ENEMY AT THE GATES

Jeffrey Gates

The Berlin Film Festival's opening-night curse has not been lifted. Two years ago it was Aimée & Jaguar, a decent melodrama about lesbians in World War II that made barely a dent in the US. How about an English-language film by Wim Wenders? Nope, last year's intriguing The Million Dollar Hotel has yet to appear here. And last month's Berlin opener, Jean-Jacques Annaud's Enemy at the Gates, isn't going to reverse the trend. It's the Battle of Stalingrad as staged by Masterpiece Theatre.

For starters, this film is in English. That might sound like a plus, but listening to Germans and Russians (whose languages could not be more different) converse in the Queen's English makes you wonder what they're fighting over. Right from the start, an Alistair Cooke-like voiceover describes Stalingrad as "a city on the Volga where the fate of the world is being decided" -- as if this were an ESPN pre-game show. The player clichés include a beautiful Russian Jewess named Tania (Rachel Weisz) who fights alongside the men and a double-agent kid named Sacha (Gabriel Marshall-Thomson) who's a dead ringer for the boy in the Warsaw Ghetto photograph. The plot has the Davy Crockett-like sharpshooter Vassili (Jude Law) taking on his German counterpart Major König (Ed Harris) while all Stalingrad watches breathlessly, unmindful of the half a million or so who are dying. Meanwhile Danilov (Joseph Fiennes) is making Vassili a newspaper legend as Annaud pays ludicrous tribute to The Front Page; and both men are falling for Tania. Other anomalies include the appearance of Nikita Khrushchev (Bob Hoskins), whose name no one can pronounce correctly, and John Williams's theme from Schindler's List, which permeates the film even though the score is credited to James Horner. Hitler should have given Stalingrad a pass -- and that's your cue for this overblown movie.