Just before the last battle in Saving Private Ryan, a gang of weary guys hang out on a flight of battered stone steps somewhere in northern France. Edith Piaf's unmistakably poignant voice sounds from a phonograph beside them. Although her language is French, you don't need sub-titles to decipher its meaning - loss, betrayal, a torchsong for the time when the lights went out all over Europe.
Still, the American GIs need a translation, word for word. And they get one almost verbatim from the only nerd present, their official translator, a young man who entered battle so reluctantly he had to be physically separated from his typewriter.
When the translator pauses, a guy on the back step comments that if he really thought those words were true, he'd go out and hang himself. Moments later, the rumble of enemy tanks can be heard. No one needs translation any more.
Those days were, indeed, innocent. Steven Spielberg's latest film recovers precisely that image by splicing the photo-journalism of Robert Capa with the apple pie painterly populism of Andrew Wyeth.
In the final scenes of this millennial quest fable, the ageing man who once was Private Ryan turns his tearful face towards his wife as they complete their family pilgrimage to his dead comrades' graves. "Have I lived a good life?" he asks her. To have lived any other would constitute betrayal.
The good life is the American way. Any tension between history and hindsight is smoothed over in favour of old certainties. It is as though Jasper Johns had never painted his iconoclastic image of the tattered US flag back in 1955. Thus, the answer to questions of national identity is ultimately straightforward, if unusually optimistic - seek and ye shall find.
In a strangely Utopian resurrection of the war film genre as it was before images of Korea and Vietnam, Spielberg gives new generations a powerful rationale for honourably accommodating war simply by returning the US to the solipsism of life within a K-mart culture.
While contemporary US audiences wrestle with a real-life High Noon, Saving Private Ryan restores a chain of command stretching straight from Abraham Lincoln to the present. Bombing Afghanistan is only a step away.
Saving Private Ryan reassures the US people that by counting on your buddies when the chips are down you can make national character into a moral category out on its own.
It is a powerful movie, with images of war and gore so shocking you cover your face. That is appropriate - we ought to be shocked. Yet while the death of Americans is invested with the visual judgment of outright murder, the killing of German soldiers resembles a surprisingly inverted genocide, more the neat kind of capital punishment practised in too many US states.
The film is, in effect, a cover version of its own title. Finding Ryan and finding the US are identical crusades.
In a foreign place, where landscape is as hostile as language, battles are waiting to be fought on all sides when an elite squad, led by Capt Miller, alias the reliable Tom Hanks, is sent to rescue James Ryan. Ryan is the only survivor of four soldier brothers whose bereft Mom waits back in Idaho. Miller's men query their mission but accept their duty. That acquiescence builds a sense of camaraderie which, in turn, helps them to make sense of war.
The analysis is not new. Buddies have faces and families and personalities. Enemies do not. Buddies can speak to each other without misunderstanding. Enemies are distanced by the act of being translated.
The story is that of 20th-century warfare. And the more diminished the enemies' humanity, the easier they are to kill.
The disturbing element in Saving Private Ryan is how much the film relies on that distinction without interrogating it. So polarised are the cultural axes between the US and Europe that while the US is pictured either as an office filled with industrious people or an isolated homestead in an idyllic, rural setting, Europe is a place set on self-cannibalisation.
The British leadership is not up-to-speed - their general is reported to be "overrated". The French are over-emotional - a family terrified out of their wits as their home crumbles around them lose control to the point where they send their small daughter out to what looks like certain death. She is saved only by the sacrifice of a US life.
The collapse of any cross-cultural communication is at its starkest in the denial of any common humanity between Germans and Americans. A cornered German who has killed one of the buddies frantically tries to establish some bond by using a pidgin American drawn exclusively from media-speak. He gabbles about Radio City lyrics, popular music, Betty Grable's legs, to no apparent effect, betraying his country in the meantime for whatever that is worth.
On the translator's intervention, Capt Hanks is persuaded to let him go, with a kind of scout's honour promise that he won't kill any more Americans. Some frames later, he breaks his word. America takes its revenge through the same translator, once a poor man's Hamlet, now a redblooded man of action.
The story Spielberg might have told could have avoided the moral elisions which snap at almost every frame of this film. He might have asked his audience to imagine what happens when you cannot find Private Ryan, how you cope when you cannot close the treadmill on which you have been placed, and you realise that the goal in which you invested so much hope is simply not attainable.
Instead, his insistence on sending us home with a lift in our step squanders the prospect of new insights which might give us real but profitable discomfort.
It is a possible measure of Spielberg's own unease about the US that he needs to comfort audiences with the parable of a white good against a black evil, and invoke all the myths of nationalism to achieve that happy end. The Hollywood ethics that suggests makes its politics all the more disturbing.
The supreme irony of Saving Private Ryan is that it has no irony at all.
War is personal and, as presented by Steven Spielberg, it is also entertaining. That may be the greatest myth of all.