COMMENTARY: Filmmaker Steven Spielberg’s `lost’ causes

c. 1998 Religion News Service (Rabbi Rudin is the National Interreligious Affairs Director of the American Jewish Committee.) UNDATED _ Steven Spielberg’s latest film,”Saving Private Ryan,”is the renowned film director’s homage to the American soldiers, most of them draftees, who stormed the beaches of Normandy, France during World War II and helped defeat Nazi Germany. […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the National Interreligious Affairs Director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED _ Steven Spielberg’s latest film,”Saving Private Ryan,”is the renowned film director’s homage to the American soldiers, most of them draftees, who stormed the beaches of Normandy, France during World War II and helped defeat Nazi Germany.


Not surprisingly, the combination of Spielberg’s artistry and the current yearning for unambiguous national values has won the movie both critical and commercial success. Spielberg’s unflinching look at modern war has deeply stirred audiences and raised many spiritual and moral questions.

The film is a stunning artistic achievement; perhaps the war movie to end all war movies. Indeed, the first 26 minutes of”Saving Private Ryan”are a frightening recreation of the bloody D-Day landings, and this extraordinary segment is destined to become a movie classic studied in film schools throughout the world.”Saving Private Ryan”is based on the real life case of Pvt. Frederick Niland who in 1944 was one of four brothers in the U.S. military.

Two Nilands were killed in action and a third was missing in action when a special unit was ordered to rescue Frederick, a paratrooper who landed in France during the invasion.

Spielberg’s cinematic soldiers, led by actor Tom Hanks, spend more than three hours finding paratrooper Ryan behind German lines and making sure he, the remaining son, returns safely to the United States. The mission is successful, but at great physical and emotional cost.

Indeed, the film made me wonder that if it is so important to save a remaining son, why is it not equally important to save from combat deaths EVERY son from EVERY family by preventing war? Who in Washington, D.C., decided the Niland family could sustain the loss of 75 percent of its sons, but not 100 percent? The loss of three brothers in battle is horrendous, but the film asks if it is morally just or militarily sound to risk several times that number of troops to rescue the fourth brother.

Like many other moviegoers, I identified with the frightened Cpl. Upham, Spielberg’s cinematic alter-ego. A would-be military author, Upham is ordered to trade in his typewriter for a rifle and join in the highly dangerous search for Ryan. Upham has never fired a weapon in anger, and at first he stumbles along, not fitting into the superbly trained Ranger unit.

In an interview, Spielberg said Upham”was me in the movie. That’s how I would have been in war.”Upham is Everyman, yanked out of civilian life and compelled to become a combat soldier.

When the Rangers capture a lone German soldier, the Americans want to kill him because their mission to find Ryan does not permit the luxury of guarding a prisoner of war. Upham persuades his captain to release the captive, arguing that an unarmed German soldier is harmless and likely to be captured by another group of Americans.


Of course, the prisoner is reunited with his forces and fights on. He is again captured, but only after knifing to death a Jewish member of Hanks’ unit. This time, the once diffident Upham kills the POW in cold blood in defiance of the rules of warfare as prescribed by the Geneva Convention.

Spielberg creates a case of what theologians call”situational ethics.”Does the existential situation make a difference in one’s behavior? The young American corporal, who had earlier shown mercy to the German and pleaded for his release, is filled with fury when the object of his compassion has returned and killed Upham’s comrade.

When I was a military chaplain in the 1960s, several soldiers, Christian and Jewish, admitted to me they executed German POWs immediately after viewing the horror of the Nazi death camps. The official explanation for their actions was always the same: the Germans were killed”while trying to escape.”Nearly 20 years after World War II, the Americans were still haunted by what they had done.”Saving Private Ryan”also returns to a central, recurrent Spielberg theme _ lostness.

In”E.T., The Extra-Terrestrial,”a lovable creature is lost and seeks to go home. In another film,”Raiders of the Lost Ark,”the Ark of the Covenant is lost, and in the Oscar-winning”Schindler’s List,”an entire people is lost to mass murder although a saving remnant, those on the now-famous list, does come home to Israel.

Now, in his latest film, Spielberg is in search of a lost soldier who is ordered to come home.

Even though the lost Private Ryan was found, I eagerly look forward to the many other”lost”causes that will surely continue to engage Spielberg’s cinematic skills.


DEA END RUDIN

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!