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ENEMY AT THE GATES: The first scenes in this epic, set during the 1942-43 Battle of Stalingrad, are horrifying in the grand and artful sense a depiction of war and chaos that arouses compassion for those who endured or died.
These scenes resemble the storming-of-Normandy sequences at the start of Saving Private Ryan. They have death and mutilation in common and, above all, the aching panic that bad as things are they’re going to get worse.
But the assault in Ryan is planned and coordinated against an organized defense. Enemy shows waves of primitive, improvised attacks by soldiers who have no apparent plan.
Both are deadly and real. Ryan is beautiful in its own way, a Mercedes-Benz of battles. But there is no trace of glory in Stalingrad. The Enemy assault is ugly. Each in its own way is true and powerful, and gives an imaginative overview of battle possible only in movies.
In Enemy, director Jean-Jacques Annaud (Seven Years in Tibet, The Name of the Rose) tells the based-on-fact story of one of the survivors of the attack, Vassili Zaitsev (Jude Law).
A modest but gifted sharpshooting shepherd from the Urals, Vassili picks off five German officers. The Soviet propagandists (led by Joseph Fiennes) make him the hero they desperately need to inspire and rally their ragtag, out-weaponed army. Ed Harris is terrific as the veteran aristocratic officer and marksman the Nazis send to kill Vassili.
Carefully developed and superbly shot, the film becomes a struggle between two star sniper-athletes, each patiently trying to outwit the other. The moral differences between them are intelligently explored. The ending offers satisfaction and uplift rarely touched in action films.
Enemy is also about the price of fame, the waste of war and how politics uses and uses up people. The cast is on the mark, especially Rachel Weisz as the Jewish military aide who loves Vassili and Bob Hoskins as the crude young Khrushchev who leads the city’s defense. Graphic genre violence, problem sexual situation, but neither is gratuitous; satisfactory for mature viewers.
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