ENEMY AT THE
GATES
Jean-Jacques Annaud's Enemy at the Gates has two
opening sequences, and both promise the audience engagement and suspense.
The first gives us a young boy and a wolf eye to eye across the distance
of a snowy wood, alternating the roles of predator and prey. We watch
as the young boy puts snow in his mouth, slowly, so that the wolf will
not see his breath in the air; and we hold in our own breath, momentarily
frozen, waiting to see if the boy's bullet will meet its target. It
is a quiet scene, almost entirely black and white in its intensity as
in its composition.
The
second opening gives us the noise and variegated shading, if not full
color, of the Soviet Army's entry, physical and emotional, into the
Battle for Stalingrad - crowded railway cars with little room to move,
Soviet propaganda blaring; crowded transports across the Volga through
bullets and blood, Soviet officers competing with the Nazis to shoot
down those who try to escape; two men for every one rifle inside the
city, the other instructed to wait for a comrade to fall so he may defend
himself and the motherland.
This
second opening has been compared to the famous battle sequence that
opens Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, but I think the comparisons
are facile and superficial. Annaud's intent here seems very different
from Spielberg's. In the American-centered film, the focus is the everyman.
The camera's point of view is that of a participant - the viewer is
in the landing craft and on the beach with the troops, suffering the
same disorientation and fear. In Annaud's film, the viewer's perspective
is resolutely outside and above it all - critical of a system it has
no part in, building sympathy for a man filling more and more of the
camera's eye - a golden-skinned, clear-eyed, chiseled ideal. Where Saving
Private Ryan's perspective leads us through a film that defines
heroism as a trait that runs through us, finding us when we need it,
Enemy at the Gates isolates heroism as a master's feat, even
a godly skill.
The
chiseled ideal is Vassili Zaitsev (Jude Law), the young boy who met
the wolf in the Urals, grown up to meet the Hun in the city named for
his leader. One day in, after a blistering defeat, he meets a more timid,
if no less beautiful man (Joseph Fiennes as Danilov), a writer/political
officer, the only other living body amid a corpse-strewn fountain. The
writer is torn between playing dead and shooting at the enemy, calmly
victorious for the day, but Zaitsev is softly steeled. The sound of
the battle still raging, he takes on the silence of the snowy wood of
his youth, and methodically, skillfully, gracefully cuts down five Nazi
soldiers with five perfectly-timed shots. Between the writer and the
sure-shot, a hero is born: Vasily Zaitsev, sniper. Russia has its role
model and the film its focal point: the extra-filmic parallel between
director and sharpshooter suggested, but unspoken.
It is, unfortunately, just shortly thereafter that the film loses its
poetry.
At the
heart of the story of Vassili Zaitsev - the reason for the film - is
the legendary match between the Soviet and his Nazi challenger: an expert
marksman named Major Konig (Ed Harris), the wolf come back to seek the
hunter out. Scope to scope, the two men are set above the history, master
to master, god to god, each set off by the other with an energy cold
and yet intensely aligned. And both actors are sublime in their roles
- palpably human in their perfection, pushed forward and back by forces
hinted at but better left imagined.
The story,
however, does not take us where the mere essence of it might and should.
The writing in Enemy at the Gates is not nearly up to the acting.
Law's hesitations and Harris's facial tics (punctuated by Bob Hoskins'
turn as Kruschev the crude) are all that carry us through actual moments
of high drama that Annaud and co-writer Alain Godard have reduced to
melodramatic cliche and topped off with the cue-card musical score of
James Horner commanding us to "aws" and "oh nos." There are those who
claim, with some authority apparently, that the legend of the match
is more propaganda than truth, but that is of small import - heroes
with names history can place are in short supply. Alas, though, I was
more moved, more awed, when I heard the real story over lunch from my
dad some time back than I was sitting in the theater watching and waiting.
At the telling, I wanted to read more about it. The film, by contrast,
dulled that desire.
The problem,
in part, is that Annaud/Godard did not trust their drama's core. They
overlaid it for effect with an invented love triangle that turns it
into tripe. At the center of the triangle, they placed Tanya (Rachel
Weisz), a true historical character - a Russian/American Jewish woman
who joined the militia, studied under Zaitsev, and became his lover.
Though her role in the history is interesting, Annaud/Godard transmute
her into the set-piece love object and cause of dissension between Danilov
and Zaitsev. They diminish their own story and trivialize more history
than they had a right even to engage, by making her the touchpoint for
both Danilov's Marxist loyalties and the Jewish plight under the Nazis
(adding a disturbing political twist to the film's Jewish question,
to boot).
More than
distracting, the love triangle is deadening, but so too the one-on-one
resolution between Zaitsev and Tanya, hinted at from the start and made
sickeningly formulaic at the end in grand scale. Their badly directed
lovemaking is an embarrasingly comical counterpart to the exquisite
intimacy shared between the two expert snipers the film should have
been about. In fact, the audience with which I saw the film actually
laughed aloud.
History was cheated, Law and Harris were cheated; the audience was
cheated. If Enemy at the Gates is not overlong, it is indisputably
overstuffed. One would think with the money they reportedly spent on
the film, they might at the very least have hired themselves an editor
with a firm hand and a sharp pair of scissors.
CineScene, 2001
