But Spielberg wraps not only the war in the flag but also the cloyingly sentimental frame story of an elderly veteran, followed by his wife, son, and grandchildren, on his pilgrimage to the vast cemetery overlooking the Normandy beachhead, now marked by row after row of simple Christian and Jewish headstones. Can we understand the flag as anything but an announcement of the subject of his epic: patriotism? The fluttering flag, denatured of its color and perhaps of its vitality, is the image with which the film begins and ends. The first and last thing we see pulsing across the entire screen is a faded, translucent American flag.
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Spielberg actually opens and closes the film twice, employing two pairs of images to bracket the war movie everyone praised. Like everyone else, I wondered at the courage or desperation or whatever it was that drove American soldiers across a French beach, codenamed Omaha, under the withering spray of German machine-gun rounds from hilltop fortifications and the flesh-shredding explosions of 105mm howitzer shells lobbed by inland artillery.Īnd like everyone else, I had to agree that it was brilliant filmmaking-except for the beginning and the end. Like everyone else in the theater, I spent most of three hours wincing involuntarily in my seat, shocked by the unrelenting mayhem of a daylight amphibious assault across a barren killing field, sickened by the sudden hash that light artillery can make of human bodies, groaning at the grotesque wounds and the grisly mutilations of whimpering casualties, and-in the end-twitching at even the slightest clatter of mechanized warfare.
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But as my wife and I filed out of the theater, I wondered what they were applauding, exactly, this darkened room full of veterans and their spouses.
Moved to tears by the powerful film, the audience gave it an ovation as the final credits rolled. Along with 6.5 million other Americans, I saw Saving Private Ryan its opening weekend back in 1998, joining a mostly elderly crowd of the "Greatest" generation at a suburban multiplex. The New York Times even devoted a respectful editorial to "Spielberg's War."Īnd I knew that almost everybody else agreed with them. Historian Stephen Ambrose, author of D-Day and Citizen Soldiers, thought it "the finest World War II movie ever made." The Secretary of the Army presented the filmmaker with the military's highest civilian decoration, the Distinguished Civilian Service Award.
The most serious students of the Second World War shared the enthusiasm for the film.
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