Review: Valkyrie

Valkyrie, dir. Bryan Singer, AMC Loews Lincoln Center 13, NYC

At long last, Bryan Singer’s con­sis­tently post­poned Valkyrie hit the­aters this past Christmas, actu­ally a few months ahead of sched­ule. The con­tro­versy sur­round­ing the film, which pro­vided about two years of delec­table biz lun­cheon gos­sip, will be for­got­ten with time, and thank­fully so because the result­ing film is a slick lit­tle addi­tion to Mr. Singer’s short but mon­u­men­tal resume. It is a great lit­tle thrill ride that man­ages to suck you in and con­vince you of a dar­ing con­cept, that not all Nazis are bad. In fact, the film is so good at pulling this par­lor trick off early on that the audi­ence is even able to sym­pa­thize with those most dev­il­ish of SS officers.

Based on the real-life attempt to to assas­si­nate Adolph Hitler from within the Third Reich, the film fol­lows the exploits of Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, played with sur­pris­ing refrain by Tom Cruise. The megas­tar has trou­ble slip­ping into his­tor­i­cal roles, evi­denced by his twenty-first cen­tury charm on full dis­play in Ed Zwick’s 19th cen­tury drama, The Last Samurai. In that ambi­tious project, Mr. Cruise appeared to be repris­ing his role as Jerry Maguire only with more hair and a sword. Not so this time around. Thanks mostly to the vis­ceral pace of Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander’s screeen­play, Mr. Cruise is never afforded the chance to be cute or charm­ing. Instead, we spend the bet­ter part of two and a half hours watch­ing the world around him spin out of con­trol while he des­per­ately tries to keep him­self grounded in the mid­dle of it all.

On one end of the spec­trum in Valkyrie is, of course, Hitler and his Third Reich. As von Stauffenberg divulges via voice-over-diary entries in the begin­ning, our heroes feel as if Hitler had turned the German empire, ini­tially a con­cept they all sup­ported, into some­thing so evil, that if left on its cur­rent course it could very well mean the end of the world. The detrac­tors wanted to let the world know that not all Germans, not all Germany, sup­ported their mega­lo­ma­niac chancellor’s ideals. And so, after sur­viv­ing an airstrike in Tunisia, less an eye and a few fin­gers, von Stauffenberg is brought to Berlin to join an elite group of con­spir­a­tors, which is where he is con­fronted with the other end of the spec­trum, the politi­cians. If Hitler rep­re­sents pure evil, then this gag­gle of blowhards rep­re­sent the bureau­cratic fum­bling that allow evil to exist. Being the heroic type that he is, von Stauffenberg refuses to par­tic­i­pate unless they can­find a way to con­trol Germany after the impend­ing death of the Führer, fear­ing just ano0ther dic­ta­tor­ship brew­ing amongst the oppor­tunis­tic clan.

The most inter­est­ing scene of the film, for my money, hap­pens when an SS cap­tain who has been charged with arrest­ing Nazi offi­cers accused of trea­son (not von Stauffenberg and friends, but the bad Nazis), is pit­ted face to face with Joseph Goebbels. Standing alone in an immense office, Goebbels pops a cyanide pill under his tongue as the capt­ian approaches, clutch­ing a tele­phone receiver. He hands it to the cap­tain; hear­ing Hitler’s voice on the other end, he real­izes he has been duped, and retreats. What is so fas­ci­nat­ing is that both men are what we know to be pure evil, and yet Mr. Singer found a way to hook us in, to feel for both men, to feel the immi­nence of their doom in that moment.

Hopefully this is a jump­ing off point for the direc­tor, whose resume is sat­u­rated with block­buster genre pic­tures, even though he exploded on the stage with the “indie” suc­cess The Usual Suspects. Mr. Singer has more access than almost any direc­tor his age, so we can hope to see more of this fare from him in the future, though we love the super­hero stuff too.