‘Enemy at the Gate’: ideal for love, drama and war
When I was a kid, we use to play army, but for me to illustrate this properly some facts need to be understood. I grew up in a very large family. It was so big that our kitchen was lovingly referred to as “the mess hall,” and the room I grew up in had two sets of bunk beds, one of them a trundle. Also, I grew up in a subdivision, so it was not hard to find extra kids to play whenever we wanted to put together a game. The games of army usually consisted of a lot of gun-like sounds and a lot people either screaming out in imaginary death for a hundred seconds before they came back to life, or people yelling out from the other lines, “Hey! I got you, you’re dead!” This is not what ” Enemy at the Gate” is like, however. The movie begins with Vassili Zaitsev, a Russian peasant boy learning how to hunt wolves from his grandfather. It then jumps to 1942, where he again is hunting, but the enemy is the German Third Reich, where a poorly equipped and demoralized Russian army is trying to hold Stalingrad from the Nazis.
Vassili (Jude Law) meets Danilov (Joseph Fiennes), a political officer for the Russian army who is impressed by Vassili’s abilities as a sniper. Danilov convinces Nikita Khrushchev (Bob Hoskins), a commissar, to let him write about Vassili, making him a national hero in an attempt to boost the nation’s war effort.
The plan works, and the Germans bring in a legendary sniper instructor, Major Koenig (Ed Harris) to track down Vassili and kill him. Within the plot, both Vassili and Danilov fall for Tania (Rachel Weisz), a fellow soldier with a fearless heart and a pretty face, and are forced to deal with a difficult obstacle on their already strained relationship as the battle for Stalingrad wages on. This movie has wonderful battle sequences and deep emotional impact, but more importantly it brings up the point that people must deal with human emotions, love, hate, envy,and joy even in the midst of the death and obliteration that boils in the belly of war. The acting is good from all the lead characters, but the relationship between Vassili and Danilov is especially rich. Both Jude Law (“The Talented Mr. Ripley” ) and Joseph Fiennes (“Shakespeare in Love” ) capture the many moods of war, from friendship to jealousy, exquisitely. Strong performances by Ed Harris
(” The Truman Show”) and Rachel Weisz (“The Mummy”) round out the story with grace, passion and consistency. Beyond the battle scenes, the more intimate parts of the movie seem to be some of the strongest points of the film. The love that formed between Vassili and Tania, becomes so strong at one part of the film that they breakdown and make love in the army barracks with soldiers sleeping on both sides of them. I must admit this was a little uncomfortable to watch, but showed the extreme situations that people fighting a war must go through in order to have any small amount of normalcy in their life. I thought “Enemy at the Gate” was captivating, well made and a thought provoking story.
If you enjoy love stories, dramas and war movies, I would definitely recommend it. If you don’t, come by and see me and I’ll just make some shooting sounds and maybe do a dive roll onto the grass for you.