There are no discernibly nasty Nazis in Valkyrie, though Hitler and Goebbels skulk about in a few scenes, shooting dark, ominous looks at the heroic German Army officer played by Tom Cruise. Perhaps they’re wondering what this Hollywood megastar is doing in their midst, a sentiment that you may come to share while watching Cruise — who gives a fine, typically energetic performance in a film that requires nothing more of him than a profile and vigor — strut about as one of history’s more enigmatic players.
That enigma was Claus von Stauffenberg, a count and a colonel who, though he lost one eye, an entire hand and several fingers while fighting on behalf of the Reich, made several attempts to assassinate Hitler and seize control of the government. At the core of Stauffenberg’s spectacularly ambitious plot was Valkyrie, Hitler’s plan for the mobilization of the home army that Stauffenberg hoped to hijack in order to quash the SS and its leaders. It didn’t work, of course, for complicated reasons, though also because by 1944, as William L. Shirer bluntly puts it in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the conspirators were “terribly late.”
You don’t learn how belated the coup d’etat was in Valkyrie, which might matter if this big-ticket production with Cruise in an eye patch and shiny, shiny boots had something to do with reality. But the director, Bryan Singer (of the X-Men franchise), and the writers, Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander, aren’t interested in delivering a history lesson. Slick, facile entertainment is the name of the game here, as it is in all Singer’s films, including Apt Pupil (about a Nazi war criminal and the American boy next door who outs him) and The Usual Suspects, an intricately plotted story with men and guns, secrets and shadows that McQuarrie wrote. The secrets have already begun swirling by the time Valkyrie opens with Stauffenberg, stationed in North Africa, bitterly recording his opposition to Hitler in a diary right before losing various body parts to the war. After his convalescence he meets Major General Henning von Tresckow (Kenneth Branagh), who, sometime earlier, tries to blow up Hitler with a bomb hidden in bottles of French liqueur. (Russian vodka might have been more effective.) Stauffenberg soon joins the conspiratorial party that includes other British class acts brandishing high military rank and speaking in lightly accented or unaccented English: Bill Nighy as General Friedrich Olbricht, Tom Wilkinson as General Friedrich Fromm, Terence Stamp as General Ludwig Beck and Eddie Izzard as General Erich Fellgiebel.
Most of the crucial rebellious officers are played by British actors, while some of the Nazi diehards are played by Germans, which wouldn’t be worth mentioning if this cacophony of accents weren’t so distracting. But, as with the casting of Cruise, whose German voice-over quickly eases into English, this international acting community invokes an earlier studio age, when Peter Lorre and Claude Rains delivered their lines in exotically flavored English and everyone pretended that Rick’s Cafe really was located in Casablanca and not on a back lot. If Cruise doesn’t work in Valkyrie, it’s partly because he’s too modern, too American and way too Tom Cruise to make sense in the role, but also because what passes for movie realism keeps changing, sometimes faster than even a star can change his brand.
Though Singer’s old-fashioned movie habits, his attention to the gloss, gleam and glamour of the image, can be agreeably pleasurable, he tends to gild every lily. Hitler (David Bamber) doesn’t need spooky music or low camera angles to be villainous: he just has to show up. Singer’s fondness for exaggeration can even undercut his strongest scenes, as when Stauffenberg visits Hitler to secure approval for the rewritten Valkyrie plan. If implemented, the plan will bring down the Fuhrer who, for his part, seems intent on bringing down the house with leers and popping eyeballs. Singer appears to have taken cues here from Black Book, Paul Verhoeven’s World War II romp, but he’s too serious to make such vaudeville work.
Stauffenberg, who hated Hitler but worshipped the Reich, sacrificed himself on the dual altar of nationalism and militarism, which makes him a more ambiguous figure than the one drawn in Valkyrie. He’s a complex character, too complex for this film, which like many stories of this type, transforms World War II into a boy’s adventure with dashing heroes, miles of black leather and crane shots of German troops in lockstep formation. It’s a war that offers moral absolutes (Nazis are evil) and narratives (Nazis are evil and should die) that seem easier to grasp than any current conflict. Truly, World War II has become the moviemaker’s gift that keeps on giving, whether you want it to or not.
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