Better than Private Ryan

Rating: 10/10 (19 June 2001)

The first 30 minutes of Saving Private Ryan may have been the best war footage ever shot. The first 30 minutes of Enemy at the Gates is at least as good. And the rest of this remarkable feeling is better -- for its clear-eyed view of the war on the Eastern Front, the story Hollywood never tells. The struggle between two totalitarian leaders, Hitler and Stalin, was the most bestial and ferocious battle in history. The film opens with an unbearably horrifying tableau in Stalingrad. The Russian conscripts, without enough rifles to go around, are sent armed and unarmed to charge a well-entrenched German position. They are slaughtered by machine gun fire. As they run back to their own lines, their own officers open fire on them, shouting "deserters will be shot." From this shocking beginning, we are offered a vision of war in which there are no winners, no right side and wrong side, in which all but the leaders are victims. Enemy at the Gates is perhaps the most honest film ever made about war. It has subtle, trenchant observations about the nature of propaganda and of genuine heroism, and its depiction of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) is as compelling and realistic as anything put on film. There are a number of exceptional performances. Three young English actors -- Joseph Fiennes, Jude Law and Rachel Weisz -- offer a superb ensemble performance. They make their unglamorous characters utterly and compellingly human. Yet they are overshadowed in a career-best performance by the American actor Ed Harris, who in his maturity is emerging as one of the finest American actors of the century. There is a strong resonance of Burt Lancaster in his prime in Harris's nuanced, brilliant performance, where every gesture and every facial expression is invested with meaning and depth. Bob Hoskins is terrifying as the calculating and brutal Nikita Sergeyevich Khruschev, who made his name as a political commissar at Stalingrad and later succeeded Stalin as dictator of the Soviet Union. There is a superb cameo as well from the rarely-used American actor Everett McGill, who had the starring non-speaking role in the director Jean-Jacques Annaud's film Quest for Fire. Yet it is the central performances of the three young people that carries the film and gives it emotional weight. Annaud weaves their performances into an intimate glimpse of what it is like to fight for rulers in whom you have no faith, against an implacable enemy, all the while trying to retain a vestige of your humanity. Fiennes as the disillusioned propagandist Danilov -- a Jew who becomes a political commissar to escape persecution -- is very good; as is Weisz. Yet it is young Jude Law, in a performance even more impressive than his role in The Talented Mr. Ripley, who fills the screen nearly as well as Harris. If Law continues to be this good, he could very well grow up to be the next Michael Caine. A first-class film all around, and the only "must see" movie of the year. Far better than Pearl Harbour (which I rather liked, despite its old=fashioned sentimentality), Enemy at the Gates is war at its most elemental -- a raw struggle to defend all you have and are.