Language barrier

Rating: 7/10 (11 January 2009)

Tom Cruise is fine in the role of Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, the well-born military leader of the last, spectacular attempted coup against Hitler. That is, he has the right bearing, that of a man of full confidence, born to command. Cruise himself may originally come from humble origins, but in stardom he has grown into the shoes at least of Hollywood aristocracy. He's a leading man, and so, made to lead. But in one way, he's out of place. The trouble is, though he plays a German, what he needs, and lacks, is an English accent. That's because the rest of the cast, Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nyhy, Tom Wilkinson, Tom Hollander, Eddie Izzard, and Terrence Stamp, to name a few, are English, and with their plummy voices they don't let you forget it. Of course, it's also hard to forget that Tom Cruise is Tom Cruise, despite the eye patch and the crisp uniforms.
Apart from the artificiality of the language, 'Valkyrie' rarely works up enough tension. And the fact that the assassination attempt is one that historically failed is no excuse, because 'Day of the Jackel' was about a failed attempt to kill De Gaulle, but it still kept its suspense coiled tight right up to the end. Anthony Lane has it right. The conspirators' scheme to use a Hitlerian emergency plan (called "Valkyrie") and fake an SS coup, is too complicated to follow, and the all-English cast gives us too many quirky character actors and not enough solid meat: these guys "are meant to be battle-toughened Nazi officers, but what we get is an array of discreetly amusing studies in mild neurosis." Singer's direction is methodical, and the costumes and sets are nicely authentic, but the movie tries to do too much. It tries to set up a context of Von Stauffenberg's life and career, outline who all the main figures in the coup scheme are, depict the bomb/assassination attempt in specific detail, and describe the subsequent coup attempt, the Operation "Valkyrie" ruse to unseat the SS. There's just not enough focus here. In a suspenseful, well structured movie about these events, the bomb attempt would probably have been the main focus, and Von Stauffenberg would have been more central. After all, it's Tom Cruise! And he's special: he's American!
There are good moments. Von Stauffenberg's visit to a distracted, declining Hitler to get him to sign the revised "Valkyrie" plan is impressively staged and atmospheric. It captures a tiny bit of the kind of endgame mood Sokurov got in his unsuccessful but haunting 'Molokh' and Oliver Hirschbiegel delineated in detail in 'Downfall'. And there's more authentic danger in it--the danger of being in the presence of a madman with absolute power--than in the bomb sequence. Despite Lane's calling Wilkinson "the ever-perplexed," he's pretty frightening as the intractable and mean General Friedrich Fromm. Bill Nihy, on the other hand, isn't appropriate as the indecisive General Friedrich Olbricht. He's too forceful an actor for such a role.
Lane is finally right in suggesting how fundamentally silly this kind of enterprise is. And yet there's a whole string of late-2008 releases about Nazism and its aftermath whose Germans all talk English -- 'The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,' 'The Reader,' 'Valkyrie,' 'Defiance.' Only 'The Boy in the Striped Pajamas' works in the unrealistic language, because it unfolds as a fable about innocence at the heart of evil. In the other films, which make claims to historical realism, the inappropriateness is jarring and the methodology -- one would hope, at least -- out of date. Germans should have made these movies. And as for having Cruise speak the opening paragraph of the film in German, well, that is laughable, and only draws attention to the pretense.