Soldier Blue

Rating: Null/10 (17 July 2009)

Tom Cruise plays the moral and righteous leader of a band of good Nazis who attempts to kill Hitler. Though slick and entertaining, "Valkryie" is just another in a long line of flicks which trivialize the Holocaust. After films like "Boy in the Striped Pajamas", "Black Book", "The Reader", "The Pianist", "Schindler's List" etc etc, it's hard to get worked up about yet another film about heroic Nazis.
More interesting are the little choices made in the film. For example, all the film's Nazis sport English accents and are played by seasoned British actors. This venerable tradition has been around for a long time, tainting our perception of bad guys to such an extent that even the Empire in "Star Wars" is populated by officers who speak with a refined upper class English accent. With World War 2 pictures, though, this choice has the odd effect of making the Nazis sound like the very same people they're trying to blow up. Imagine, in contrast, a film in which the Nazi villains sounded like the Sopranos or the Corleones. Or how about Tony Montana as an SS officer: "Hitler? He da man! First you get da powa, then you get da wimmin, and then you get da concentration camps!"
And of course audiences respond only to pretty Nazis. Compare the well manicured Tom Cruise to Shirley Stoler, the ordinary yet strangely hideous prison commandant of Lina Wertmuller's "Seven Beauties". Such casting choices are too confusing for mainstream audiences.
But confusion is the very point. Nazis need to be portrayed as vaguely superior, aloof, pretty and refined. It's far more satisfying for us to vicariously defeat smart guys than evil dopes. This provide audiences with objects of guilt-free hatred and panders to our own class based insecurities.
Ultimately, this constant revisiting of the Holocaust via new and inventive narrative avenues is just an attempt to affix a happier ending onto one of the most horrifying episodes in human history. By locating and magnifying some morsel of human charity ("Schindler's List", "Valkyrie" etc ) we are somehow led to believe that, even in the midst of a national murder spree, there was hope, kindness and humanity. It makes sense that an emotional anesthesiologist like Steven Spielberg would construct such a story.
Of course these approaches aren't necessarily problematic, it's just that "Holocaust" has rarely been successfully rendered as a tragedy. And so what we have with "Valkyrie" is another film about nobility and courage among perpetrators of great horror. It's another exercise in wish-fulfilment, just like "Defiance", another recent film which argues that if Europe's Jews had more guns and considerably more homicidal instinct, the entire Holocaust might have never happened. All these films are thus giant "what ifs". What if Cruise had succeeded in killing Hitler? What if Schindler had saved more Jews? What if there were more Good Germans? What if the Jews fought back? It's all a kind of fantasy, an attempt to shut doors, look away and avoid trauma. And it's this very lack of confrontation which perpetuates these horrors themselves (see "The Shining").
Perhaps the only way to treat the Holocaust serious is to approach it as a comedy. Laugh at Nazis and steal their power. Mel Brooks knew this, as did Lubitsch and Billy Wilder. Maybe Bryan Singer does too, because he has Tom Cruise dressed in an eye-patch and missing an arm for most of the picture. Cruise isn't just a "good Nazi", he's a German pirate as well.
7.9/10 – Slight, but Singer is a talented director and he's crafted a slick thriller here. I can't think of another mainstream movie that so deftly communicates a coup and political take over. See "The Garden of the Finzi Continis", "Soldier Blue", "Hotel Terminus" and "The Shop on Main Street".