"Saving Private Ryan" (15) Nationwide
The cinema of Steven Spielberg has been marked by the film-maker's unwavering technical virtuosity, an ambitious level of scale, a child-like sense of wonder, a shameless skill for manipulating the emotions, and a keen sense of packaging and marketing. These elements have worked for and against his output as a director over the past 25 years since his riveting first film, Duel, went on release here. Spielberg's uneven output has spanned the thrilling emotional highs of E.T. and Close Encounters, the rousing adventure of Jaws and the Indiana Jones trilogy, and the chilling and moving though naive and over-praised Schindler's List - along with such glib and tedious exercises as The Color Purple, Hook, Always, Amistad and Jurassic Park.
With Saving Private Ryan Steven Spielberg has produced one of the crowning achievements of his film career, an unrelentingly intense and truly remarkable antiwar movie which remains riveting throughout its 170-minute duration. It begins unpromisingly on a sentimental and wholly superfluous - though mercifully brief - framing device, a present-day sequence which echoes the dissipating impact of the coda to Schindler's List.
An intense close-up cues the extended flashback to 1944, plunging the viewer head-on into the terror and confusion of the D-Day landings on Omaha Beach in Normandy - filmed at Curracloe, Co Wexford last summer - as platoons of American soldiers are ferried to shore, some of them vomiting with fear at what lies ahead. What follows is an unforgettable 25-minute battle sequence - shot above and under the water and on land - of cacophonous chaos and mayhem as many of the soldiers are picked off like pins in a bowling alley. Bodies are blasted and blown to pieces, blood spurts through the air and the sea runs red, as the scale of the sacrifice escalates.
In the edgy calm that follows, with its ever-present shadow of danger, Robert Rodat's screenplay establishes the essentially conventional but consistently involving narrative line of Saving Private Ryan. When three brothers from the same Iowa family are killed in action within days of each other, the US chief of staff orders that the family's fourth and youngest brother, James Ryan, be found and rescued from behind enemy lines. Here Spielberg's film recalls Lloyd Bacon's factually-based 1944 war movie, The Fighting Sullivans, dealing with five Irish-American brothers who died in battle in 1942. The mission to save an individual life also recalls the intent of the naively scripted and rather embarrassing "one more life" speech uttered by Liam Neeson's Oskar Schindler towards the end of Schindler's List.
In Saving Private Ryan Tom Hanks plays Captain John Miller, who, assigned to find the missing paratrooper, selects six men from his platoon along with an interpreter. The wisdom of sending eight men on such a potentially fatal mission to save the life of one other man is questioned by the most cynical of Miller's squad, the plain-speaking Brooklynite played by Edward Burns. However, in the light of the slaughter depicted so graphically in the opening battle sequence, their mission is an emblematic one within the broader context of a war in which so many gave their lives to protect countless others.
The film ends on an even more startling and sustained battle sequence which gains in emotional power as many of the characters established over the course of the drama lose their lives in action. Although superficially treading familiar ground - the film is set entirely from the point of view of American GIs who make up a calculatedly ethnic mix - Saving Private Ryan delivers its anti-war message with an intense realism rarely seen on a cinema screen. It is highly effectively shot by the gifted Janusz Kaminski in a muted, desaturated colour scheme that evokes Elim Klimov's devastating 1985 Russian war epic, Come And See, set during the Nazi massacres in Soviet Belorussia.
Rarely more impressive, Tom Hanks subtly plays the paternal Captain Miller and he is joined in an exemplary cast by actors previously best known from US independent productions - Matt Damon (as Private Ryan), Giovanni Ribisi, Barry Pepper, Edward Burns, Adam Goldberg, and, most strikingly, Tom Sizemore as the squad's tough sergeant and Jeremy Davies as the nervy interpreter with no experience of combat.
The unfamiliarity of so many of the key cast works to the film's advantage, just as the supposedly definitive D-Day movie, The Longest Day, was persistently undermined by the succession of high-profile cameos which turned it into a star-spotting exercise. Many have disagreed with the putative status of Saving Private Ryan as the definitive anti-war movie. Such distinctions are immaterial in the case of such a thoughtful, harrowing and brilliantly accomplished film which is made with passion and a ferocious energy and unfailingly articulates its message that war is hell, hell on earth.
Michael Dwyer
"Cousin Bette" (15) - Virgin, UCI, Tallaght
Take away Balzac's tone of ironic sympathy and reduce his vast cycle of novels, La Comedie Humaine, to the skeleton of their plotlines and you're left with pure melodrama, as indigestible as multiple episodes of soap-opera screened back-to-back.
Des McAnuff's screen version of one of the best known books of that cycle, Cousin Bette, is an uneven and repetitive treatment of the story of an embittered, vengeful seamstress (Jessica Lange) who schemes to bring about the destruction of her cousins, the aristocratic Hulot family.
Set in Paris on the eve of the 1848 revolution, the film is bursting with picturesque poverty and vivid period detail, but in its concentration on the overwrought family drama, the rich social and political contexts are lost.
Jessica Lange gives an extraordinary performance as the manipulative, needy, Bette. Smouldering with anger and desperate for love, her facial expressions change, in seconds, from malevolence to breathtaking beauty. Clothed in black throughout and masked in shadow, she is indeed Balzac's "black diamond". Unfortunately, everyone around her is in a different film and her most emotionally demanding moments are thrown away because we're not sure whether to laugh or to be moved.
Hugh Laurie and Bob Hoskins give tired comic turns, while Aden Young, playing the tortured young artist, Wenceslas, is starring in his own Romantic tragedy. Bright, hard-edged lighting from Pulp Fiction's cinematographer, Andrzej Sekula, adds to the cartoonish, sometimes camp effect and suggests an attempt to break away from naturalism. But this is not pushed as far as, for example, Philip Haas's Expressionist Angels And Insects, and it remains wedded to the demands of period verisimilitude and narrative exposition. There are some farcical moments, such as when Wenceslas's great sculptural masterpiece is unveiled as the sort of Brutalist slab that would not have been out of place in Stalinist Russia, and when Bette engineers events so that the dramatis personae congregate in a hotel bedroom to find Wenceslas and his lover (Elisabeth Shue) licking molten chocolate from each others' naked bodies in a very post-Haagen-Daas moment. La Comedie Humaine, indeed.
Helen Meany
"Life Is All You Get" (Members and Guests) IFC, Dublin
"Love in the time of the Kohl era," puns a graffito on the wall of one of the many bleak building sites which form most of the exterior backdrops for Wolfgang Becker's directorial debut. It's as good an encapsulation as any of this rambling, picaresque tale set on the fringes of Berlin society, but the title itself gives some indication of the film's problems. Life Is All You Get is too hectoring in tone and sentimental in execution to do justice to its themes.
Jurgen Vogel plays Jan, a young drifter stuck in a dead-end job, whose chance encounter with the beautiful and free-spirited Vera (Christiane Paul) brings him into conflict with the law, while opening up the possibility of a more fulfilling life. Along the way, he comes into conflict with his shiftless sister and her gross boyfriend (Martina Gedeck and Richy Muller), strikes up a friendship with an ageing Teddy Boy (Ricky Tomlinson) and tries to come to terms with the possibility that he may have contracted HIV.
This is all told against the backdrop of Berlin in the throes of "reconstruction" - apartments are being repossessed from their long-time tenants and buildings razed to the ground for new developments - all of it shot in a remorselessly non-stylish fashion (it's one of the ugliest films of the year). Becker peppers his film with satirical jabs at the trash culture which permeates the city: quiz shows are devoted solely to horror movies; TV programmes offer quick cash for hopeless talents, and everybody's on the make for a few extra Deutschmarks. It's a potentially compelling subject, but in Becker's hands this material seems too didactically delivered, and the innocence of the central characters is over-romanticised.
The presence of a badly-dubbed Tomlinson, one of Ken Loach's favourite actors, gives some indication of what the director is trying to do. One of the ironies of modern European cinema is the reverence accorded to British realists like Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, compared to the indifferent reception they receive from their home audiences. It's hardly surprising that European filmmakers should try transposing Loach's methods to their own societies, but in this case it just doesn't work. Becker's characters, in script and performance, never achieve the level of naturalism or sense of rootedness found in films like Riff-Raff and Raining Stones, and the heavy-handed humour only serves to confirm our worst prejudices about German cinema.
Hugh Linehan
