You may recall that in this series, the six movies I've already seen are designed as all movies I've seen only once. Given that Saving Private Ryan was my #5 movie of 1998, you'd think I'd have had occasion to watch it again in those 27 years. But it turns out, a 170-minute running time tends to curtail the inclination toward casual second viewings, even in films you know are great. Plus, there's the difficult subject matter, G.I.s turned to mincemeat in that harrowing storming of Omaha Beach.
I wasn't sure when I'd carve out the time this October to give it a second watch, until my younger son took a last-minute invite to go a sleepover at his auntie's house yesterday. (And because he's starting high school this January, which starts here in year 7, she should probably take as many of these opportunities as she can. They will soon evaporate. In fact, I won't be surprised if we look back and realize this was the last one.)
The sleepover matters because when our son is at our house, and he's allowed to have screen time, he's basically fixed on our living room couch, same room as the TV where I like watching movies. While the older one likes his own bedroom, the younger one prefers the communal area for now -- though he says it's because the internet doesn't work very well in his room. I won't be surprised if all the sudden next year, the service there vastly improves.
Anyway, enough getting sidetracked. Without my son camped out in his usual spot on our couch, I got a still-too-late start on the movie around 5:30 yesterday afternoon. It was still too late because after I took a brief nap somewhere in the middle, it still had more than 30 minutes remaining at 8:20 when my wife texted me from upstairs: "What about dinner?"
I had selected Saving Private Ryan because I knew we were likely to get some amazing editing during the aforementioned storming of the beach at Normandy, which takes up more than 20 of the film's first 25 minutes. (Don't forget there's a short prologue of the elderly James Ryan.) I also knew that after this, the movie was likely to devolve into slightly more standard editing as the pace slowed and the narrative became a series of lower stakes vignettes.
The interesting thing I discovered, though, was that the opening actually relies more on choreography and the work of cinematographer Janusz Kaminski than it does the editing of Oscar winner Michael Kahn.
But before we get in to Janusz, let's establish Kahn's bonafides.
Kahn has made a career of being Steven Spielberg's editor of choice. Which isn't to say he hasn't worked with other directors, just that Spielberg has rarely worked with other editors. Ryan was the 14th film Kahn had edited for Spielberg, and he has subsequently edited 14 more. I'm not sure if that accounts for the entirety of Spielberg's output since Ryan, but if not, it's close to it. Kahn is still alive at age 94 and he did edit The Fabelmans for Spielberg in 2022. Spielberg has not yet released his follow-up to The Fabelmans, but it's supposed to come out next year, and Kahn is listed on IMDB as the editor. Pretty remarkable career, and it includes two other Oscar wins, for Raiders of the Lost Ark and Schindler's List. He was also nominated for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Fatal Attraction, Empire of the Sun (those last two both coming in the same year), Munich and Lincoln.
But the thing about that opening sequence is it's not as much of a showcase for Kahn as you'd think. It's a showcase for staging of extras and for the movement of the camera to capture the chaos.
There's one particular moment I always think of, though I remembered the general contours of the moment more than its specifics before being reminded yesterday. Tom Hanks' John Miller is getting minimal protection from a makeshift trench in the sand, and he's going back and forth between someone he's giving orders to on his right and someone he's giving orders to on his left. We can barely hear what's being spoken of in all the gunfire and general cacophony, but it all sounds very real and we're totally immersed. The camera goes back and forth between the people he's talking to on either side, moving the one he's not currently speaking with out of the shot. Janusz goes twice to the guy on his left -- or I guess it would be his right if Hanks had his back to the sand, but it's our left as viewers -- and the guy looks like he's in something of a daze, nodding and completing whatever has been asked of him. On the third time Janusz goes to him, though, there's just a crater in the middle of the guy's face. We have no idea what actually befell him and caused that crater, and how something that could do that didn't catch any of Miller as collateral damage, but it's just one of those perfect moments that ecapsulates the thin membrane between life and death that was the reality for every man on that beach.
I'm not going to say the opening sequence requires no editing. I did like the way the editing was used as we see men fall out of the boat and begin sinking underwater. But it is far more likely to rely on these sort of spatial dynamics that can only be accomplished by camera movements. I'd say that's the key to why it's so immersive, that we know there's nothing done in post to blend together two consecutive images that might have been shot hours or even weeks apart, and not even necessarily in the same location.
As the movie continued to go on, I wondered if Kahn's Oscar -- though certainly not undeserved -- was another case of getting swept up in the movie that was going to win all the awards. If you remember back to that year, we were all very surprised when Shakespeare in Love won best picture, even in the moments leading up to the moment, since Spielberg had already won best director, and those accolades are usually paired. In fact Shakespeare did win more awards total, but Ryan won the awards that seemed to herald a best picture win, only it didn't transpire.
It's true, the middle scenes of the movie -- and I guess by that I'm referring to the hour and 45 minutes between Omaha Beach and the big finale -- use a more purposeful, functional form of editing, as few of them rely on anything like sustained gunfire. There are certainly short bursts of combat depicted throughout, but some of them are held at a distance, like the scene where they take out a German nest so it's not still around to ambush the next group that comes through. (Which results in the death of Giovanni Ribisi's medic.) We see this scene more from far off, not up in the midst of it. This section does not have a lot of examples of editing that calls attention to itself.
In the final battle, where we lose most of the remainder of the characters we've come to know -- sparing only Edward Burns' Brooklynite, Jeremy Davies' pacifist/coward and Matt Damon's Private Ryan himself -- Kahn does start to shine in the obvious sorts of ways that result in Oscars. Given that there are a number of different arenas to the battle here -- everything from a sniper vs. soldiers on the ground, sticky bombs against tanks, hand-to-hand combat and more traditional gunfire -- a skilled technician is required to weave these scenes together and progress them at the same rate. And we really see here what Kahn can do. I was especially noticing the crisp editing in the sequence where Barry Pepper's sniper needs to keep cocking and manually loading a single bullet after his previous weapon has been rendered inoperative from lack of ammo, as we see the targets of his bullets fall.
A few other thoughts on this film.
1) I loved seeing the familiar faces popping up. I'd forgotten, for example, that the likes of Ted Danson and Paul Giamatti make what amount to extended cameos. Then I never would have known, because I don't think I knew him at the time, that Nathan Fillion played the "wrong James Ryan," who is mistakenly told that his young brothers who are still in grammar school have been killed. The film sets this up as sort of a dark punchline, but it actually has a more devastating impact, in that we see this James Ryan distraught and asking Miller et al if they're sure his brothers are okay, even though the whole thing is obviously just a misunderstanding. War made everyone so fragile that the reveal that it was a mistake doesn't actually cause him relief, it just leaves him in this agitated state of worrying about his brothers and missing home.
2) It was a Jeremy Davies sort of weekend, as I happened to catch Davies -- who doesn't work all that much these days -- in Black Phone 2 the night before.
3) It was interesting to watch this on the eve of No Kings Day in the U.S., though I suppose by the calendar it was October 18th in Australia, which would have been No Kings Day itself had that been observed here. (I'm sure it was, in some way.) Twenty-seven years ago, a movie about heroics in World War II, and the weary jingoism that inevitably accompanies it, would have been equally celebrated on both sides of the political aisle. Nowadays, I'm not even sure if a filmmaker would be likely to make such a movie, since the progressives in Hollywood are hesitant to make something that celebrates even America's finest hours in foreign combat. Like-minded people to themselves are generally rejecting traditional incarnations of patriotism, and those who would embrace it are certainly not like-minded. Patriotism itself has been poisoned by the current culture wars.
4) I'm not sure if I liked this as much as the first time I saw it in 1998, but there's no doubt it is an incredibly effective piece of filmmaking that generates a lot of interesting questions about duty and sacrifice and missions where the many are risked to save the one -- which, in a way, is the sort of mission that popular filmmaking is founded on. We see lots of movies where heroes risk the lives of the many because they can't accept the loss of the one. In fact, it is almost the defining quality of a movie hero to make a decision that endangers the majority because sacrificing the minority is untenable. This codifies that theme into an actual storyline involving military strategy and the questioning of these choices on both sides.
5) I think I should tell you a little bit about the circumstances of my only other previous viewing of Saving Private Ryan, because they are interesting. I saw it in, I believe, Park City, Utah -- which you will be familiar with as the traditional location of the Sundance Film Festival, which is having its last such festival in Park City this January before moving to Boulder, Colorado. (It'll be a crazy year to be at Sundance, both the last in its location and the first since the death of Robert Redford.) Anyway, I wasn't there in January, I was there in August as part of a road trip with two friends where we saw baseball games in 14 different cities across the U.S., over three weeks. I'm pretty sure this was the only movie we saw on the trip, as almost all of the rest of the time we were watching baseball games or driving. Can you imagine, three weeks and only a single movie?
Okay, that's enough for this month, join me in November when I watch my last previously unseen movie of this series, which is also the only best editing winner since Saving Private Ryan that I haven't seen: Paul Greengrass' The Bourne Ultimatum, also starring Matt Damon. That'll be an interesting one because unlike some of the other movies I've watched in this series, we can't say The Bourne Ultimatum was winning all the other Oscars, and best editing just got swept up in a general wave of enthusiasm. It may make an ideal case of seeing editing rewarded purely on its own merits.
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