Quiet Heroes Amid War’s Roar

Americans have always loved their war films, for decades finding in combat the romance, heroism and machismo personifying the timeless schmaltz of Disney’s recent “Pearl Harbor.”

In that one, fearless Ben Affleck has the luxury of dying magnificently and still getting the ruby-lipped girl, while Josh Hartnett expires in style after fighting the good fight, knowing instinctively as he bows out, with the camera tightly framing his handsome flyboy face, that his unborn child will be co-raised by his best buddy.

If you swooned at them, consider skipping “Band of Brothers,” whose big savage bangs mingle with delicate shadings in 10 hours of acutely on-point HBO drama that may be the best-ever film depiction of war in the trenches, large screen or small, and TV’s loftiest miniseries since the Brits sent over “The Jewel in the Crown” in 1984. Give “Band of Brothers” a medal.

Its executive producers are that “Saving Private Ryan” pair, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, and various writers and directors (including Hanks) are behind the 10 episodes, two of which arrive back to back Sunday.

“Band of Brothers” isn’t universally adored. After buying it for a bundle, the British demoted it from BBC1’s prime-time fall schedule to the lesser-watched BBC2, reportedly after veterans there claimed it credited the U.S. with whipping Hitler alone. Not true.

If “Pearl Harbor” and its lover boys exhume an old-fashioned dreamland that Hollywood seemed to have buried, “Band of Brothers” is war for a grislier television age that toughened Americans when beaming back pictures of Vietnam in a body bag.

Drawn from Stephen E. Ambrose’s book about the actual men of Easy Company, it resists glamour and romanticism, recalling the gruesomeness of “Saving Private Ryan” and, flashing way back to 1945, “The Story of G.I. Joe,” a fine movie about ordinary infantrymen being worn down by combat and fatigue in Italy during World War II.

“Band of Brothers” does its own shadowing of a World War II unit, this one in the 506th Regiment of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division. Here are these kids (as most of them were) training in Georgia in 1942, then jumping into France on D-day under withering fire, then digging in during the Battle of the Bulge en route to capturing Hitler’s picturesque Eagle’s Nest at Berchtesgaden as war in Europe ended.

Although various perspectives intervene, threading them all is an overview from Dick Winters (played persuasively to the hilt by subdued Britisher Damian Lewis), a taciturn, steely, admired young officer who later is named battalion exec. In one of the twists of war, he ultimately makes major right after ignoring an order to form a patrol that he knows would put men at risk for no good objective.

The real Winters is among elderly Easy Company survivors voicing recollections on camera at the beginning of each episode and at the story’s end. Their collective memoir helps define the unique camaraderie of men with nothing much else in common but war, the challenge of staying alive connecting them in ways that transcend civilian life where most probably wouldn’t have given the others much of a tumble.

Ironically, the most memorable testament in this story comes not from an American but a German general in a farewell address to his troops after their surrender at war’s end, his moving tribute to his own band of brothers (“We found in one another a bond ... that exists only in combat”) becoming a universal anthem for soldiering together in the foxholes of wartime.

This shared experience hardly softens Easy Company’s outrage at the enemy, best expressed by one soldier bitterly exploding (“You ignorant, servile scum....”) at a long column of German POWs tramping by as the war winds down. Elsewhere, too, almost without apology, are summary executions of Germans surrendering to Americans in the heat of battle.

In one almost surreal scene, Winters leads a charge on an enemy position, loudly gasping for breath on the run before halting sharply when coming upon a lone enemy soldier. Little more than a youth, the German is helpless on his knees when Winters shoots him dead, this encounter haunting him later like a recurring bad dream.

The imagery of “Band of Brothers” yields stunning contrasts, as in parachutes floating almost balletically over Holland and orange-bannered Dutch greeting Americans as liberators dissolving much later to the crimson jelly of limbs flying from bodies during an artillery barrage in Belgium’s Ardennes Forest.

Here, these many years later, we see the “young faces bleared with blood, sucked down into the mud” that British poet Siegfried Sassoon witnessed in World War I, and hear the “swift unseen bullets” and “fury of Hell’s upsurge” described then by his countryman, Wilfred Owen.

In dusty browns and grays, “Band of Brothers” creates its own visual poetry, also mostly grim, affirming that on a primal level the stakes of combat are constant from generation to generation.

Stacked against walls like firewood are stiff corpses. A dead German’s arm rises from smoky rubble almost in a mock Sieg Heil . Another fallen one is ground into the earth by one of his own tanks, another frozen in death like an ice statue beside a tree.

Blasted by his own grenade, a 20-year-old American screams that he doesn’t want to die, then does die as his friends watch helplessly. Death is arbitrary here, not glamorous. There are no cre-scendoing signals, no buzz bombs that alert you. Easy Company members are sometimes cut down in mid-sentence, the absence of big names in the cast (except for David Schwimmer of NBC’s “Friends”) making it all the harder to foresee who will remain at the end.

One obscure soldier survives combat all the way to the Alsatian town of Haguenau in 1945, only to die when hit by a German mortar round while carrying a sack of potatoes from one building to another.

Will one who falls be Bill Gaurnere (Frank John Hughes), the tough little sergeant nicknamed “gonorrhea,” or traumatized Albert Blithe (Marc Warren), gazing vacantly in his foxhole as others fight on? Will some be officers, including Winters’ boozing friend, Lewis Nixon (Ron Livingston), whose eyes grow harder and harder, or Buck Compton (Neal McDonough), ever melancholy, ever an emptier helmet after being wounded and seeing two friends blown apart?

Written by Bruce C. McKenna and directed by David Leland, one of the story’s strongest episodes follows the decline of Eugene Roe (Shane Taylor), an overwhelmed medic retreating deep within himself as the war around him grows louder. Scrounging medical supplies and the sheer effort of trying to save soldier after dying soldier in the bitter cold are pushing him over the edge.

Another notable hour, written by John Orloff and directed by David Frankel, has Americans forcing German townspeople to bury Jews who died miserably in a nearby camp about which they plead ignorance. Frankel opens tight on a violin in a string quartet playing Beethoven while civilians sift through mounds of rubble, dust settling on the musicians like crematory ash.

Just as profound here is silence, as when Roe tenderly reaches down to retrieve something inside a building destroyed by German bombs, knowing it belonged to someone he cared for who now lies dead, unseen by us, just beneath fallen timbers.

“Band of Brothers” has a way of creating metaphors from the minutiae of routine. On leave in England, a paratrooper returns to a laundry for wash he had left behind when flying off on D-day after training there with his comrades. Would he mind, an employee asks, also carrying back the clothes of soldiers who for some reason hadn’t been by? When she reads the names attached to unretrieved bundles, he’s hearing a roll call of casualties.

Resisting stereotypes from the start, Easy Company’s story is a crossroads of bravery, pragmatism and incompetence. When we meet Herbert M. Sobel (Schwimmer), the company’s first CO training his men in Toccoa, Ga., they despise him for driving them mercilessly. “He’s got no chance,” one says. “Either the krauts will get him, or one of us [will].”

Any veteran moviegoer knows what happens next: Sobel turns out to be as caring as he is tough, ultimately earning his men’s loyalty for forcing them to become disciplined hardbodies.

Wrong story. Instead, Sobel is every bit as mean-spirited as he appears, firm of body not mind, an inept combat leader so dangerously fragile and insecure that fear of discovery is visible in his eyes.

Easy Company survives him only to face much worse in occupied Europe, where “Band of Brothers” makes its mark with all the special effects and noise its $120-million budget can muster. But its heroes are quiet ones.

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The miniseries “Band of Brothers” begins airing Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO with Episodes 1 and 2. The remaining eight episodes will air on consecutive Sunday nights at 9. The network has rated the first night TV-MA-VL (may be unsuitable for children younger than 17, with special advisories for violence and coarse language).

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted via email at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.