Valkyrie

I suppose, in addition to his other kooky hobbies, we can now anoint Tom Cruise the unofficial head of the Nazi Anti-Defamation League.   His new movie, “Valkyrie,”  strives to convince us that not every Nazi was as evil as Adolf Hitler.   In fact, some of them fought for Truth and Justice by risking, and ultimately losing, their lives in an attempt to assassinate  Der Fuhrer.  They were good guys, really, they just found themselves on the wrong side of a terrible conflict. 

It might be nice to believe that.  Surely your average Nazi was not the sadistic monster you find in the movies.   And we all know about good Germans; we were all made to read “The Diary of Anne Frank” in middle school.   Come to think of it, perhaps Singer should’ve made a movie about Dietrich Boenhoeffer, the German pastor and theologian who was also part of Operation Valkyrie, but had opposed Nazism from the beginning and spent most of the war years smuggling Jews into Switzerland.   Instead, “Valkyrie” focuses on Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise,) and a number of high-ranking generals and politicians within the Nazi party.    Stauffenberg planted the bomb in the Wolf’s Lair, and the others orchestrated the coup after it went off.   To my eye, they don’t appear noble and heroic, or all that interested in Truth and Justice.   They look like political opportunists.   After five years of fighting with and for Hitler (you don’t get to be a colonel–much less a general– through conscientious objection, after all) they saw the end of the war approaching, and found themselves on the wrong side.  The coup was their attempt to do something about it.   That’s not heroic, that’s pragmatic.   And kind of ugly. 

The funny thing is, as much as “Valkyrie” talks these men up as heroes, it delivers them as politicians, and sometimes as cowards.  I’m not a historian, and I knew very little about the Operation Valkyrie (aside from how it turned out) going in to the movie.   If Singer had wanted to convince me Colonel Stauffenberg and his associates really were heroes, I think he could have.  He’s a competent director.  So why do they come across as rats trying to desert a sinking ship?   Almost all of the tension in “Valkyrie” is generated by hesitation and overcalculation.  Stauffenberg alone acts as a soldier completely committed to the mission; the rest are only committed to their own survival –- and, if possible, political advancement.

The overall tone of “Valkyrie” is pretty heavy and not a little bit suffocating.   These men find themselves between a rock and a hard place; it’s clear the Allies are going to win the war, but Hitler remains a force to be reckoned with.   There is a lot of frustration, fear and desperation onscreen; coupled with the fact that we know, going in, that the plot fails, Singer has a lot to overcome to make this a “fun” movie experience.    He succeeds in spots, managing to generate the kind of fast-paced and tense sequences you’d find in a heist film.   Unfortunately, the breathlessness dissipates too quickly, and we’re back to frustration and calculation.

“Valkyrie” is supposed to be about good men trapped in a bad government: instead it feels, at times, like a good movie trapped in a bad production. Ignore the trailers and cut off the first and last ten minutes of voiceover and montage, and it’s a strikingly different movie.  There’s material here – and acting chops (Bill Nighy, Eddie Izzard, Tom Wilkinson, Kenneth Branagh) – to pull off a film about a group of decidedly unheroic men, and the desperate actions they took in a desperate hour.   The kind of movie that dares you to like its characters despite their flaws, their histories, and their failings, and dares to ask you what you would do in their place.    “Valkyrie” hints at these notes, but backs away from them when the money’s down.   It asks us to see a few Nazi officers and politicians as heroes; maybe Singer though it would be too much to ask us to see them as ordinary men.   

Recommended

• If you’re dying to see Tom Cruise with an eye patch (and a missing hand.) 
• If you’re a World War II buff (though I don’t know how accurate this is.)
• If you love conspiracy theories, assassination plots, and movies about them (even if they go awry in the end.