Screen Scene
Saving Private Ryan
[1998. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Cast: Tom Hanks, Tom Sizemore, Matt Damon. Dreamworks Pictures/Paramount Pictures. 170 mins.]
William T. Sherman may have said it - and he certainly witnessed it - but it has taken Steven Spielberg's prodigious imagination to convey for the rest of us the exact hell of war.
Like James Cameron's underrated Titanic, Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan uses the extraordinary power of contemporary visual and audio effects to paint a fictional world so vividly lifelike as to put us in the middle of a harrowing real life experience.
The film's plot is simple. Private James Ryan, the youngest of four brothers engaged in the American military during World War II, is singled out by the highest of brass (no lower than Chief of Staff George C. Marshall himself) as being worthy of returning home on the basis of his three older siblings' death in combat.
Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) and his squad of American infantry Rangers is given the assignment to find private Ryan to muster him out. These seven top-notch infantrymen are not in the least pleased to be placed in danger to locate a single dogface among the hundreds of thousands mopping up after the D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944. Orders, however, are orders and Miller and his men go out to find Ryan before he can get himself killed in the war effort.
So much for the details. This threadbare story is the slimmest of canvasses a film can be hung on. Spielberg's intent, rather, is to use this thin plot to depict the extraordinary conditions through which America's enlisted men fought in France during that period of the war.
To say that he succeeds is understatement. The film's opening sequence on Omaha beach during the morning of D-Day is as horrific as is anything ever likely to be filmed. The carnage makes the proposition of war an endeavor that only fools and megalomaniacs could endorse. For no matter how much horror Spielberg and his crew pile on top of the last grisly sight, there's always another atrocity unfolding before the audience that boggles the mind and imagination. It's been difficult at times to witness Spielberg's maturation as a filmmaker. He started so young (in his mid-20s at feature films) that each wrinkle of his psyche has been indelibly etched on our national consciousness. When he has been on his game - The Sugarland Express, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial - the results have been marvelous. On the other hand, when he has been off his game - Hook, any of the Indiana Jones trilogy , and most embarrassingly, 1941 - no major filmmaker has seemed so unredeemably juvenile.
But something's apparently snapped in Spielberg's viewfinder this decade.
Granted he'll never fully get Jurassic Park out of his system, but Spielberg has developed into a human being. There were hints of an arrested conscience in The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun, but it took the wrenching pain of Schindler's List to bring home the fact that he's in a unique position to galvanize audiences against social and political inequity.
Between Schindler's List, Amistad, and now Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg has finally joined the ranks of mature filmmakers. He's in the unique position of commanding any dollar amount he wishes to paint his personal history lessons.
Steven Spielberg may have done too good a job in savagely conjuring Saving Private Ryan. But there might be some hope for us yet if every sane military man and politician watches this film before committing himself to mayhem. That wouldn't be too bad a job for a single career in the movies.
THE TRUMAN SHOW
[[1998. Directed by Peter Weir. Cast: Jim Carrey, Laura Linney, Ed Harris. Paramount Pictures. 104 mins.]
And you feel as if you're being watched?
Try being Truman Burbank. Everything about Burbank's Iife is bogus - from his memories to his comfortable future - and the whole world is (literally) looking over his shoulder. Unbeknownst to Burbank, his fate is being played out daily on network television.
Played with surprisingly subtle charm by Jim Carrey, Truman Burbank is an orphaned everyman bought at birth by an entertainment Corporation. He's unwittingly been trapped in the cross-hairs of the vaguely menacing television Svengali, Christof (Ed Harris), who's plotted every moment of his prized commodity's Iife to the point of creating a TV series based on his day-to-day affairs.
As such, Truman Burbank lived a charmed Iife from the earliest time he can remember to the present day. The only drawback is that he can't leave his island home town of Seahaven, Florida. For "The Truman Show" would, of course, close on the road.
By Christof's reckoning, captivity is a small price to pay for security. For if Burbank's Iife isn't exactly comfortably numb, it also isn't wild in the streets. He has an unctuous wife, Meryl (Laura Linney), who skillfully pitches one product after another at the secret camera surrounding their home life. And his best friend, Marlon (Noah Emmerich), is equally adept at product placement as these buddies share their good times together growing up in average-town America.
Indeed, there are only a couple of nagging holes in Burbank's soul. First, the only woman he spontaneously cared for was snatched way from him by Christof because she threatened to blow the show's cover. And second, he runs across a series extra who reminds him of his long deceased father. That the supporting actor is supposedly deceased makes Burbank begin to suspect that all in Seahaven isn't what it appears.
So with painstaking care, Burbank plots his escape. And like all the other plot developments in the televised "Truman Show," Burbank's audience is caught in the grips of a media frenzy unlike any other in the history of broadcasting.
It's not enough to say The Truman Show is diabolically clever because it's certainly that. Rather, as gently twisted as a thoroughly postmodernist Franz Kafka, screenwriter Andrew Niccol goes for the absurdist's touch rather than despairing existentialism. And given Peter Weir's previous track record with the absurd - for example, The Cars That Ate Paris, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and The Mosquito Coast - Niccol's found the perfect filmmaker to keep the emphasis sweet rather than sour. But the real find here is Jim Carrey. One of the great mysteries of film history is what Jerry Lewis' career might have been like if he had straddled the comedy fence from gap-tooth histrionics to dramatic pathos. In fact, Cary Grant, Jackie Gleason, and Robin Williams have been the only male American comedians to work consistently both sides of the performer's mask.
Carrey shows that he - like Grant, Gleason, and Williams - has the verve and discipline to give this strenuous exercise a clean shot. When the film requires silliness, he sufficiently tones down his yuks to allow the humor to flow as a thematic understatement to the film's development. While in the crucial dramatic sequences, where the film either rises or falls as a coherent statement, Carrey is surprisingly restrained.
Weir - like the mysterious Christof - has a black comedy up his sleeve in The Truman Show and he's certainly got the talent to get what he wants. What he couldn't count on was Jim Carrey's hijacking his darkness to give Truman Burbank a heart.
It's this odd juxtaposition of fantasy and despair that makes Truman Burbank's audience, both inside and outside of the silver screen, want to shout in unison: "Go, man! Go!" Luckily for us, Carrey does.