ALL GUTS, NO GLORY

The twenty-five-minute depiction of the horrific battle to take Omaha Beach that opens the film is staggering in its intensity. So is the twenty-five-minute fight near a small bridge in a French town with which the film ends. Between the two sequences, Spielberg shows us French towns reduced to rubble and a French countryside alive with menace. The craftsmanship is awesome. There has never been anyone like Spielberg, really: He is a movie director the way you are a person who breathes, and he seems to have coursing through his blood the distilled experience and skill of a century of directors before him.

He has, in fact, everything an artist ought to have — everything except wisdom, vision, and soul, which is to say that he isn’t really an artist. This is the conundrum of the cinema: The people who make great popular art usually aren’t artists themselves, but somehow manage in collaboration to fashion works that can stay with you for a lifetime.

Saving Private Ryan isn’t one of those works. It is at once the most powerful war movie ever made and the least meaningful. Spielberg takes World War II and, in the interest of paying tribute to the almost unimaginable sacrifices made by those who fought it, minimizes the war beyond recognition. Saving Private Ryan isn’t a tragic story of loss, a noble story of heroism, or an ironic story about insignificant men trapped in a struggle beyond their comprehension. It tries to be all of these things, and it ends up being none of them. Spielberg has no idea what to make of what he is showing us and wants to make us believe that complexity and confusion are the same thing.

Now, there’s no shame in getting the message wrong in a drama of war. Tolstoy’s War and Peace is built on a patently absurd theory of the meaninglessness of individual humans in battle and manages nonetheless to be the greatest of war novels. Gone with the Wind is told from the perspective of those who waged a bloody war for the express purpose of preserving slavery and is still magnificent. What makes a war story work is the interaction of world-historical events with characters — real, identifiable characters who feel and act and conduct themselves as you or I would. War stories ask the most profound questions about human conduct under conditions of extreme stress and danger.

So does Saving Private Ryan, but it offers no coherent answers. In part that’s because every character in the movie is a cipher, except George C. Marshall, who sets the plot in motion. And Marshall seems like a real person only because he was a real person. Half an hour into the movie, Marshall receives word that three Iowa brothers named Ryan have all died in the same week, two on D-Day and one in the Pacific theater. A fourth Ryan brother, a paratrooper, is missing somewhere in France. Remembering a letter Abraham Lincoln wrote to console a woman who lost five sons in battle, Marshall decides the army must do what it can to save the fourth Ryan and send him home.

The duty falls to Tom Hanks, with whom we have just experienced the landing at Omaha Beach. The Omaha Beach sequence is extraordinary in every sense of the term; Spielberg spent almost $ 20 million to stage the nightmarish D-Day assault that ended with three thousand American soldiers dead on a narrow strip of beach. It’s a seamless merger of special effects, makeup effects, sound effects, and choreography, as realistic and graphic as the scene in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park when a giant Tyrannosaurus Rex attacks a sport-utility vehicle.

Only instead of depicting a confrontation between actors and an animal that doesn’t exist, Spielberg is using his craftsmanship to bring home to audiences deadened by years of graphic violence what it might have been like to be under assault from machine-gun fire. Robert Capa, the great World War II photographer who was there on Omaha Beach, spoke of “a new kind of fear shaking my body from toe to hair, and twisting my face.” Spielberg certainly does capture the causes for that fear — not only the incessant pinging of bullets and the chaotic mix of explosions and screams, but the agonies of the wounded and dying. Arms and heads are blown off on camera; soldiers frantically try to stuff their innards back in their nearly eviscerated bodies before dying.

There’s already been a lot of talk about how Saving Private Ryan is the first movie to show battle in all its naked bloodiness, but that’s just hype. There’s no single shot in this sequence to compare with the image of thousands of dead and dying Southern soldiers lying on the Atlanta railroad tracks in Gone with the Wind. And while no movie has ever gone quite as far as Saving Private Ryan in showing what the insides of a human body look like, there’s no moment as powerful as when a terrified southerner in Gone with the Wind begs a stolid doctor not to amputate his gangrenous leg without anesthetic.

And when it comes to the use of gore on screen, Spielberg’s motives are suspect in any case. He has a thirty-five-year record of taking obnoxious joy in trying to gross out audiences with special effects. In fact, he helped bring viscera, once relegated to drive-in fare with titles like The Wizard of Gore, to the big-budget Hollywood movie. Remember the blood that poured from Robert Shaw’s mouth as the shark bit him in two in Jaws? Or the heart that was pulled straight out of a man’s chest in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom? The battlefield gore in Saving Private Ryan is really just another example of Spielberg’s hunger to offer thrills and chills above all else. Just as he supervised the construction of a “Back to the Future” ride at Universal Studios, so Saving Private Ryan is his version of a World War II ride.

The grave weakness of the otherwise superb Schindler’s List was that Spielberg and screenwriter Steven Zaillian never bothered to give names or faces or identities to the Jews we saw walking into the gas chambers. The same is true in Saving Private Ryan. Hundreds die on screen, but they’re just extras. We just watch them die, and if their guts weren’t hanging out, we wouldn’t respond at all.

Nor is there much to care about in the drama that unfolds after Hanks is given the mission of finding Private Ryan. He brings along seven men, and it’s a mark of how little Spielberg and screenwriter Robert Rodat care about these individual characters that five minutes after the movie is over, you can’t remember their names. One guy has a Brooklyn accent; another is a Jew; a third is an Italian. There’s a sensitive novelist, a doctor, and a gruff but lovable sarge.

What happens to them is affecting. How can you fail to be affected by the sight of a soldier cradled in his buddies’ arms as the life seeps out of him? But there’s nothing to these men but banter, anger, and sullenness. We like the captain, but that’s only because he is played by Tom Hanks, the most likable actor alive.

The moral dilemma posed by the movie has to do with carrying out orders. Is it fair that eight men should risk their lives to save a single soldier? Don’t their families have the right to see them home safe? Why should they be called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice to make George Marshall feel better?

The logic of Saving Private Ryan is that of a classic anti-war novel or film, like All Quiet on the Western Front or The Good Soldier Schweik: men put in absurd danger for no good reason. But Spielberg, who has practically become a secular saint since the release of Schindler’s List, cannot bring himself to make a purely pacifist tale about World War II. His reluctance is understandable, but his movie sinks into a morass as a result.

He is so concerned with depicting the horror of Omaha Beach that he doesn’t allow the audience to enjoy the courage of Hanks and his men as they succeed in routing one of the German positions. When Hanks’s rescue mission finally locates the missing soldier, Private Ryan bravely refuses to abandon his post until reinforcements arrive. Spielberg’s determination to avoid “gung ho” or “macho” cliches (as he has told many interviewers) is so strong that he doesn’t know what to make of Ryan’s declaration. He just records it as Hanks and the rest of his men stand around uncomfortably. If their director can’t figure out whether Ryan is noble or foolhardy, how can the actors?

The movie ends with Hanks’s brigade pulling off another triumph — but if their last stand had led to a defeat, the moment could not have been depicted any more somberly. Like an inflexible preacher with a single message to convey, Spielberg will not let anything come between the audience and his assertion that War is Hell.

But isn’t this why artists have been grappling with war since Homer’s time — that out of the carnage and waste and loss of war, men prove themselves capable of bravery and self-sacrifice? That even in the noblest of causes, men behave barbarically — and that even in barbaric causes, like the southern side of the Civil War, men behave heroically? Indeed, the word “heroism” was once solely associated with war.

World War II was a just war — the just war to end all just wars. It was hell, but it was more than hell too. Omaha Beach was a site of tragedy and triumph, and it was the triumph that gave meaning to the tragedy. Spielberg’s inability to grasp these ideas, which aren’t all that complicated, shows his limitations not only as an artist but as an adult.

A contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, John Podhoretz edits the editorial pages of the New York Post.