Beyond all recognition

Saving Private Ryan

(1998)

It was the best of Spielberg, it was the worst of Spielberg. The worst is the godawful present-day narrative frame, with its all-but-unambiguous endorsement of the ludicrous notion that by being a good man and raising a large crop of children who bear a disconcerting resemblance to the children that the soldiers he killed might have raised, given the chance, the titular Ryan has discharged Captain Miller's dying command to "earn this."

In fact, if the mission to save Private Ryan has any positive value, it's in the fluke of bringing a half-dozen bodies and one good brain to a bridge that needed defending and thus giving the Air Force's tank-busting planes a crucial extra few minutes to be the machina dei.

I hope, though, that I'm wrong to think that Spielberg really wants us to swallow the tripe (though knowing his fondness for the dish, I doubt my hope). I hope that the best of Spielberg is the foreground: the notion that war (and, by extension, life) forces minute-by-minute choices between brutality and humanity, between sense and sensibility, and that the great cosmic joke is that at any moment either choice is equally apt to result in salvation or catastrophe.