This Enemy Is on Target ... Most of the Time

By Teddy Durgin
I have come to the conclusion that I am a schmuck.  No, really. I am.  You wanna know what my biggest concern has been lately?  I have a pimple that has been forming on the bridge of my nose for the last week!  I am 30 friggin' years old, and I still get the occasional zit.  It's about two days away from popping, but I have a social gathering to attend before then.  Even worse, the pimple is located right where the frame of my eyeglasses comes to rest above my nostril.

It hurts, man!

Then, I saw Enemy at the Gates, and director Jean-Jacques Annaud showed me what hurt really is.  He showed me hundreds of Russians getting mowed down by gunfire in World War II.  He showed me boatloads of soldiers, crossing the Volga River to get to a battlefield where the men would meet almost certain death at the hands of the Nazis.  He showed me those boats getting obliterated by German warplanes before they could even reach shore.

In short, he showed me the Battle of Stalingrad.

Clearasil, anyone?

Enemy at the Gates (opening nationwide March 16) is a vivid and fantastically realized war film that is both epic in scope and intimate in nature.  It's epic in that it gives us the most intense and graphic combat sequences since Saving Private Ryan. It's intimate in that the focus of the movie is not the war, but a prolonged duel between two world-class snipers, young Vassili Zaitsev (Jude Law) of Russia and the ruthless Major Konig (Ed Harris) of Germany.

The story opens during one of the darkest periods in Russian history.  Hitler's war machine is gobbling up Soviet real estate by the day, and Stalingrad is on the verge of collapse. Amid the devastation, a Soviet political officer named Danilov (Joseph Fiennes) has his life saved by Vassili.  Danilov marvels at the rifle skills the young soldier is able to display.  He decides to write about him in the underground newspapers, making him into a national hero.  Soon, all of Russia knows Vassili's name, and a country's courage is rediscovered.

As the Nazis continue to lay siege to Stalingrad, the great sharpshooter Major Konig is brought in to hunt Vassili down.  If Vassili is eliminated, the Fuhrer reasons, the people's hope will also perish.  What kind of a guy is Konig?  Let me paint you a picture.  If he and I were friends, and I bitched to him about my pimple, this is what he would do.  He'd calmly say, "Tedrich, stand against this wall."  Then, he would march 50 yards away from me, turn, whip out his rifle, take aim, and shoot the zit right off my schnozzle.

"Tedrich, did you say you had another one on your back?"

"Uh, no, Koney.  N-n-no, thank you."

Enemy at the Gates surprised me.  Going into it, I had more than one person tell me the lack of accents would get in the way of my enjoyment of the picture.  You see, none of the principal actors even attempts a German or Russian accent in the film.  Not even Bob Hoskins, who portrays Nikita Khrushchev, takes a stab at one.  This is obviously a conscious choice on the part of all concerned, and I think ultimately a wise one.  There is nothing more annoying than actors of varying degrees of talent, laboring to pull off consistent accents.  I look at it this way.  The dialogue in Enemy at the Gates is never meant to be said in English.  You just have to imagine that the characters in the film are actually talking to each other in their native tongues, and that what we're hearing is a translation, and you'll be fine.

Another complaint I heard prior to my screening was that the romance in the film was going to annoy me.  Vassili falls in love with a female Russian soldier named Tania (Rachel Weisz), whose parents have been murdered by the Nazis.  I found the romance to be a welcome breather from the almost constantly bleak visuals that Annaud and director of photography Robert Fraisse bombarded me with.  Vassili is not some lone-wolf career sniper.  He is just a foot soldier who lucked into becoming a propaganda-created hero.  Yes, he is a Hell of a shot.  But he is not like the ice-cold, almost emotionless veteran killer that Konig is.

Now, here is what DID annoy me.  I really didn't like the decision to make the film's romance a love triangle in which Danilov also pines for Tania in scene after scene.  Danilov has the hots for Tania, but she only has sniper eyes for Vassili.  As played by Fiennes, Danilov is the least interesting character in the picture.  It's obvious right from the get-go that he has NO shot with Tania, so his repeated scenes of silent longing and angst just take time away from other, more compelling plot threads.

One other nitpick, and I'll stop.  Vassili and Konig have four encounters throughout the picture.  The first three are tremendously suspenseful.  Konig is the hunter, and Vassili is the prey.  If Vassili so much as shows one inch of his body in the sniper's scope, the expert Konig will take him out.

But then the fourth and final encounter comes.  It's the one where clearly one of the two is going to bite it.  I, of course, will not reveal the outcome.  But I will say, I was somewhat let down.  The final encounter is the least clever and least suspenseful of the four.  Instead of a slam-bang ending, Enemy at the Gates ends with something of a whimper.

But so much of what comes before it is nothing short of spectacular. The film is never more daring than in those agonizingly quiet moments when one sniper is waiting for the other.  More than anything, Annaud, Law, and Harris get the eyes of the sniper just right.  The intensity of his stare.  The precision of his aim.  The job of the sniper is among the toughest in the war, Vassili tells Tania at one point.  The sniper can see who he is shooting every time.  Through his scope, he can tell if his quarry shaved that morning.  He can tell what his rank is and whether or not he wears a wedding ring.

And, I suspect, he can even see if he has a pimple on his snoot from one too many late-night Hershey bars.

Schmuck.  It's a German word meaning "one who doesn't know how good he has it."

You can look it up.