Movies also are of course not real life. Even newsreels and documentaries are filtered through the mechanical devices of camera, microphone, projector, and screen, and delimited by the choices of an editor. Most of the films that actually make it into theaters are not even as factual as a documentary—and yet most movies do make some claim, at least implicitly, to being "realistic." Even cinematic examples of fantasy such as Altered States (Ken Russell, 1980, with William Hurt), Frankenstein (the 1931 version with Boris Karloff), and 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968) have a kind of subtle, fascinating relationship to the truth. The truth-claims of films in genres such as realism and neo-realism are presumably much more straightforward.
Almost everyone agrees that Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan is a "realistic" film. The realism hits us square between the eyes from the very beginning, as a now elderly James Ryan (Harrison Young) searches through an immense French cemetery for the graves of friends killed in action. Then the scene quickly shifts to something even more "realistic": the D-Day landing on Omaha Beach. Sea-sick soldiers vomit, bodies are shot to pieces by automatic weapons, and a bloody, dying soldier cries out in utter pathos for his mother.
Everyone also agrees that the characters are realistic, too, transcending the usual war-movie stereotypes. The dialogue is convincing, the acting is superb, and the Germans are portrayed not as the bad guys, but as real human beings. More realistically, war itself is the bad guy. Historically, militarily, anatomically, psychologically—in every sense, this is realism. One reviewer even suggests that the movie is so realistic that if Congress and the president could be required to view it, the U.S. would never wage war again.
Are Claudia and I the only two people in the country who are not convinced that Private Ryan is one of the greatest movies ever made? For us, there is something that just doesn't click. Perhaps it is the plot, which seems to use the gruesome savagery of the battlefield to camouflage several of what MAD Magazine might call "incredible Hollywood coincidences"—little dramatic conveniences that when added together seem slightly less than, well, realistic.
There is the dramatic convenience of a really likable, decent, literate Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) being ordered to lead the search for a really handsome, personable Private Ryan (Matt Damon). There is the dramatic convenience that all of the soldiers who die under Miller's command die dramatically and bravely. There is the dramatic convenience that the one captured German soldier freed by Miller's men turns out to be the very guy who later returns and shoots Miller. There is the dramatic convenience that Miller lives long enough to die heroically—uttering to Ryan (who conveniently doesn't die) his terse last words: "Earn it."
Even if melodramatic, these words from Miller bring the movie to what I found to be its most memorable and compelling moment. The older Ryan, standing fifty years later at Miller's grave, turns to his wife with tears running down his face and asks imploringly, "Am I a good man? Tell me that I have been a good man." Evidently unaware of Miller's final statement to her husband, Ryan's wife answers incredulously, "Of course you're a good man." She does not know that he is haunted by one event that made him realize how precious life is.
Most of us know something about "survivor's guilt," the regret or remorse of those who feel that they have no more right to live than companions who have died. Ryan has certainly encountered this kind of psychological distress. His tears, however, seem to arise from something even deeper than survivor's guilt—the experience of being required by circumstances beyond his control to ask continually whether he has truly lived as he should have. Compelled by the unforgettable memory of men who died on his behalf, Ryan has had to look relentlessly at his own life and ask, "Have I done the best I could? Have I made the most of every day?"
Though for Ryan this type of self-scrutiny is rooted in a wartime incident, there is something in his experience that transcends war, something that is universally human, something that urges all of us in our old age (if not sooner) to wonder what we have done that is genuinely meaningful or worthwhile. For Ryan this self-critical element is tied unseverably to his memory of comrades who are now dead—but actually, this connection between persons who have died and a sense of moral imperative is not unique to soldiers. It is a widespread human experience. For me this element of common humanness is the highpoint of Saving Private Ryan.
Otherwise, the often-cited "realism" of the movie's violence seems somehow unconvincing. As graphic as the violence is, you can still, if you want to, eat your popcorn while watching it—something I am absolutely certain I could not do if I were really in the landing on Omaha Beach. But like Magritte's pipe that isn't a pipe, that is sometimes the fate of cinematic violence. Even with multi-channel sound and Technicolor blood, action on a flat screen is just pretend. There's an odd thing, though. The artificiality of the medium doesn't dilute every film. I think of the black sky and the gray smoke belching from the crematorium in Schindler's List, and wonder how it can be that, even though you can't smell anything in a movie, the stench is still in my nostrils.
Anyhow, if you want a movie about World War II, though I haven't seen it in years, I think I would recommend The Young Lions (1958, dir. Edward Dmytryk, with Marlon Brando, Hope Lange, Montgomery Clift, Maximillian Schell, Dean Martin). As for a film that would end war if viewed by all politicans—well, there probably ain't no such critter, since all elected officials take an oath to separate humanitarian sensibilities from the necessities of Realpolitik. On that note, see Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964, with Peter Sellers), Mike Nichols' Catch-22 (Alan Arkin, 1970), or Sidney Lumet's Failsafe (1964).
If you really want to be turned against war, read Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. It tolls for all of us, and I still grieve when I think about it. Compared with it, Saving Private Ryan is a feel-good classic.