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If Upham represents the unheroic realities of war, Hanks' character will remind viewers with long memories of figures like Robert Mitchum's stoic platoon leader in William Wellman's The Story of G.I. Joe or of the men of the PT-boat squadron grimly enduring decimation in the greatest of all paeans to American dutifulness, John Ford's They Were Expendable. Hanks is surely our age's Everyman, as compelling as any star of the classic era and for the same reason: the reserve beneath his openness, hinting at unspoken competencies that make us, like the troops he commands, willing to follow.
In this case it is into a surreal landscape where death and absurdity come at you with equal fury and suddenness. Spielberg says it was another Wellman film, the "watershed" Battleground, that inspired the harsh reality with which he presents combat. It was, so far as he recalls, the first movie in which men cried out for their mothers when they were struck down. He also cites a more obscure influence: Sydney Pollack's Castle Keep, for the way it blended black humor with brutality in a combat film.
It is an emotional nexus to which Spielberg constantly reverts. There's the discovery of the crashed glider that has fallen from the skies, killing all aboard, because it was specially armored to protect a general's ass. There's the sequence in which a French father hands his little daughter over to the Americans for safekeeping. Immediately the soldier trying to protect her is killed. And when the child is hastily handed back to her father, she begins slapping him hysterically for his seeming abandonment of her.
There's finally Private Ryan (Matt Damon). Found at last, he refuses to be rescued. Like all infantrymen in Spielberg's view, he fights not for grand abstractions but for his buddies, the survival of the unit. In the film's final, heartbreaking passage at arms, where the losses are anything but acceptable, he fights beside his would-be saviors.
Here Spielberg, the creator of Schindler's List, the film that more than any other justifies the justness of World War II, asks us to examine the war's morality in a different light. He is saying now that the lives that were given up in this conflict were every bit as valuable as the lives saved by those sacrifices. "Earn this," Captain Miller grunts to Private Ryan in that final fire fight. Was he worth the price other men paid for him? We do not know. And that flag is impervious to the question. What we may hope is that Saving Private Ryan will be perceived for what it is--a war film that, entirely aware of its genre's conventions, transcends them as it transcends the simplistic moralities that inform its predecessors, to take the high, morally haunting ground.