The two most important lines in ‘Saving Private Ryan’, according to Tom Hanks
It’s a lot easier for a movie to sink its hooks into the hearts and minds of the moviegoing audience if it’s got quotable lines that become part of the lexicon, but it’s not a requirement. Saving Private Ryan doesn’t have any dialogue that permeated pop culture, and it didn’t need to.
That’s not to say the script is a washout, with Robert Rodat deservedly earning a ‘Best Original Screenplay’ nomination at the Academy Awards. It was less of an issue back in 1998 when the film was released, but in the modern era, where attention spans are shorter than ever, it’s not the kind of story that can be boiled down to soundbites and 30-second clips.
Saving Private Ryan grabs you from the start and refuses to let go, from the pulse-pounding and jaw-dropping Omaha Beach opening to the last stand of Tom Hanks’ John Miller and his soldiers during the Battle at Ramelle. The dialogue reflects who the characters are and what they stand for, but two lines made everything fall into place for the picture’s Oscar-nominated leading man.
While he saw no flaws in the narrative, with his squad merely following orders by being deployed to retrieve Matt Damon’s title character from behind enemy lines to save his mother the agony of having to bury all of her sons, Hanks admitted that he did have a slight issue with why the rest of his men would stay behind after Ryan made it clear he wasn’t going anywhere until the battle was over.
“And you might wonder why they make that decision,” he explained to Roger Ebert. “We always had this problem with the story: Why do they stay? There are two lines of dialogue that made everything work, as far as I was concerned. One is said by Private Ryan: ‘These are the only brothers I have left’. The other is said by my character: ‘Things have taken a turn for the surreal here.'”
Verbatim, the line is actually, “The world has taken a turn for the surreal,” but the point still stands. From Ryan’s perspective, he wasn’t willing to abandon his comrades in arms just because the people who’d been ordered to rescue him had shown up to complete their mission, not when there was still a job to do.
As for Hanks’ Miller, his line spoke to how anything that unfolds during wartime, no matter how unexpected, should be expected because unpredictability had become the new normal. Or, as he put it, “All rules are off and nothing makes sense anymore, and this is the last thing we should be doing, but yet we’re going to do it.”
The actor’s bugbears with the story weren’t huge ones, and thanks to Rodat’s writing, they were easily overcome, with those two simple and straightforward sentences encapsulating not only the arduous task Miller and his squad were facing, but the resistance they faced in trying to accomplish it, and why they refused to walk away when Ryan told them he wasn’t leaving with them just because they’d arrived.
