Stepping Into The Fields Of Normandy

"Soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force. You are about to embark on a great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you." ~ General Dwight Eisenhower, 1944

Today is the seventieth anniversary of D-Day, the landing of American, British, and Canadian forces on five beaches in Normandy during World War Two, and the turning of the tide on the Western Front. I thought I would review one film that takes D-Day as part of its subject matter. I would also recommend you find The Longest Day, or Ike: Countdown To D-Day for a more recent examination of the lead up to the invasion from the point of view of the commanding general.

"I don't gripe to you, Reiben. I'm a captain. There's a chain of command. Gripes go up, not down. Always up. You gripe to me, I gripe to my superior officer, so on, so on, and so on. I don't gripe to you, I don't gripe in front of you. You should know that as a Ranger." ~ Captain Miller

"You wanna explain the math of this to me? I mean, where's the sense in risking the eight of us to save one guy?" ~ Private Reiben

"Why do I deserve to go? Why not any of these guys? They all fought just as hard as me." ~ Private Ryan

Saving Private Ryan is the 1998 war epic by director Steven Spielberg, following a squad of soldiers in the wake of the D-Day landings, as they set out on a mission into the French countryside. The film won Spielberg a Best Director Oscar, among several other Oscars and awards, and is a harrowing, graphic exploration of war at its most horrendous. While it tells a fictional story, the story carries an authenticity about the life of the soldier in the Second World War, exploring personalities of different men as they drive deeper into occupied territory.

The film starts and ends in Normandy five decades after the landing, with a veteran and his family walking through the military cemetery at Omaha Beach. We are then drawn into the bloody landing at Omaha Beach, following a number of soldiers off a landing craft as they storm the beach and German defenses. They're led by a captain, John Miller (Tom Hanks), and after men fall around them in the barrage against the landing, the squad breaches German defenses, achieving their objective. The first half hour of the film is a violent, brutally realistic view of the invasion from the boots on the ground viewpoint. That very same viewpoint will carry on through the rest of the film.

While Miller and his surviving Rangers catch their breath, the camera shows us a body on the beach. For the only time in the film, the story takes us across the ocean to the halls of power, where the identity of the body is brought to the attention of General Marshall, who learns three brothers have fallen in the line of duty in various theatres of war, and the fourth, a private who parachuted into Normandy, is unaccounted for. He insists that the private be found and brought back home. The mission is given to Miller, who picks the core of his squad to go with him. His right hand sergeant Horvath (Tom Sizemore), rounds up a sardonic private, Reiben (Edward Burns), a sharpshooter, Private Jackson (Barry Pepper), the medic, Wade (Giovanni Ribisi), and two more riflemen, Carpazo (Vin Diesel) and Mellish (Adam Goldberg). They've all faced battle together, and while they might bicker and annoy each other, they know they can count on each other. Miller also brings in a cartographer from the staff, Upham (Jeremy Davies), because he knows he needs someone who can speak French and German. And so the squad sets out from the beachhead in search of a lone private (Matt Damon), who has no idea his brothers are dead.

The story was written by Robert Rodat, who first drew inspiration for it after seeing a Civil War monument about the deaths of eight siblings in that war. Rodat transplants the essence of that into the Second World War, giving the soldiers a mission, one they question the sense of, but one that we can be sympathetic with. A family shattered by the loss of three sons makes for a compelling reason to go after the last son. And while it's a fictional story, it certainly rings true. The Sullivan brothers, for instance, all died during that war when their cruiser sank during the Battle of Guadalcanal. Rodat's script is intensely character based- as much as the story follows a narrative through the ruins of occupied Normandy, it's grounded in these eight men, all of whom are explored in detail and given depth, and in the young man they're out to find, who doesn't believe he has the right to go home.

Spielberg used the work of cinematographer Janusz Kaminski for this film, giving the tone of the film a gritty, devastated look, which perfectly fits Normandy at that time. They shot much of the film in Ireland and England, standing in for Normandy, but the setting looks like you might expect of France in the Second World War- ruined villages, damaged homes, destroyed countryside. The film has a washed out quality in the images, lending it a sense of time and place. Kaminski worked with Spielberg on Schindler's List, and that same tone of harsh realism permeates the entire film; his work would win the Oscar for Best Cinematography, and rightfully so. Colours feel muted, and the finished film has something of a newsreel sensibility to it, completely desaturated. The camerawork also adds to the sense of authenticity to the film- Spielberg chooses to film close and with tight angles, instead of at a distance. During the opening sequence, for example, it feels like the camera is the point of view of a soldier on the beach, including the carnage of war, the noise, and the bloodshed. It's intensely personal, this camerawork that really gives us that boots on the ground perspective. It was a wise decision. 

The sense of authenticity lends itself as well to the work of the crew. The uniforms take us back in time to the era, as do the weapons and vehicles. The same applies to civilian clothing and ordinary items- everything feels like it's drawn out of the past, as if we're walking through the carnage of Normandy in the days following D-Day. Attention to detail is, in a word, rendered with great care, and it really shows. The uniforms, for instance, feel lived in, and the actors look exhausted and drained, a testament, perhaps, to the fact that many of them were subjected to a rigorous boot camp to prepare for the film. The battle sequences have been acclaimed as realistic, and while violent, the purpose is to demonstrate the brutality and desperation of battle. In all that carnage, there never seems to be a gratuitous moment. As well, Spielberg's regular collaborator John Williams delivers one of his finest scores, one that is a stark contrast to much of his work. The music only shows itself in the quieter moments, rather than the epic sweep of battle. It gives the audience a moment to breath, and the music in and of itself gives a noble, stirring quality to the film.

There are a number of cameos scattered in various places. Dennis Farina turns up early on as Miller's superior, giving him the assignment. He doesn't like handing the mission to Miller, but stresses its importances. Paul Giamatti and Ted Danson turn up along the way as soldiers Miller and his squad meet on their way to finding Ryan. Giamatti's sergeant is a hardened sergeant among the paratroopers, playing the role as cynical. Danson, playing a fellow captain, learns of Miller's mission, urging him to find the private and get him home, and we sense he means it. All three actors play these roles with a sense of authority as they go along. Another cameo features an early performance by Nathan Fillion (Castle; if you haven't seen the series, you're missing a lot). He turns out to be the wrong Private Ryan, and serves as a brief red herring- the news that his brothers are dead is wrong, but you can understand his reaction. Harrison Young plays Ryan as an old man. When we first see him at the beginning, we don't know who he is, but he conveys the essence of a man who survived the war, and yet feels the sorrow and pain of knowing so many young men died and he got to live. When we catch up to him again at the end, Young's performance rings true to the performance of Damon, and comes across as one of the more poignant performances in the film.

Jeremy Davies occupies the role of Upham, playing him as an outsider. The character is perfectly happy as a staffer, and gets drawn into hazardous duty without really having a choice. He wasn't part of the invasion in the first place, and so hasn't seen battle. He finds himself trying to figure out how to fit in with the rest of the squad, all of whom have seen battle. He's an intellectual, and at one moment, a moral center for the story. At another moment, late in the film, he has an all too human reaction, freezing up in the midst of battle. It's a complicated character, which must make him compelling to play. Vin Diesel as Carpazo is perhaps the least developed of the core squad. Part of that has to do with his fate, and part of it has to do with the fact that Diesel's not that good an actor. He plays the part though as someone who can stay calm in the heat of battle, and yet wears his heart on his sleeve. Giovanni Ribisi plays the medic Wade, and we get to see more of him. He's ferociously angry at moments during the beach landing as his work gets undermined by hellishly accurate German riflefire. He's a young guy who, like so many other soldiers, misses being home. Adam Goldberg gives the character of Mellish a somewhat cynical air. Mellish talks a lot, is something of a wiseguy, and yet is very much aware of the German attitude towards his people. He taunts prisoners of war with the fact that he's Jewish. For him, the personal nature of the war has an added dimension.

Barry Pepper is one of those actors who, for the most part, tends to be interesting in whatever he's in (there are a couple of exceptions, but he's not to blame for disasters like Battlefield Earth and The Lone Ranger). He plays an exceptional marksman who quotes scripture while killing enemy targets, finds himself calm during battle, and suggests the war might end sooner if he was assigned to go after Hitler personally. It's not arrogance- the character simply knows how good he is with a rifle. Edward Burns is the sarcastic and cynical Reiben, plays him as a wiseguy who tends to talk back. Reiben is suspicious of the notion of wasting time going after one man, to the point of disgust when two of their own die, and yet acts protectively during the climactic battle for a private whose life he has held in disdain. Tom Sizemore embodies the sergeant Horvath just as you'd expect. He's a tough guy, feels like he's been in the army for most of his life, and carries himself like a soldier. He keeps the others in line, makes himself indispensible for Miller, and despite the tough exterior, can see the value of the mission.

Matt Damon hit it big before this movie was released with Good Will Hunting, but there's still a freshness in the performance despite being well known at that point. He plays the role as someone who's torn between his duty and the grief he feels for his brothers. He doesn't believe he deserves the right to go home, despite the fact that the order is coming down all the way from the top. He's quite defiant on the point that he must stay where he is until reinforcements can come up to the ruined town where he's posted. And at the same time, we see the agony of his grief moments later as he silently sits among his fellow paratroopers. And in the calm before the storm, we learn more about him, both in a story he tells that proves to be a darkly hilarious tale and in how Miller says that Ryan reminds him of so many students he taught down through the years. And the added touch, in that conversation, in which Ryan admits he can't visualize his brother's faces, rings true to anyone who's suffered a recent grave loss- the shock of the grief does that.

Hanks gives the central role of Miller the gravity and weight that it deserves. He leads his men forward into battle as a natural leader- despite the trembles he does his best to conceal. He manages the personalities of the men under his command. There is a weariness in the character that Hanks brings across, along with a quiet wisdom and an inner resourcefulness. There are moments of gallows humour in the character, but also the behaviour of a commander who knows he must show concern for his men. He feels the losses of fallen men intensely, though he can't show that to the men. And at a pivotal point when the mission seems to be at a  crisis, he is completely honest with his men, giving them insight into himself, and the audience a glimpse at the man inside. In doing that, he defuses the tension in the scene, and it's one of the most powerful scenes in the film.

Saving Private Ryan has established itself as a classic in the war genre, and a truly great film. It is both an epic and an intensely personal, character driven film that deals with the themes of the brotherhood of war, the meaning of courage, and the brutality of battle. It is harrowing and graphic, but it needs to be. It is a gritty, realistic look at the Second World War from the perspective of men on the ground, and is a masterpiece from the director. 

Someone Please Make Gore Verbiniski Stop

Links to see to before we get ourselves started today. Check out Norma's blog for her look at the Razzie awards. We've got ourselves another Snippet Sunday blog posted at the joint page. The Happy Whisk asks if this is true or false. You decide. Eve has an orchid blossoming.  And at The Real Maple Syrup Mob, we have a cat tutorial on how to attract rabbits. Now then, today it's time for a movie review... one that I'm glad I didn't see in the theatres. I picked it up last week on an express shelf in the library... and I was not impressed.

"People think you are dead. Better you stay that way." ~ Tonto

"Why are you talking to that horse? Why am I covered in dirt?" John Reid

"I buried you." ~ Tonto

Last summer, director Gore Verbinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer reunited with Johnny Depp for the action-western-comedy The Lone Ranger. Depp came on board to play the unlikely role of Tonto, while the title character got handed over to the inexplicably named Armie Hammer. The end result was a mess filled with distracting continuity glitches, geographical errors, story plotholes, and more problems. It bombed in the theatres, and with good reason.

The story bounces around in time, starting off at a fair in the 1930s as a boy encounters an elderly Indian (Depp), a Comanche who identifies himself as Tonto and begins to tell him the story of how he and the Lone Ranger met. This takes us back in time to 1869, where lawyer John Reid (Hammer) is on a train into Texas. The same train is carrying two prisoners, a renegade Indian, the aforementioned Tonto, and an outlaw named Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner) due to be hanged. The train comes under attack from some of Cavendish's gang out to rescue their boss, and Reid and Tonto first meet while dealing with the crisis. Tonto is jailed nonetheless, we briefly meet John's sister-in-law Rebecca (Ruth Wilson) and her son. She will, of course, become the requisite love interest. 

Reid's brother Dan (James Badge Dale) deputizes John as a ranger to go after Cavendish and his gang. Things go seriously wrong, and the posse are all shot down and killed by Cavendish and the others. All except for John, left for dead but recovered by the conveniently escaped from jail Comanche who seems to think the bird on his head is alive and that the brother he has saved (the wrong brother) is a spirit walker who can't be killed.  Thus the two unlikely partners must work together in a story that brings in a horse with an attitude, a corrupt Army officer (Barry Pepper), a businessman with delusions of grandeur (Tom Wilkinson), and a brothel madam with a rather unusual prosthetic leg (Helena Bonham Carter). And it's all tied together with a whole lot of silliness.

Gore Verbinski has something of an eclectic history as a director. One of his earliest films was the priceless black comedy Mousehunt, and he's best known for the Pirates of the Caribbean films (he really should have stopped after the first three). Of those films, his production partner has been Jerry Bruckheimer, who's made a career in movies and television of loud and occasionally obnoxiously boorish stories that feature lots of explosions and rock music underscore. The Lone Ranger is, in short, the hubris of both coming back to haunt them. The film was plagued with production problems and an over the top budget straight off. The story is from a trio of screenwriters, Justin Haythe, Ted Elliot, and Terry Rossio. What they craft is filled with errors. While the story seems to be set in Texas, it moves all over the map geographically, from Monument Valley to Promontory Point (all while dragging history through the mud). It gets numerous details wrong, to say the least (as if we could expect accuracy in a film like this). It doesn't even pay attention to its own continuity- there are plenty of mistakes, such as dirt on a body that's not there in the same way in the next frame- that make you wonder if anyone was paying attention during filming.

And the film doesn't help in that it jumps around in time, not only from decades later, but often in the course of the 1869 timeline where we're seeing something one moment that might only make sense later on. It's distracting, but not in a good way. It also doesn't help to have the kid hearing the story from the elderly Tonto- it's not a framing sequence; the narration interrupts with regularity, and I found myself disliking the kid. It's probably a good idea to refrain from using child actors to begin with; something about this kid struck me like fingernails on a blackboard. They could have dropped the narration element entirely, told the film in a linear fashion, and it wouldn't feel so grating.

Verbinski and Bruckheimer assembled a crew with this production that brings mixed results to the film. Makeup actually does its job. Tonto's entire look is rather striking, and apparently based on paintings of Native peoples (though the dead bird on his head is a bit much). And Fichtner in particular looks suitably hideous as the outlaw Cavendish; he looks like he's been out in the sun for too many years and has been beaten over the head with an ugly stick, so the makeup department went out of their way with giving him that look. This also applies to set design, which evokes the Old West in a great deal of the finer details (even if the crew can't keep track of how much dirt ought to be on a body from one moment to the next).

Much of the filming was done on location, so we've got beautiful western settings (including the obligatory Monument Valley scenes that are seen in every western), and the camera work captures that reasonably well. The special effects and set work for the climax of the film, featuring two trains on a runaway chase through the mountains, also work in making the sequence work (even though geographically the start off of the sequence does not mesh with the bulk of the scene). In fact, the train sequence late in the film actually helps the movie... but not enough to compensate for the other problems that tanked the film. One other member of the crew worth mentioning. Hans Zimmer composes the score, and as usual goes for bombastic and over the top in his signature style, though it works. This is one of those cases as so often happens with movies where the score is the best part of the movie. Zimmer even incorporates Rossini's William Tell Overture into the climactic sequence of the movie, weaving the familiar music with his own score.

The cast is generally made of actors who should have known better than to get themselves in on something like this. Most of them, however, are not to blame for the fiasco this film became (one glaring exception to that). William Fichtner has been playing various dirtbags, villains, and nefarious sorts down through the years as a character actor. He's nearly unrecognizable here, but his Cavendish is an addition to that resume of roles (though Robert Redford, the ghost of Paul Newman, and writer William Goldman would object to the insult to an iconic character with the similar sounding name). Tom Wilkinson is one of those outstanding actors who's often one of the more interesting elements in any film he makes. He's playing a seemingly considerate man named Latham Cole when we first meet him, but underneath all that is a greedy bastard out to get even richer than he already is. Barry Pepper's also one of those actors who tends to be interesting to watch, and seems to suit the part of a soldier well (he's played that before in another period uniform). However, a weakness of the script itself seems to suggest his corruption just happens, which must annoy the actor.

James Badge Dale doesn't last long in this film as the lawman Dan Reid, but is at least plausible as a lawman in the Old West. He looks comfortable in the saddle, and as an actor is slowly building a good resume of work, including 24, The Pacific, Iron Man 3, and The Conspirator. I would have rather preferred him in the lead as the title character. Ruth Wilson is an actress I was unfamiliar with before now, but she plays the requisite part of the damsel in distress reasonably well, with romantic history with two brothers, and a son with one of them. I'd like to see what she's capable of in a film that's better. And Helena Bonham Carter, one of my favourite actresses, must have wondered what she was thinking getting into this film as Red. The character is eccentric and tends to come across as more of a plot device than anything else, used by the screenwriters to fill a plothole. At least Carter has a well established track record and can move off and do other things. 

The two leads are a problem, admittedly. I'll start out with the lesser problem. Johnny Depp is essentially channeling Captain Jack Sparrow with a glazed over Native American in his portrayal as Tonto. The take Depp has on the character is that of a man who's probably out of his mind, a nutcase who's crazy for the sake of being crazy, just like his signature Pirates role. It seems to me like Verbinski and Bruckheimer wanted him to play the role from that eccentric point of view rather than just as a straight on not for laughs character. Or maybe Depp has gotten to like playing eccentricity over and over again. It doesn't suit the character, though, but it's not really Depp's fault so much as it is those behind the scenes- the writers, producer, and director, all wanting to take another shot at that Pirates mentality. Johnny, do us a favour: for your next role, play something that's not eccentric.

Ultimately, the biggest problem of the film, which casts a fatal wound on it, is the actor playing the title role. Armie Hammer (why the hell did this man not change his name?) brings no weight, no gravitas, no sense of presence to the character. Tonto remarks on more than one occasion that the wrong brother came back from the dead, and in that, he's right. Dale would have been a better actor in the role, but instead we get stuck with an actor who we can't take seriously. Hammer seems to be sleepwalking through half the movie, or maybe he's just naturally boring, or maybe he's a pretty lousy actor. I'm inclined to think it's the last of those three options. It's a performance that just scuttles the entire film. This should be an object lesson to producers and directors: don't cast this guy in your film.

The Lone Ranger failed in spectacular fashion at the box office. It is filled with endless errors and gaffes that just hamper the whole thing from the point of view of the historian. The story itself is grating and derivative and wanders all over the place. It's entrusted to a director who needs to step away from filmdom for awhile and come back with something that's not so over the top. And its producer will never take a hint and just go away. Add to that a cast of supporting actors who are largely wasted in place of the spectacle of an empty story, a lead actor who needs to play a character who's not eccentric, and another lead actor completely out of his depth... and you've got the recipe for a film disaster. If you happen to watch this film at some point, you might want to make a drinking game out of this. Every time you have to roll your eyes at something in the story that annoys you, everyone takes another gulp.