right to be concerned, for while such a device works as a gag in an Indiana Jones adventure, here it makes the rest of the film a serious letdown.
The screenplay by Robert Rodat was augmented with uncredited contributions by Frank Darabont and others, and with frequent improvisations by Spielberg and his cast, who included several other writers and directors. After D-Day, the film turns into a relatively conventional World War II movie with the standard array of multiethnic characters. Spielberg does try to work variations on clichés familiar from more than half a century of filmmaking on the subject. The wrenching scene of a Jewish soldier (Adam Goldberg) being murdered at close range by a German, with a cowardly fellow GI, Upham (Jeremy Davies), failing to come to his aid, seems intended as a microcosm of the Holocaust, but cannot support that full burden; Spielberg said the character he most identifies with in the film is Upham, a surprising admission that sells himself short but is a measure of the depths of the director’s self-doubt. Tom Hanks elevates the film with his superb performance as a schoolteacher who worries that what he does in the war will make him unrecognizable to his wife when he returns home, a man who tries to preserve some semblance of decency in the midst of combat, a commander who maintains a gentle discipline while fighting to control his fragile nerves so his men won’t see how vulnerable he actually is.
Individual scenes of combat are directed with sharpness and concision, but their familiarity is disheartening after the hallucinatory, almost avantgarde freshness of the D-Day sequence. The climactic set piece, in which the outnumbered squad ingeniously decimates a German tank unit in a ruined French town, is elaborately and excitingly staged, but seems to violate the film’s initial vision of combat as inhuman frenzy by encouraging the audience to root righteously for the picturesque slaughter of the enemy. Earlier in the film Spielberg had shown Americans callously mowing down surrendering German soldiers, a bracingly honest departure from war-movie convention, but by the end, Saving Private Ryan is not appreciably different in tone from old-fashioned gung-ho staples of the genre. (The scripts for his and Hanks’s miniseries Band of Brothers stick more closely to the mundane lives of soldiers, admirably avoiding the melodramatic contrivances that damage Ryan.)
The triteness of much of Ryan’s plotting is a reflection of the basic phoniness of its premise. Miller and his men are sent to rescue Private James Ryan (Matt Damon), whose three brothers have just been killed in combat; their mother is seen collapsing in grief at her Iowa farmhouse when she hears the news. Variously portrayed in the film as a mission of compassion (by General George C. Marshall, played like a waxwork by Harve Presnell, reading Abraham Lincoln’s letter to Mrs. Bixby) and a PR stunt (as Miller and his men more cynically regard it), this plot device raises an artificial moral question (Is it just to risk other men’s lives to save one?) that seems a distraction from the real issues of the war. This device may evoke the line from the Talmud quoted in Schindler’s List—“Whoever saves one life saves the world entire”—but its deployment in Ryan cheapens the idea, especially since it has no direct precedent in the actual history of American involvement in World War II.
Ryan’s Irish name alludes to the five Sullivan brothers who died in the sinking of a single ship in November 1942. After that incident, the U.S. government forbade brothers from serving in the same unit. But the incident Rodat adapted for Saving Private Ryan is reported by historian Stephen Ambrose (a consultant on the film) in his 1992 book Band of Brothers. U.S. Army Sgt. Frederick (Fritz) Niland, while serving in France in mid-June, learned that his brother Robert had been killed on D-Day. Fritz hitched a ride to see another brother, Preston, in a platoon nearby, and learned that Pres
ton had also been killed, on June 7. It was later reported that a third brother, Edward, was presumed dead in the China-Burma-India Theater, and although he eventually turned up alive, their mother received three telegrams from the War Department on the same day notifying her of their deaths. Fritz Niland was found quickly, by a chaplain, and sent home without incident, even though he objected, “No, I’m staying here with my boys.” The chaplain told him, “Well, you can bring that up with General Eisenhower or the president, but you’re going home.”
All the drama that ensues in Ryan, including the sacrifice of the lives of six men (including Miller himself) to help get Ryan home, is the original screenwriter’s invention. It is hard to get as worked up as the film expects us to do by what, in reality, is only a Hollywood “high concept.” And although the film’s bookends showing an elderly veteran (Harrison Young) breaking down in the American cemetery at Normandy are based on an incident Spielberg said he witnessed while visiting there during his French tour for Duel in 1972, the clumsy mawkishness of the directing and acting makes the scenes alienating rather than affecting. Spielberg even cheats by making the audience think that the old man is Captain Miller (by introducing Miller with a matching extreme close-up of his eyes), but at the end we learn that the old man is actually James Ryan (as he morphs from Matt Damon). Not playing square with the audience but resorting to this kind of visual trickery, and hyping up the central dramatic device, is all the more damaging in a film that purports to represent history. The elderly Ryan’s anxious need for reassurance from his family that he is a good man seems gratuitous after all we have witnessed and a further sign that Saving Private Ryan is insecure about its emotional effect on the audience.
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