Lean in its Own Way: “Enemy at the Gates” – A Movie Review
Enemy at the Gates (2001) is a World War II action picture by Jean-Jacques Annaud. Its assets are many. Photographed by Robert Fraisse, it’s a great-looking work starting out with a David Lean scope. Although it trivializes the terrible siege of Stalingrad by the German army, it reminds us of how depressingly violent history is. A Russian sharpshooter, Vasily Zaitsev (Jude Law), is the film’s hero, but Gates has no more love for Communism than for German anti-Semitism, a threat to Rachel Weisz’s Tanya and Joseph Fiennes’s Danilov, both Jews. It does have a love for entertainment, though.
To go back to David Lean, this film certainly lacks the taste and intelligence of something like Lawrence of Arabia. Annaud is no Robert Bolt, who authored Lawrence, and neither, I suppose, is Annaud’s co-scenarist Alain Godard. It isn’t long before the writing becomes very weak, even proffering a dissatisfying love triangle. And this: a German master sniper is sent to Stalingrad to kill Vasily and is actually naive enough to heed the words of a young Jewish boy, who wishes only to deceive the German, about Vasily’s whereabouts.
Ed Harris plays the sniper and doesn’t have the voice, the vocal strength, for it, and is monotonous besides; whereas Law, Weisz and Fiennes are effective. Bob Hoskins is okay as Khrushchev during the Stalin era, but his role is a two-dimensional stinker. James Horner’s score is . . . well, also a stinker. I think I have made myself the enemy of Enemy at the Gates.
