Sydney Morning Herald
26 July 2001
By Sandra Hall
In the early stages of Jean-Jacques Annaud's epic about the Battle of Stalingrad, he gives us an authentic glimpse of hell a khaki mass of bodies swarming across a scarred landscape that looks as if it's never going to see sunshine again. Everything is mud and smoke. The only flashes of colour come from the bloodstains and shellfire.
Then a Very Important Apparatchik arrives. An armed guard springs to attention, a door swings open and out steps Khrushchev, alias cuddly Bob Hoskins, wearing a woolly hat. Suddenly you're not in hell any more. You're in a movie.
And not just any movie. This is European cinema's answer to Saving Private Ryan $151 million worth of historical re-creation, giving us Stalingrad as it looked in 1942, after being carpet-bombed by von Richthofen's Fourth Air Fleet. And apart from the technical complexities, there are the moral ones. Naturally we're on the Russians' side. Since they're up against the Nazis in the pivotal battle of World War II, things could hardly be otherwise, but there's not much joy in it, given the brutality of a military regime which refused to evacuate most of the city's civilians, as well as executing 13,500 of its own troops for everything from drunkenness to desertion.
But enough of these messy details, which don't preoccupy us for long. Annaud makes sure of that. Having swiftly established the nastiness of the high-ups on both sides of the conflict, he takes the Pearl Harbor option. Wide angle yields to close-up and crowd scenes give way to a love triangle, in which two of British cinema's poster boys, Jude Law and Joseph Fiennes, vie for the love of their equally gorgeous comrade, Rachel Weisz, last seen battling poltergeists in The Mummy Returns. Law is playing Vassili Zaitsev, a young soldier whose extraordinary prowess as a sniper is made famous by the Red Army's propaganda machine in an effort to boost the morale of troops and civilians alike. Vassili did exist, as opposed to Fiennes's Danilov, who didn't but could have, since he's the press officer responsible for disseminating Vassili's story.
As for Weisz's Tania, it seems that she's a hybrid. According to the World War II historian Anthony Beevor, who delicately disentangled the film's few facts from its multiplicity of fictions in a recent London Sunday Telegraph article, Tania Chernova, the woman on whom she's based, may have been Vassili's lover at Stalingrad, as she claims, but could not have been a sniper, as she also claims, because none of them were women. Nor was there anybody resembling Major Konig, the crack marksman sent in by the Germans to take Vassili out.
On the Oliver Stone scale of historical distortion, these are not exactly major sins especially in the light of what's been going on lately in films like The Patriot and U-571. And Enemy at the Gates does have a lot going for it from the wintry wasteland of the ruined city to the iciness of Ed Harris's Major Konig.
An actor whose smooth features and air of all-seeing repose make him adept at playing strong men of every description, Harris triumphantly overcomes the fact that Konig was fiction to make him the most convincing character in the picture certainly a lot more "real" than bouncy Bob's Nikita K.
And while the idea of the glamorous Law as a former shepherd boy from the Urals is as risible as his London accent, he reminds you, with every close-up, how much film is about faces. His febrile beauty versus Fiennes's lean and foxy looks form a diverting silent sub-plot of their own, which is handy because they're given very little to work on elsewhere.
The script ties itself in such grotesque knots in trying to make simplistic connections between the love story and Vassili's progress as he and Konig stalk one another through the rubble that coherence is the first casualty. And after that, there's no hope. Annaud may win the battle, but he loses the picture.
At the end, I was with Beevor, who wonders why he went to such pains to bring the past alive only to squander all this verisimilitude by using it as a backdrop to yet another potboiler.
