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Enemy At The Gate review
:. Director: Jean-Jacques Annaud
:. Starring: Joseph Fiennes, Jude Law
:. Running Time: 2011
:. Year: 2001
:. Country: France
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With a colossal budget, historical context and Hollywood distribution, one would have hoped for Enemy At The Gate to be an authentic European response to ultra-patriotic American war films in the vein of Saving Private Ryan. Far from it, Jean-Jacques Annaud's film rather resembles rather an egocentric fantasy where the direction is hardly defined.
Enemy At The Gate tells the tale of two WWII snipers during the battle of Stalingrad between the Russian and German armies. Jude Law plays Vasily, a young Russian peasant who becomes a heroic symbol to his people and a German officer (Ed Harris) who smokes gold tipped cigarettes sent out on a special mission to kill him, and in the process, Russian morale. Joseph Fiennes is Danilov, the army officer/journalist who publishes accounts of Vasiliy's heroics to the masses.
Annaud, who of late has specialized in large scale epics, seems vainly gone off in pursuit of an American box office blockbuster. The director, more at ease in intimate films like The Name Of the Rose, lacks the breath necessary for an epic of this scale. As a footnote, it was initially a Sergio Leone project, which explains the very spaghetti western themes, and French filmmaker's allusions to the genre. In spite of the explosions and grandiose scenery, the film is shockingly dull. Annaud's direction never succeeds in transmitting the emotion and rage of wild combat, giving the impression that his camera draws blanks. Except for the opening scene (where we see badly prepared Russian soldiers killed by their own commanders if they refuse to fight the Germans), the action is inactive.
The film also has the ambition to be a satire of the propaganda services of the army (when Fiennes character makes Vasily famous by writing of his heroic feats), a love story (an unlikely one between peasant Law and intellectual Rachel Weisz), and a drama (a love triangle amidst war unfolds). But these secondary stories are so barely outlined that they never take hold of the audience.
Nor should one count on the actors to make film credible. None of them makes the effort take on a Russian accent—instead you have the impression of stumbling into the middle of a WWII reenactment in the British countryside. Whereas Jude Law remains in withdrawal, Joseph Fiennes has the finesse of a tank and Ed Harris does not do enough to make us believe his its character.
If Stalingrad marked the debacle of the German army, Enemy At The Gate marks that of Jean-Jacques Annaud.
Fred Thom
 Movie Reviews: French Films
Movie Reviews: from 1998 to 2011
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