Saving Private Ryan (1998) Saving Private Ryan (1998)

See also: _Index | Plot Structure (Saving Private Ryan) | Backbeats (Saving Private Ryan)

Quick Facts

  • Director: Steven Spielberg
  • Screenplay: Robert Rodat
  • Starring: Tom Hanks (Capt. John H. Miller, an English teacher from Addley, Pennsylvania), Tom Sizemore (Tech. Sgt. Mike Horvath), Edward Burns (Pvt. Richard Reiben), Barry Pepper (Pvt. Daniel Jackson, sniper), Adam Goldberg (Pvt. Stanley Mellish), Vin Diesel (Pvt. Adrian Caparzo), Giovanni Ribisi (T-4 Medic Irwin Wade), Jeremy Davies (T-5 Cpl. Timothy Upham, translator), Matt Damon (Pvt. James Francis Ryan), Ted Danson (Capt. Fred Hamill), Paul Giamatti (Sgt. Hill), Dennis Farina (Lt. Col. Walter Anderson), Harve Presnell (Gen. George C. Marshall)
  • Cinematography: Janusz Kamiński
  • Editor: Michael Kahn
  • Music: John Williams
  • Runtime: 169 minutes
  • Budget: approximately $70 million
  • Worldwide Box Office: approximately $482 million
  • Release Date: July 24, 1998 (US)
  • MPAA Rating: R
  • Distributor: DreamWorks Pictures (US), Paramount Pictures (international)

Overview

After the surf at Omaha Beach has receded and General Marshall reads the Bixby letter aloud in a Washington office, Capt. John Miller — a Pennsylvania schoolteacher leading a battered company of Rangers — is sent inland with a squad of eight to find one paratrooper, James Francis Ryan, the last surviving brother of four, and bring him home. The mission is a propaganda rescue dressed as moral mathematics, and the squad knows it: the dialogue between Reiben, Mellish, Caparzo, Jackson, Wade, and Upham keeps trying to find a calculus that makes eight lives spent for one make sense. Spielberg and Rodat let the calculus stay broken. Miller's hand begins to shake somewhere between the radar bunker where Wade dies and the half-bombed village where Upham freezes, and by the time the squad finds Ryan at Ramelle and chooses to stay and hold the bridge, the rescue has become a stand. The Ramelle bridge sequence — Jackson in the bell tower, Mellish under the knife, Upham on the stairs, Miller firing a sidearm at a tank — is the climax the opening landing has been pointing at: the same kind of fight, smaller, with names attached. The film frames the whole story inside an elderly Ryan kneeling at Miller's grave in the Normandy American Cemetery, asking his wife if he has been a good man, which is the only test the dying Miller's "earn this" can ever return.