VALKYRIE: TENSION DIFFUSED
June 5th 2009 06:37
Tom Cruise as Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg in Valkyrie.
It’s hard to envy a filmmaker involved in the task of rendering a war film without any action and an assassination attempt to which virtually every member of the audience knows the outcome. On the flip side, however, if anybody could pull it off you’d think it would be the Usual Suspects double team of director Bryan Singer and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie.
In fact, Valkyrie is a little like a Suspects reunion, with editor/composer John Ottman and regular Singer collaborator, cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, also along for the ride. Indeed, it’s a production team with an intimidating pedigree so you’d be forgiven for expecting great things from this rendering of the final failed inside attempt on Adolf Hitler’s life.
It’s the summer of 1944 and the Third Reich is being squeezed from both sides. The Germans are beating a bloody retreat from the Russians in the east and the rest of the Allies in the west. But while Hitler remains defiant of the increasing odds stacked against his regime, a group of high-ranking generals are beginning a plot to depose the dictator and sign a truce with the allies, thus saving both Europe from destruction and Germany from humiliation. Masterminded by the disfigured Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise), it’s a daring plan, which, besides the disposal of the Fuhrer, also calls for a bold trick to be played against the SS, setting them up as being responsible for the assassination and therefore allowing the colonel and his cabal of collaborators to seize power.
It’s these machinations of the plan that McQuarrie and fellow screenwriter Nathan Alexander have focussed on with their script for Valkyrie. There’s a dizzying sequence of scenes as plans are drawn out, collaborators brought onboard, and the assassination and subsequent maneuvering in Berlin are borne out. It’s interesting stuff and in sync with the work of Singer and Ottman, Valkyrie's flair possesses a remarkable resemblance to that of The Usual Suspects.
But all this careful choreography comes at the steep cost of character development. The plan was so complex and called for the involvement of so many high-ranking officers that hardly any of them are fleshed out in even the slightest. Some characters are even sacrificed for the sake of embellishing Stauffenberg’s part in the scheme, such as Bill Nighy’s ridiculously timid General Olbricht, who in real life was awarded the Iron Cross for his bravery on the battle field. Stauffenberg is the only character to be given any real context, and even then it’s the broadest of brushstrokes. The result is a large bunch of characters that you don’t really care about, and as the steam train of scenes regarding the assassination gets underway, the audience is left at the platform, strangely disconnected from the onscreen events.
Bill Nighy as a timid take on General Olbricht and the excellent Christian Berkel as Colonel Mertz von Quirnheim in Valkyrie.
It’s a shame, because there’s a lot to admire about Valkyrie. The cinematography is undoubtedly slick and it’s good to see Singer’s nose for tension being used to good effect in certain scenes, such as a great moment when Stauffenberg, under pressure to load the primed explosives into his satchel, struggles frustratingly with his one good arm to keep the bag from falling to the floor. The players too do well with their underwritten parts, even if some of the casting is slightly haywire. Cruise’s American accent is the main culprit here, making him stick out among the British and European performers; it’s a particular disappointment, seeing as the ‘A-list’er is otherwise very good as Stauffenberg, carefully modulating his performance that it all but totally eliminates the actor’s larger than life off-screen persona.
Indeed, there are a number of elements that make Valkyrie a very watchable piece of celluloid, but the filmmakers haven’t done enough to add grit to a story to which everybody knows the outcome. To do that would have required the drilling down into the personalities of the main players of the assassination, providing more information on both their motivations and their reactions to the pressure placed upon them throughout the crisis. Valkyrie’s failure to do this ultimately leaves the film limp, an endlessly interesting story left almost completely unexciting by its neglect for the personalities of the brave people upon which its based.
Check out the trailer for Valkyrie below:
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Mountain Fog
Comment by Michelle Sweeney
Competition Queen
Comment by Matt Shea
20/20 Filmsight
Comment by MVD
I suppose if we're dealing with American English, better Cruise then, say, Billy Bob Thornton.
Comment by Matt Shea
20/20 Filmsight