Brutality Versus Lies: Lies Always Wins

Rating: Null/10 (22 March 2001)

Spoilers herein.
This is what theatrical people think war is like: every day is interesting, the conflict centers on certain people, guile is everywhere, love always penetrates, and the sets are lush. Those sets deserve mention. They are deep, multitiered confused jumbles of life. The pieces are big enough to recognize and consist more of objects rather than unrecognizable rubble. I was charmed. This was more a model of an unconscious than a ruin.
I was also impressed with how this film began, how it swept you into the center of a story so seamlessly. This is where `Private Ryan' failed so miserably, and few films have been as adept at transporting us (literally here) into another world. Then they larded it up with a bunch of Hollywood plot machinery. But the first part is good.
Here's a problem: these actors are competent, but the director tolerated so many different visions of projection, the ensembles never coalesce. Weisz (here made up to look alarmingly like Kate Winslet) acts with her breath. Fiennes gears every line to an emphatic pause, as if the text itself had character. Law emotes.
The titles (which also appear during the action) are in a Soviet heroic industrial font. It is accurate (actually from the 30's) but doesn't mesh well with the style of the film proper, which seems to have little to do with Russia itself. British accents? I spent the day with a Russian, here on a short visit, to remind myself how different they really are. These characters adopt no eastern European mannerisms.
There didn't seem to be any hunger.