The two-time Oscar winner who despised ‘Saving Private Ryan’: “Phony manipulative shit”
While most viewers would wholeheartedly agree that Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan is, at the very least, a classic, if not a full-blown masterpiece, the epic World War II drama isn’t without its detractors.
That said, a recurring theme is that the people who’ve spoken out against it are coming from a place of knowledge or experience. Like Oliver Stone, a combat veteran of the Vietnam War who won medals for valour, and was adamant that if he was there, he’d have put a bullet between Tom Hanks’ eyes.
The filmmaker couldn’t wrap his head around the concept of an entire squad of soldiers risking life and limb to extract a solitary soldier they hadn’t heard of until they were dispatched to find him, especially when they had no idea what he looked like, and they weren’t even sure of his whereabouts.
Along similar lines, Richard Todd, an Academy Award-nominated and Golden Globe-winning actor who was actually there and fought in the D-Day landings, had no interest in even giving Saving Private Ryan a shot, dismissing the entire thing as “sentimental twaddle” that wasn’t worth a moment of his time.
You can understand why those two bristled at the goings-on in the picture, but from a purely storytelling perspective, William Goldman may have been the most scathing of all. A two-time Oscar winner for penning Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men, he knew his way around a tightly wound narrative.
His other credits included The Stepford Wives, A Bridge Too Far, The Princess Bride, and Misery, so he was a dab hand behind the typewriter, and latterly keyboard. Goldman’s assessment of Saving Private Ryan didn’t get off on the right foot, either, as he noted that “the bullshit started early with this baby,” and kept going.
He did commend the opening Omaha Beach scene as “an incredible battle sequence,” but from there, Goldman described the actual introduction at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial as “awful stuff,” calling it so overly jingoistic that “even John Wayne would have been embarrassed to start a movie that way.”
The scribe summed up the first hour and 45 minutes of the film as “sensational storytelling,” but after that? “The rest of the movie is a disgrace, 50+ minutes of phony manipulative shit.” Once the team tracks down Matt Damon’s title character, Goldman lost all interest, and he didn’t care much for his monologue. It was improvised, and he could tell.
“And I wonder only this,” he speculated. “How could Spielberg allow something this atrocious to happen?” As for the ending, where the older Private Ryan visit the grave of Hanks’ John Miller? As you’ve probably guessed, Goldman couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “Just when you think Spielberg has stooped as low as even he can, new thresholds are reached,” he ranted. “Four agonising minutes of pretentious syrup.” Omaha Beach? Good. Everything else, as far as he was concerned? Not so much.
