Tom Hanks – The Reluctant Wardaddy

Although the characters and the story are fictional, Saving Private Ryan is still worth analysing in terms of its themes and its historical accuracy because Spielberg and Hanks have probably had the greatest influence on how the Second World War (or at least the U.S. contribution to that conflict) is perceived by the general public. 

Obviously the mythologising of the Second World War started well before Spielberg and Hanks (see the John Wayne episode for more on that) but over the last thirty years these two men have taken it upon themselves to curate WWII for modern audiences and the upshot of that creative control has been fairly hit and miss.

As well as directing Saving Private Ryan Spielberg also acted as Producer on the first instalment of EA’s Medal of Honor (1999) computer game series – which would ultimately evolve into the entertainment juggernaut that is the Call of Duty franchise. Together with Hanks, Spielberg also produced and financed three very expensive TV series set during WWII – Band of Brothers (2001), The Pacific (2010) and Masters of the Air (2024). If that wasn’t enough Tom Hanks also wrote and starred in a film about U.S. Naval operations in WWII (Greyhound, 2020) and he’s currently working on a 20-part documentary series on WWII for the History Channel.

But Saving Private Ryan was where it all started and the film arrived with a bang. 

When it was released Private Ryan was widely praised for its historical authenticity, its apparent realism and its attention to detail. Historian Stephen Ambrose – no doubt biased because he’d been the key historical consultant on the production – called it “the finest World War II movie ever made”. The critics were equally amazed. Richard Cohen’s review for the Washington Post (A Reminder From Spielberg) is pretty typical of the sort of reactions the film received from critics with Cohen congratulating Spielberg for eliminating any John Wayne characters from his film. 

The Observer called it a masterpiece, with the reviewer gushing that the film “makes you proud to be an American without a lot of phony, sentimental, patriotic flag-waving”. Presumably he took an early bathroom break and missed the actual waving American flag that appears at the end of the film.

Showing more humility than most, the reviewer for Sight and Sound acknowledged that it was “…meaningless for critics to write of ‘realism’ in war movies, as most of us have no idea what war really looks like” and yet he still felt that the action sequences were ‘utterly believable’. He also didn’t notice anything strange about the age or the backstory of Hanks’ Captain Miller.

“In Apollo 13, Hanks never seemed totally convincing as a man of action. But here he is perfectly cast as an ordinary man doing the best he can in impossible circumstances, and gradually losing his grip. The revelation of Miller’s peacetime origins, the subject of much speculation among the other soldiers, is brilliantly timed to provide one of the film’s most compelling moments.”

Most other critics focused their praise on the opening 20 minute battle sequence while tiptoeing around the 140 minutes that follow. The reviewer for Time magazine declared that the beach landing scene was “quite possibly the greatest combat sequence ever made” and that the film “transcends the simplistic moralities that inform its predecessors”.

There were a few dissenting voices. The novelist William Goldman wrote a fairly scathing piece about the incoherent message of the film which also criticised Spielberg’s flashback narrative device for implying Private Ryan somehow witnessed all the events leading up to his rescue.

But most reviews were effusive. Entertainment Weekly called Saving Private Ryan “a movie of staggering virtuosity and raw lyric power” – once again emphasising the realism of the opening sequence. To boost these claims of realism and authenticity Paramount Pictures announced that they had set up a dedicated hotline to counsel veterans who might be re-traumatised by watching the film.

But some WWII veterans were more outraged than horrified. Paul Fussell wrote that after the brutality of the opening scene” the film 

“…degenerated into a harmless, uncritical patriotic performance apparently designed to thrill 12-year-old boys during the summer bad-film season.”

Another veteran, Howard Zinn, protested that films like Saving Private Ryan played with the audience’s emotions by using the unique circumstances of WWII and the deaths of those young soldiers as a means to redeem the idea of war itself. He reminded his readers that:

“…the long-term effect of World War II on our thinking was pernicious and deep. It made war—so thoroughly discredited by the senseless slaughter of World War I—noble once again. It enabled political leaders—whatever miserable adventure they would take us into, whatever mayhem they would wreak on other people (two million dead in Korea, at least that many in Southeast Asia, hundreds of thousands in Iraq) and on our own—to invoke World War II as a model.”

For a longer exploration of this theory you can read my series of essays on The Road to Hell.