Enemy at the Gates (2001)

There's French, British, German, and Irish production money invested in the European battlefield pic Enemy at the Gates, and why not: On a bookstore shelf, the spine of this muddy epic would read Saving Private Ryan for Dummies: A World War II Movie for the Rest of Us. It's not audience-friendly, of course, to pin Greatest Generation medals on the lapels of soldiers who fought for the triumph of Nazis, and it's iffy to cheer for Russians, whose status changed from allies to Commies. But the American story has been pretty thoroughly co-opted in recent years by Spielberg, Hanks, Tom Brokaw, et al., so what's a showman with an eye towards the international market to do?

French filmmaker Jean-Jacques Annaud, who most recently skirted pesky fascism in Seven Years in Tibet, hit on an interesting solution: His Enemy at the Gates, cowritten with Alain Godard, is a war movie in which the Nazi-dom of the Germans and the Commie-dom of the Russians is barely noted — a World War II movie deracinated from history and politics. (Not enough, apparently, for local residents who sat glumly through this picture when it was the inexplicable selection to open last month's Berlin Film Festival.)

Enemy acknowledges the cinematic importance of hideous bullet wounds, smashed bodies, and graphic images of death — Ryan has forever raised the stakes on depicting the suffering of grunts — but at its dumbly effective romantic heart, the movie is a simplified ''happy'' hero's story, based on the fame of a real Russian army recruit, Vassili Zaitsev, and immeasurably amped by the grubby beauty of Jude Law in the role.

Zaitsev was indeed an actual national hero, a shepherd from the Urals whose hunting skills were put to patriotic use during the cataclysmic Battle of Stalingrad. In 1942 and 1943, his bull's-eye aim helped rally the desperate, decimated Red Army and demoralize the Nazis who had until then been unstoppable. And Zaitsev is indeed alleged to have faced a showdown with an equally talented Nazi shooter, here turned into German nobleman Major Konig (Ed Harris, playing the part with precisely the kind of modulated rectitude he had no use for in portraying Jackson Pollock). For that matter, Zaitsev is said to have had a love affair with a female soldier, here named Tania and played by Rachel Weisz.

But surely not so schmaltzily. Not backed by an unrelentingly swelling score meted out by Titanic music composer James Horner; not with battles invoking Gladiator; Gone With the Wind, and paintings by J.M.W. Turner; and not with such panoply staged for the sake of filling the frame. The entire Battle of Stalingrad, in which some 800,000 Axis troops and over a million Soviet soldiers died, ultimately, comes down to a class struggle between two handsome men with rifles?