I watched Enemy at the Gates, a movie I had never heard of, because a friend included it in his Top Ten movies of all time. I loved it. My enthusiasm comes with two warnings: the movie is rated are for graphic war violence, and some film critics really did not like the movie. Why did such a good movie draw so many pot shots? The film has three elements: 1) the 1942-43 battle between the Russians and the Nazis for the city of Stalingrad; 2) the duel between two snipers, the Russian hero Vassili Zailsev (Jude Law), and the German sniper sent to kill him, Major Konig (Ed Harris); and 3) a love triangle between Vassili, his friend Danilov (Joseph Fiennes), and a Russian Jewish soldier named Tania (Rachel Weisz). Whether you really like the movie or not depends on whether you think these three elements go together and whether you think they should go together. For me it worked.
To viewers who criticize the movie, I say this: “OK, Jean-Jacques Annaud is not the director—you are. And you’re in charge of how you spend the 80 million dollars. How would your movie be different and better?”
Let’s try a couple. One professional movie reviewer complained: the opening battle sequences with hundreds of troops, air raids, and so forth is excellent panoramic action, but the cat-and-mouse contest between the two snipers pales in comparison. So what would you do? Completely ignoring the fact that the movie was made to dramatize the real-life story of a farm-boy sniper from the Urals and an aristocratic Bavarian sharp-shooter sent from Germany specifically to kill him, you could have more air raids, more charges, more mortars, more slaughter, and this could be followed by more air raids . . . But wait, now you have 2 hours and 11 minutes of carnage and a film that is unwatchable even for the critic who unthinkingly implied it.
Let’s try another, this time from a talented critic and one of my favourites. He vehemently criticizes the movie for its “coolness” and “detached style,” which produces flat characters he doesn’t care about. He says the love triangle is a mistake and never rises above the level of a soap opera. So what would he do? Note that he is calling for eliminating the romance while simultaneously calling for characters who have more depth than simply fighting machines—like, maybe, people who would fall in love, who would be jealous, who would have emotional lives before and after the battle? If you eliminate Tania, how does Vasili meet the 8-year old boy who is living in the same basement as Tania, the boy who provides so much suspense as a double agent? Maybe Tania could just be another soldier, make the introduction, and then not have any young men interested in her. Unlikely. If Tania doesn’t care at all for Vasili, how is he going to get rescued when the German sniper has him pinned behind an old stove? Instead of her going looking for him, a Russian soldier could happen upon him . . . but that seems like deus ex machina. But if the Russian soldier did happen upon him, the stranger would not likely listen to all Vasili’s directions—“Don’t shoot. Move over there. Move you legs. Find a piece of glass . . .” If you eliminate Tania from the movie, you’ve got a lot of problems to solve.
Before we fire off shots at a movie, they should imagine taking our own criticism to heart. If we cannot then imagine a better movie, we should reconsider and maybe appreciate the one we saw.
Amistad (1997) deftly side-steps the stereotype of a slavery movie. Through three successive trials the issue expands into a battle between doing the right thing and being political expedient—a theme that resonates today from the nearest bureaucracy to federal governments. The photography is top notch, Steven Spielberg keeps things moving along, and Anthony Hopkins, as John Quincey Adams, shows what great acting is all about. There are a few awkward bits which probably kept the movie from winning many awards even though it was nominated for several. But there are some really excellent aspects. The way in which the African slaves can speak to no one and no one can make themselves understood drives home the enormous initial difficulty of developing any understanding between races. The way in which the macho African cannot understand the slimy American judicial system dramatizes a culture clash. We see the advantages of being macho—tearing your chains out of the ship’s timbers and killing the crew to gain your freedom—and we witness the disadvantages—being unable to forgive your white lawyer for a misunderstanding even though he goes to the trouble to learn your African language. Similarly, we see the advantages of the American judicial system where fair-minded men are convinced by evidence, and we suffer through the corrupt political interference that would undermine the courts’ work. This movie has heft..
The movie opens with a simple sentence printed on the screen: a Nobel laureate says that the greatest threat to humans dominance on the planet is the virus. Unfortunately, this and the opening sequence set you up for a serious investigation of the issue—or, at least, a plausible and interesting exploration. Instead we get Hollywood cliches. What is different about Hoffman’s “rebel good guy with a theory no one will believe”? What is unique about Southerland’s “evil general with a secret plan”? What is realistic about a helicopter chase scene in which the two good-guy medical researchers out fight the two Army attack choppers? Although the 2 hours and 8 minutes is certainly watchable, it reminds us of how Hollywood can fluff even the most serious issue.
Second, I’ll bet Ebert hates the movie because, despite Ebert’s claim to the opposite, it does have something serious to say. It works hard to make us sympathize with a racist, even as we know the horror of what he has been involved in. We know he shot his black hired man, we know he was somehow involved in several bombings including one that killed two children, and we can see the damage his behaviour has had on his family. But we also hear his family history—four generations, beginning with the founding of the KKK, dedicated to racism. And we see an old black and white photograph of a lynching with him in the foreground, 10-years old. Furthermore, we gradually learn that four of his five bombs were carefully placed to hurt no one, but that someone else was primarily responsible for the blast that killed the children. And we see him slowly warm toward his attorney (Chris O’Donnell) who is his haunted grandson. And we see him attempt an apology to the black guard—something like “When I say those things I about your people, I want you to know that I don’t mean to include you.” And at the end of the movie we see him, at long last, break allegiance somewhat with the secretive KKK by allowing authorities to open the records that will identify the fellow primarily responsible for planting the deadly bomb. The movie goes one step too far in this effort to get us to like this bigot: Before he goes to the gas chamber, he exchanges good-byes with all the prisoners on death row, most of them black. This rings entirely false since they know full well that he is imprisoned for hating blacks and he has given little indication that his beliefs have changed substantially. In the end, we know that he had no direct hand in killing the children and that the higher ups have made some political deal that will see him die anyway. The effort to simultaneously gain our horror and our sympathy is something that would not work with anyone—say, like Roger Ebert—who believed that society should not cut the least little bit of slack for racists. Partly because of Gene Hackman’s superb performance, I felt some sympathy for the old bigot. Although he says the politically correct thing when he faces the gas chamber—something like “I had an opportunity to make something of my life and I did no one any good”—I ask the same thing his grandson did in the courtroom: Yes, but given his time, place, and upbringing, what chance did he realistically have?