We know the rough shape of modern history, but as Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie proves, the delight is in the details. Tom Cruise plays a German officer at the forefront of a conspiracy of soldiers and civic leaders to kill Adolph Hitler and take back control of Germany at the height of World War II in 1943-44. We know that Cruise’s Colonel von Stauffenberg did not succeed, that Hitler committed suicide in 1945 as American and Russian tanks closed on Berlin; what Valkyrie does is pulls tension, suspense and drama out of the facts we don’t know. How many German officers tried to kill Hitler? What was their plan? How many times did they try? What went wrong? And what did it cost?
Cruise’s von Stauffenberg — whose German turns to English in the opening scenes, in a trick lifted from The Hunt for Red October — is a German officer with contempt for the German leadership: "Hitler is not only the arch-enemy of the entire world, but the arch-enemy of Germany. …" Wounded in battle, von Stauffenberg is sent to Berlin for a job at the Defense Ministry, where he’s soon recruited into a secret group of military men, political leaders and like-minded individuals who want to stop Hitler. Discovery means death; failure means Germany’s destruction and shame and more atrocities in the name of madness. It’s not much of a choice.
The plot von Stauffenberg joins has two parts; not only killing Hitler, but also seizing control of Germany back from the Nazi party. Neither is going to be easy, and von Stauffenberg’s pivotal to both — first re-writing the contingency plan, code-named ‘Valkyrie,’ that will fill Berlin with troops the conspiracy can control and then getting within killing distance of the most protected man in Europe. … Cruise is actually good here — tough but not superhuman, charming but not cocky. Cruise’s characters often boil down to a type — the man who’s sure he’s sure — and Cruise not only gives us that kind of confidence in Valkyrie but also the cracks and flaws in it.
Director Bryan Singer leapt from gritty indies like The Usual Suspects to big-screen fantasies like X-Men and Superman Returns; both sides of his career come into play in Valkyrie, with tension and scares in the scenes of people talking and intelligence and awareness in the scenes of people in action. Singer’s a great technician — the sequence where von Stauffenberg takes the best possible shot at killing Hitler is excruciating — but he also knows when to just tell the story cleanly and clearly. Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander’s script mixes the fake with the factual to nice effect, and cinematographer Thomas Newton Siegel crafts great, tense thrilling visuals whether he’s shooting a quiet conversation loaded with threats or a chaotic city jammed with soldiers. (Ironically, if any person makes Valkyrie‘s Berlin scenes look as good as they do, it’s Albert Speer — Hitler’s master architect, who designed many of the buildings Valkyrie uses as real locations or re-creates for the film to striking effect.)
And the action is not only roughly historically accurate but also actually exciting; as a bomb-maker explains that " … Any problem on Earth can be solved with the application of enough plastic explosive …." we get a little education in bomb-making. Later, as von Stauffenberg tries to do the delicate work of bomb-setting with war-wounded hands, we enjoy the suspense even more because we’ve been told what we need to know early and well and we understand what’s going wrong. The supporting cast is great — including Kenneth Branagh, Eddie Izzard and Terence Stamp as co-conspirators — but the story is the star in Valkyrie, with Singer showing us all the things we didn’t know, so that the twists and turns of a story where we know the final act somehow still pushes us to the edge of our seats. Valkyrie was notoriously moved from the end of this year to early next year and then moved back again; the fact is, Valkyrie plays a lot better as a diverting summertime action thriller than it does as an earnest end-of-year Oscar-contender drama. At the same time, there are flashes of beauty and dark wonder in Valkyrie, like von Stauffenberg’s first meeting with a conspirator in a gorgeous cathedral, the next wide shot pulling back to reveal how the roof over the altar’s been destroyed by bombs; there’s no safe place, and everything good will be destroyed if the war goes on much longer. It’s a simple moment, but an effective and unexpected one, a moment of grace and spooky beauty hidden in-between the shouting and shooting. Valkyrie‘s brawny and big and bold, but it’s also stronger, slicker and smarter than you’d think.
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Posted on December 29, 2008 at 4:07 pm
“Valkyrie” is, surprisingly, a sober and factual movie of a plot that failed because a German officer moved the bomb behind a table leg as a matter of convenience. I do not like Tom Cruise, but in this movie he is so restrained and surrounded by fine actors that he is more than palatable; he is actually good. He even looks like Stauffenberg. Like the real Stauffenberg, he shouts “Long live Germany!” at the final moment. It is a tragedy that this movie opened ona weekend when a dog movie with the bland Jennifer Anniston was number one. It deserves a bigger audience. Finally, a movie for grown-ups.
Posted on December 30, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Let’s not forget that the bomb plot was only to get control over the war decisions. The holocaust was still perfectly ok to these nazis.
Posted on January 5, 2009 at 11:44 pm
That’s not true, Mr. 4. Von Stauffenberg himself was very much against the camps. Other members of the Valkyrie plot were opposed to the treatment of the Jews to varying degrees. Yes, the German Army was aware of the Holocaust and helped operate the camps, but many of those who were trying to overthrow Hitler were not in favor of the camps (if not as vocally and forcefully opposed to them as history would like). It was not the primary focus or impetus for their actions against Hitler, but the Holocaust was very far from “perfectly ok” to most of these particular conspirators.
(Nor were most of them “Nazis,” though German Army officers had different levels of sympathy, apathy, or antipathy to the Nazis and loyalty to Hitler — an issue of historical contention to this day.)
Posted on January 6, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Mr. Peterseim, You sound like a true German! The Nazis were what they were, animals!!!!!
Posted on January 6, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Ah, Mr. Todd, did you have a point?
Needless to say (and yet, I’ll say it), I wasn’t defending the Nazis (though Oskar Schindler was a member of the Party — was he an “animal”?), I was pointing out that there was a difference between the German Army officer corps and the Nazis. Not cut and dried, not black and white. The Army ran the camps and many of its members were morally accountable (and punished) for both that and for “looking the other way” or “just following orders.”
However, as I said, there were members of the Army, such as the participants in the Valkyrie plot, who were disgusted by the Nazis, both politically and morally. Sure, some of them went along with things longer than they should have, and as with any group of humanity and any moral issue, there were all sorts of shades of gray in how German Army officers reacted to and rationalized their service to Hitler and the Nazis.
Historians to this day go back and forth on just what the German Army leaders knew, when they knew it, and what they did or did not do about it.
But the point of the FILM Valkyrie was to highlight the attitudes and actions of von Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators, not all of whom were as pure in motive and morality as we might like, but who DID eventually ACT.
As for my personal German ancestry, nice try, but ironically you’re off the mark a bit. You’re judging me by my last name, which was actually the Amish name of the family that adopted my WELSH grandfather. But nice try at casting stereotypes and assumptions based on scanty evidence. However, I AM three-quarters German/Bohemian, as my mother’s parents were Bohemian and my father’s mother was Amish. And today, two generations removed from all that, I’m about as German as I am Amish or Welsh, which is to say not a whole lot. Other than my love of bratwurst, which is more about the Packers than the Germans.