Flat characters taint ‘Enemy at the Gates’

In theaters

“ENEMY AT THE GATES.” Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud. Written by Annaud and Alain Godard. 131 minutes. Rated R.

Jean-Jacques Annaud’s great-looking World War II movie, “Enemy at the Gates,” is so uninterested in its characters, it should have been called “Enigma at the Gates.”

Working from a script he co-wrote with Alain Godard, Annaud offers audiences a sometimes harrowing depiction of the Battle of Stalingrad. But since he’s more interested in capturing the guts and glitz of war than he is in keeping his characters out of the murky trenches of stereotype, his film ultimately lacks the soul and narrative pull it needed to succeed.

“Enemy at the Gates” comes eight years after Joseph Vilsmaier’s “Stalingrad,” three years after Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” two years after Max Farberbock’s “Aimee and Jaguar,” and two months before Michael Bay’s “Pearl Harbor.” If it serves as a continuation of pop culture’s enduring interest in the second great war, don’t expect it to collect any medals for doing so.

The film loosely follows the real-life story of Vassili Zaitsev (Jude Law), a crack shot shepherd from the Ural Mountains who’s sent to the frontlines of Stalingrad, somehow survives a ferocious battle against German troops, and then meets – atop a pile of rotting corpses – the Russian political officer who will forever change his life.

On orders from Nikita Kruschev (Bob Hoskins), the officer, Danilov (Joseph Fiennes), is in need of a hero who will inspire and give hope to the exhausted Russian troops. Choosing Vassili, Danilov turns the man’s unprecedented marksmanship and bravery into fodder for front-page news and radio propaganda.

Realizing that it’s just this sort of inspiration that can turn the tide of a war, the Germans send in their own sniper (Ed Harris) to eliminate Vassili. The result is a film less interested in the Battle of Stalingrad than it is in becoming a game of cat-and-mouse between two gifted marksmen we never come to know.

That’s just the film’s problem – we never know who its characters are. As good as the performances are, the script is strangely aloof and the actors aren’t able to personalize any of it. Harris’ character in particular remains a frustrating, one-dimensional enigma straight to the end.

Worse are the liberties Annaud has taken to tell his story, which becomes more myth than truth. Are we to believe that it was Vassili alone who cost Germany the war? Further, it’s been documented that Vassili had a romance at Stalingrad with a female solider (played here by Rachel Weisz as Tania), but nowhere has it been documented that that romance evolved into the fierce romantic triangle Annaud imagines between Vassili, Danilov and Tania.

I won’t reveal the ending, but it’s outlandish, a romanticized re-envisioning of history that pours on the sap with the help of James Horner’s purple score. But the ending isn’t what truly kills the film. That happens long before thanks to its bomb of a script.

Grade: C-

On Video and DVD

“REMEMBER THE TITANS.” Directed by Boaz Yakin. Written by Gregory Allen Howard. 113 minutes. PG.

Disney has a new cartoon in video stores. It’s called “Remember the Titans,” a film whose true story has been ruthlessly squeezed into – and distilled by – that famous Disney formula.

Apparently, if one works hard enough – as director Boaz Yakin and his screenwriter Gregory Allen Howard have – even a story about racism in high school football during the early 1970s can be applied to that formula.

My position is this: If you’re going to play the race card to make some serious money at the box office, you’d better lose the feel-good clutter and the swelling violins and be prepared to tackle the subject seriously. Otherwise, all you’ve done is to create a film that insults those who fought against racism and discrimination in the past, certainly those who fought against it during the period your film is set – and those who are fighting against it now.

“Titans” doesn’t suffer from bad performances – Denzel Washington, its star, is fine as Herman Boone, a black man brought in to coach a newly integrated team. It just suffers from a wealth of bad decisions. It’s one of those movies that dares to use a ridiculous gimmick to resolve the racial tension and ongoing conflict in a recently desegregated town.

In this case, that gimmick is the film’s insistence on allowing the T. C. Williams High School football team to burst into sudden bouts of song whenever the going gets rough.

What’s one to do when one’s rejected on the basis of one’s skin color? Grab your buddies and sing “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”! What’s one to do when the white boys and black boys are about to go at each other’s throats in the locker room? Just break into song and it’ll all be okay!

It’s just this sort of oversimplification and cheesy theatrics that I resent in movies such as this. “Remember the Titans” wants to make audiences believe it’s tackling race and the issues that surround it, but it doesn’t. What’s closer to the truth is that Yakin was hoping to shoot for Oscar gold on the coattails of race and racial discrimination during a time when our country is still coming to terms with it.

Grade: D

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays in Style, Thursdays in the scene, Tuesdays on “NEWS CENTER at 5” and Thursdays on “NEWS CENTER at 5:30” on WLBZ-2 and WCSH-6.