#263: Enemy at the Gates
Soviet sniper movie generally keeps it within scope
This review was originally posted to Twitter on June 5, 2020.
Initial release: March 16, 2001
Director: Jean-Jacques Annaud
War movies, as a general rule, do not often pretend to be anything more than what they are: violent action fests, rife with heroism and jingoism. Yet Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Enemy at the Gates is a little different: a western-made film about a fundamentally ostfront conflict, a remarkable distillation of the Battle of Stalingrad, for an audience far removed from any of the history underpinning it.
Based, somewhat loosely, on the tale of a real-life sniper, Vasily Zaitsev, Enemy at the Gates tells us a tale about a young farmboy from the Urals who becomes a hero of the Soviet Union through his marksmanship skills before being pulled into a duel with a German sniper. For his actions he’s made into a propaganda figure, much to his chagrin. Along the way, he befriends a Commisar, Danilov, and a local militia volunteer, Tania, as well as a young boy and his mother, who have been hiding in one of the few safe zones of the city.
Despite its largely European production, this is very much a Hollywood kind of film, drawing on the techniques that Saving Private Ryan and other films of the era utilized to give war movies a bite that hasn’t really been seen since 1930’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Yet Annaud is a little smarter than all that. Jude Law is well cast as Vasily, his thin face and boyish looks (he was maybe 28 when he did the film) befitting a young farmboy who just got thrown into the meatgrinder that was Stalingrad. Opposite him is Ed Harris as Major König, a grizzled veteran sent to kill Vasily. The duel between these two is the central focus of the film; they become, in effect, symbols of their respective superpowers. Despite being a movie about the Soviet Union, it’s not exactly waving a red banner; an early scene shows Soviet commissars shooting retreating troops.
In the middle of the film a character (a brief-yet-glorious role by Ron Perlman) discusses how he was tortured by the Soviets for training at König’s sniper school during the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, then mocks a young soldier for being surprised, calling him a “Marxist bastard.” All this adds up to a fairly typical Hollywood approach to the Soviet Union; but then again, that’s part of the appeal among war nerds of the conflict between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany: it’s easy to get excited when you don’t have to root for one side or the other.
Yet we still root for Vasily, if only because he’s a genuinely good person who doesn’t like being a symbol of the Soviet resistance, who just wants to do his job then go home and work in a factory. It’s his story, and König is his arch-nemesis. It’s a simple story and it works. Where it doesn’t work is when the romance subplot rears its ugly head. Tania is the object of both Danilov and Vasily’s desire, but if I’m being completely honest, there’s more chemistry between Danilov and Vasily than either of them with Tania. The romance subplot could easily have been lopped off and this movie would be way better, and you’d hardly even notice. At the very least, we get treated to tense scenes such as Vasily pinned down in a ruined factory, or the famous charge on Red Square.
This is one of those things where most people in the US only know a story of the war through Hollywood; the US typically has not given a single shit about anything that happened east of Berlin or west of Okinawa. But you know what? At least we got this story. Sure, it’s a bit of a throwback, with the tacked-on romance and historical inaccuracy, but it’s still a compelling story when it’s focusing on the rivalry between these two men, the top of their class, the best snipers their respective regimes have to offer.
