Saving Stalingrad

Rating: 7/10 (17 September 2002)

The photography reveals a Stalingrad that hardly anyone would want either to conquer or defend. Ominous, gloomy, wrecked, under gray snow-laden clouds, like the city in Kubrik's Full Metal Jacket. Everything is, or looks, gray in one or another tone. In the chemical factory, even a pile of sulfur, than which nothing is yellower, turns into a bright but sickly chlorine green. No wonder Brighton Beach and Elizabeth, New Jersey, are now filled up with Russians; they left home because of the weather.
The sounds come down to us from Saving Private Ryan. I don't think war movies will ever be the same. The German MG42s sputter and the bullets clunk and spatter. As in SPR or Band of Brothers the bullets hit iron with serial clanks. It's imitative but there have been improvements too. We can be grateful that we no longer have to listen to every other shot resulting in one of those long wobbling ricochets, PtewEWewEW.... as the bullet whines into the infinite vastness of space. The sound departments used to be so fond of that particular noise that I've heard it when bullets glance off, not only hard surfaces like rocks, but wooden planks, sod, everything but flesh.
The musical score is appropriate to the setting, with occasional echoes of Prokoviev. The acting is adequate. The most interesting character -- and they are all kind of interesting -- is not Zaitsev, the nominal hero, but the Commisar, spurned by his beloved who has fallen for the pop idol sniper, and who turns spiteful and destructive before sacrificing himself.
The direction too is adequate. Tania has a scene in which she relates the sad story of how her parents were bundled out of town with other prisoners and then executed by the Nazis. As she goes through this monologue, a plaintive sad tune wanders into the sound track (a hint to the audience that this is a sad story). Meanwhile the camera very slowly dollies up from a medium shot to a close up (an even broader hint to the audience that this story is not only sad but important). In a later scene, Zaitsev is told that his lover has been killed and the camera moves in to a close up of a gigantic eyeball in which a tear seems to be forming. I kept wondering how Ozu would have handled this in something like "Tokyo Story", which was full of sad tales. His camera wouldn't have moved an inch. And I think I believed it the first time a reflection momentarily blinded the sniper in "The African Queen" but I sure can't swallow this instance, which takes place in a darkened factory.
I wish more directors had enough faith in their audiences' ability to recognize tragedy when they see it. You know, when you think about it, there were very few movies made about the conflict between the USSR and Nazi Germany until fairly recently. The post-war political environment in the USA wasn't such as to encourage heroic portraits of the Commies, and yet we couldn't go with the Nazis either for obvious reasons. Nobody making American movies would have known which side they wanted the audience to root for.
This one is pretty even handed as far as that goes. It's mostly seen from the Russian's point of view, and, with the exception of Ed Harris's character, they are the only ones we get to know. (There is a very nice scene of Zsaitsev and Tania making furtive frightened love amid a horde of snoring bodies in a shelter; we briefly see her ivory, smooth, generous butt and it's not at all erotic.)
Harris is cool, professional, has lost a son on the Eastern front, and is prepared to die. And, man, does Harris have the body language of the European aristocrat down pat. He sits with crossed legs and polished boots, serenely puffing a cigarette, his face placid. But he definitely revolts the audience when he takes a young boy whom he has gotten to like out into the ruins and hangs him as bait.
Zaitsev is positively embarrassed by his notoriety in the media. Khrushchev is bullying and brutal, and the Commisar mouths socialist clichés. (We had to give them a kick in the pants somehow, I guess.) As for the sniping, it's the best part of the picture. I mean, it's hard to make movies about people whose main job is to lie there without moving for long periods. But these guys are sharp. They never miss. Every kill is a head shot. And they can cut a telephone line at 155 meters with one bullet. If they were any better they'd be superhuman. And, again, the audio is not embellished during the few shots we see. POP, and that's it. No clichés. It's a rather nicely done movie, kind of an easy one to get into, and, tense if not gripping, it carries a viewer along.
War is a funny thing though. I can't think of another business in which you become a hero by killing more human beings than anybody else. The film avoids the whole issue.