The ‘Saving Private Ryan’ scene Matt Damon made up: “Neither profound nor insightful”
It’s not a particularly novel take to claim that Saving Private Ryan is one of the greatest war movies ever made. At this point, that almost goes without saying. However, Spielberg’s searing 1998 classic is brilliant for many reasons beyond its influential, intense battle scenes and Tom Hanks’ staunch lead performance. It’s a perfect war movie because it has the guts to be real, especially when showcasing its titular character, played by Matt Damon.
Saving Private Ryan is predicated on a simple throughline: Hanks’ Captain John H Miller and his unit are tasked with finding the missing paratrooper James Francis Ryan, whose three brothers have all been killed in battle. In most movies, the brave heroics of Miller and his team, not to mention their countless sacrifices, would lead to a cathartic scene where they locate Ryan, who they find out is just as courageous and valiant as they are.
Instead, when the unit finally catches up to Ryan, they find a disarmingly normal young man who is about as far away from heroism as can be. Damon plays the character perfectly, and when he bonds with Miller by telling him a ribald story involving his three deceased siblings, it’s a poignant, heartbreaking scene. However, the true genius of the scene is that Ryan’s speech wasn’t meticulously crafted by an army of screenwriters to pluck the audience’s heartstrings and provide telling insights into the nature of war and the toll it takes on human souls. Instead, the entire speech was improvised by Damon on the spot, and it works precisely because it’s not profound at all.
Indeed, Ryan’s tale of he and two of his brothers discovering the fourth sibling getting busy with a less-than-attractive woman in their barn is childish, low-brow, and borderline offensive. The way he laughs so hard at the memory of this poor woman realising she was being watched, then trying to run away with her shirt over her head and smashing into a wall in the process, is funny because it’s so juvenile. The way Damon tells the tale is long, meandering, and ultimately vaguely pointless, too, largely because he was making it up as he went along.
After listening to this winding story of female embarrassment, many of Saving Private Ryan’s crew were convinced it would never be included in the film. Surely Spielberg would want Ryan to be more erudite and perceptive? However, to their shock, Spielberg loved the story and kept it in the film, despite admitting “the ad-libbed speech was neither profound nor insightful.” Instead, he felt it was the most truthful thing “this oddly unformed kid who was fated to be at the centre of this mission” could say.
Ryan wasn’t a hero, nor some kind of poet who could form his thoughts into achingly sincere speechifying. He was a painfully unremarkable guy who found slapstick comedy funny, like most men his age. By some trick of the cosmos, though, he had found himself placed in a position of importance he could never live up to.
So, there you have it: Damon created movie magic by specifically telling a rambling story that wasn’t particularly funny, but somehow spoke to the heart of his character more than any purple prose ever could have. It’s no wonder Hanks looks so baffled throughout the scene, though. After all, he had no idea where it was going and probably thought Damon had botched his big opportunity to make an impression in the movie.
