Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Valkyrie

by Bob Clark

Bryan Singer’s tense, workmanlike World War II thriller Valkyrie does an unlikely, commendable job of portraying the failed German Resistance plot of July 20, 1944 as realistically as possible while milking as much suspense from the real-life events as possible without exploiting them. Sacrificing much of his usually slick cinematic style, most immediately noticeable in his switch from his standard 2:35.1 aspect ratio for the less aesthetically ambitious 1:85.1, Singer sticks to a strict discipline of covering events, action and exposition with few flourishes of artificially fancy camerawork, focusing on delivering with maximum efficiency the details of a conspiracy of high-ranked Nazi military officers in their bid to assassinate Adolf Hitler and install an Allies-friendly regime.

Working closely with old collaborators Christopher McQuarie, Newton Thomas Sigel and John Ottman, Singer delivers a movie that plays on all the strengths of his past works and suffering few of their setbacks. Still, that’s not what matters to most reviewers or audience members. So far, the majority of the media’s coverage of Valkyrie has concerned itself with the casting of Hollywood mainstay Tom Cruise as Colonel Claus von Strauffenberg, the plot’s leading figure and an iconic hero of German history.

Far from embarrassing himself with one of his ordinarily showy, excessively self-confident performances, Cruise does a fine job of sinking into the film’s cast, withholding his usual easy charm in the same way that Singer restrains his own directorial habits. The rest of the ensemble cast fills out the story with a tight network of performances, spearheaded by an impressive selection of largely British actors both familiar (Kenneth Branagh, Terrence Stamp and Tom Wilkinson, to name a few) and lesser known (among them David Schofield, Kevin McNally, and an especially entertaining Christian Berkel).

Furthermore, Singer’s decision to let the actors use with their own accents instead of imposing false German speech patterns upon them lets everything play as natural as possible, an important consideration when the main priority is generating suspense based on the film’s action, rather than its dialects. Still, it’s a decision that doesn’t slide along without any consequences, chief among them being the question of national identity-- the figures played the film’s actors might be German, but the only ones who feel authentically, if subtly German are the ones filling the roles of Nazi figureheads like Hitler and Goebbels.

There’s a precedence for this in plenty of war-thrillers from the WWII era in Hollywood, particularly in the films of German expatriate Fritz Lang, whose Bertolt Brecht scripted Hangmen Also Die featured a similar strategy in dialects-- pushing goosestepping Gestapo villains into thick, teuctonic accents and easing downtrodden, rebellious Czechs into familiar, American ones. Singer’s overall cinematic vision favors the Langian approach in general, and with good reason-- by letting his film’s heroes sound more like the members of its target audience, filmgoers have an easier experience identifying with the protagonists.

Admittedly, one can’t help but wonder if the film might’ve benefited from the extra-authenticity of language, not to mention whether it was really necessary to go so far in order to obtain an audience’s sympathy. After all, could there be any more universal a goal, in the movies or otherwise, than wanting to kill Hitler? Still, for a film whose conclusion is already well known before the first reel even begins, Valkyrie accomplishes a feat made possible in only the best of historical dramas-- suspension not only of disbelief, but actual suspense, itself. It says a lot that Singer and his team are able to make you forget, for however brief moments, that the July 20 plot didn’t succeed in assassinating Hitler, and in so doing invites you to appreciate just how close they all came, in the first place.

For a director whose last recent efforts have exclusively concerned themselves with the special-effects driven spectacle of mutants and super-powered newspaper reporters, it’s heartening to witness the far more marvelous heroics of good men fighting against the most villainous regime in all of history. If Superman made you believe a man can fly, then Valkyrie does something that much better-- it makes you believe a Fuhrer can die.