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.
posted on Saturday, February 24, 2007 2:45 AM by JimBell