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Eastern Affront

Icemen at War: A chilly scene from "Stalingrad"

'Stalingrad' is too balanced in portrait of WWII battle

By Richard von Busack

One of the most decisive battles in history is the two-year-long fight at Stalingrad, 1942-44. It was the place where Hitler's hopes of world domination were stalled by the Red Army of the U.S.S.R. By the time it was over, 1.5 million people had been killed or injured. By contrast, the movie Stalingrad is necessarily less epic.

A few interesting skirmishes highlight Stalingrad, among them a skirmish with your sense of disbelief when the film implies that the Germans were the injured party and were not such bad fellows after all--they even try to rescue a little boy who is basically a Russian version of comics kid Dondi.

With some diversions, Stalingrad follows two figures: Hans (Thomas Kreischmann), your basic Prussian officer; and Rollo (Jochen Nickel), a younger, tougher and more whiskery plebeian out for the Iron Cross. They meet on a troop train on their way to the front, boasting of the farms that will be theirs from the conquest of Russia.

Through the window out on the steppes, we see Russian slave laborers hoeing the fields, and the movie delivers a quick chill at the thought how matters might have worked out differently. Stalingrad sometimes sustains, but mostly loses, that chill in set piece after set piece: a battle in a wrecked factory; a suspenseful scene of a human tank trap made of a prison battalion; and a hellish slaughterhouse of a military hospital.

The last, a more graphic and ghastly version of the train station set in Gone With the Wind, is evocative, but there's no real intimacy to match the scale.

The characters tend to blur into one gunshot victim after another. The necessary female interest is a beautiful Russian captive (Dava Vavrova) who becomes friends with Hans after he rescues her from certain rape.

There might have been young Russian boys befriended by Nazi soldiers; there might have been Russian women saved from rape by them as well. If you've ever done any reading about war, what strikes you the most is how the most extraordinary events become commonplace.

Still, the even more unlikely attempt at rehabilitation of an invading army is the most unlikely aspect of Stalingrad, and there's a sense of doom all over this literal and mostly humorless movie that makes it depressing from the beginning.

Stalingrad is the work of a German company with German stars, and maybe the film's most insoluble problem is this German perspective. It's probably only bearable to watch a movie about Stalingrad if you feel that there was something at stake. The futility of war is all very well and good, but no matter what you think of Stalin, the unparalleled bloodletting did serve to drive out of the Russian homeland something worse than even their own government.

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Stalingrad (Unrated; 135 min.), directed by Joseph Vilsmaier, written by Vilsmaier, Jurhen Buscher and Johannes Heide, photographed by Vilsmaier and starring Thomas Kreischmann and Jochen Nickel.


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