My first impression of Valkyrie — starring, as everyone
knows, Tom Cruise as Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg — is how
unexpectedly not-awful it was. It was not only the presence in it
of Mr. Cruise which led me to expect it to be awful, though that
would have been enough by itself, but also its troubled
production history, including a suspicious reluctance of the
producers to release it for some months after it was completed.
Unfortunately, not-awful isn’t the same as good. Or even not bad.
Wisely, I think, the writer and the director, Christopher
McQuarrie and Bryan Singer respectively, avoid anything that
might suggest depth or thoughtfulness. Instead, they make a
straightforward, tick-tock action thriller out of it, like an
episode of 24. Will the plot to kill Hitler and so to stop the
appalling carnage of the Second World War in mid-1944 succeed? It
must be exciting for the large part of the intended audience who,
so the film-makers appear to be betting, don’t know the answer to
that question already.
Messrs. McQuarrie and Singer have worked together before on
X-Men and The Usual Suspects, and
Valkyrie has some of the slick, surface brilliance and
absence of depth of the superhero movie, as well as the obscure
plotting of the sub-standard thriller. But in the end — or even
in the beginning — the movie can’t quite get away from the
obtrusive absence of what has been left out, which is the natural
drama of the situation as the real-life people it is representing
would have experienced it. Here, for example, it is treated as a
matter of course for a serving officer of the Wehrmacht to betray
his oath to Hitler and the Reich because for us, of course, there
is no problem about such a betrayal. We can take the evil of
Hitler and the Nazis for granted. A thousand movies, perhaps
more, have made the solid gold Nazi wickedness we all depend on
bankable in any cultural emporium on earth without any tedious
exposition or moral debate. The real life Claus von Stauffenberg
could not have relied upon it the way Mr. Cruise does.
Nor, for that matter, could any of the large number of his fellow
high-ranking officers here represented as having joined in his
plot against the Führer. The movie makes no effort to take their
point of view, let alone that of the officers, few though they be
on this showing, who remain loyal. We see next to nothing of the
inward struggles of men bred up to honor who plot an act of what
they themselves calmly call treason. No one struggles with the
betrayal or the moral or honorable questions it must have raised
for his historical counterpart. Instead, everyone with more than
a minute or two of screen-time except for Hitler himself (David
Bamber), a shadowy Goebbels (Harvey Friedman) and Major Otto
Remer (Thomas Kretschmann) of the Wachregiment Berlin or home
guard, who is called in to crush the coup attempt, takes the
easy, post-war view that Hitler is a monster who has to be
stopped. We can’t help thinking that maybe they should have
thought of that a bit sooner.
Yet, as I may have mentioned before in a movie review or two, my
Golden Rule of reviewing is that you shouldn’t criticize a movie
— or anything else for that matter — for what it isn’t but only
for what it is. They might have made a better movie if they had
tried to add in some element of moral drama, but then they might
have really screwed it up, too. Some have
praised the movie for reminding us that not all Germans were
Nazis — or, as the film itself puts it, “We have to show the
world that not all of us were like him,” meaning Hitler.
Others have pointed out that the movies were making this
point almost as soon as the war was over and that even during the
war people in the allied countries didn’t believe that all
Germans were like him. I myself cannot see any broader
significance to the film, and thought it was at its worst when it
tried to reach for such significance.
At one point, for instance, one of Stauffenberg’s
co-conspirators, Major-General Henning von Tresckow (Kenneth
Branagh), says to him: “God promised Abraham that he would not
destroy Sodom if he could find just ten righteous men. I have a
feeling that in Germany, it may come down to one.” Oh, I get it!
Tomk’s the beautiful victim-hero, the one righteous man — and
who’s counting the efforts of Tresckow himself and the other
conspirators who outrank him? — who is set up to be martyred for
his people and, indeed, all mankind. The Christ-conceit is
another contribution, along with the chiseled profile, the snazzy
German uniform and the eyepatch — although an historically
accurate one — of the celebrity star.
As a result the movie becomes way too obviously a vehicle for Tom
Cruise to look cool in. Still, on the positive side, even though
I did know how the plot to kill Hitler came out — Spoiler Alert!
It failed — I found myself briefly caught up in the excitement
of its moment-to-moment working out. That has to be worth
something, as do fine performances by Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson
and Terence Stamp as the generals Olbricht, Fromm and Beck,
respectively — even if it means taking Tom Cruise seriously in
the role of one of 20th-century history’s iconic figures and a
moral exemplum. That’s why they call it a willing suspension of
disbelief, I believe.
