Bryan Singer's first ever feature was 1993's little seen Sundance winner Public Access. This chillingly subversive micro-budget gem of a thriller manipulated audience expectations, allowing us to sympathize with the lead character until his evil intentions became clear and the audience was forced to look away in shame and self-disgust.
Public Access was - arguably - a disturbingly seductive portrait of a neo-Nazi, while 1998's Apt Pupil saw its teenage lead fall under the spell of a charismatic Nazi war criminal. Singer's body of work, from Usual Suspects to X-Men, has been concerned mostly with the evil that men are capable of and what drives intelligent men and women to choose one side over the other.
In Singer's new film Valkyrie, Tom Cruise plays Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a decorated German war hero who takes the lead in an ambitious eleventh hour plot to assassinate Hitler, seize Berlin from the SS and the Gestapo and negotiate a truce with the advancing enemy. Joining a group of conspirators hidden within the Führer's inner-circle, Stauffenberg risks losing his wife and children, not to mention his life, by attempting to detonate explosives inside the Wolf's Lair bunker.
The planning, execution and aftermath of the failed coup d'etat are portrayed with the utmost precision, each scene calculated to maximize suspense and ratchet up the tension. Singer's efficient handling of a very tight script takes a story whose outcome is known to everyone and turns it into a nail-biting thriller. It may be sold as an action thriller, but despite its structure - Tom Cruise leads an ace team on a suicide mission - Valkyrie owes more to Hitchcock than to Mission Impossible.
The PR team found Tom Cruise a great role, both for himself and his troubled career. His limited acting range is sufficient to convey the stoic determination of a serious man caught up in serious times. Partially hidden behind an eye patch and a uniform, he has no trouble coming up with the inexpressive poker face the part demands.
It takes a while to get over the fact that every German in the film speaks English (the accents are all over the place), but thankfully Singer and collaborator Christophe McQuarrie know when to keep the characters quiet. A lot of the suspense in Valkyrie stems from conspiratorial looks shot across briefing tables and long moments of loaded silences as we wait to discover if the plot has been exposed.
There are some particularly fine performances to enjoy, the ensemble cast being a who's who of overachieving, mostly British supporting actors. Eddie Izzard, Terence Stamp, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy and Kenneth Brannagh all leave strong impressions as men left little time to decide just how much they were willing to risk. There's also a subtly moving performance by Jamie Parker as Stauffenberg's right hand man (literally, the colonel lost his right hand in Tunisia). It takes a little reading-between-the-lines, but a homoerotic reading of their relationship gives the ending an added note of melancholy.
Gorgeously photographed in bleached out grays and pale hues (the blood red of the Nazi flag being the only exception), Valkyrie is often disturbingly beautiful to look at. Bryan Singer always pays a lot of attention to composition and detail and this film is no exception. A seemingly innocuous close-up of a soldier killing a mosquito with his cigarette, for example, sends chills down one's spine. The filmmakers keep proceeds lean and understated, focusing on actions rather emotions and using silence to encourage the viewer to weigh the consequences of each rash decision, each perilous operation.
Yet, while the film could be described as coldly efficient, it's far from emotionless. The very fact that we all know exactly how the coup will end should have neutered the suspense and removed us from the viewing equation. Surprisingly, the exact opposite happens. With the hindsight of history, the doomed nature of Operation Valkyrie gives everything an undertow of pathos. Tom Cruise, used to portraying confident action heroes, becomes a tragic martyr, as do his accomplices, inexorably headed towards a summary execution as traitors.
That this WWII thriller should move us as it does makes up for many of its faults. There are some decidedly clunky lines and the conspirators' motivations - on which each character's life hinges - are barely alluded to. In the case of Cruise's character, they boil down to simplistic inspirational speeches, leaving no room for moral ambiguity.
Then there's the problem of sympathizing with German officers of the Reich. Whatever their convictions about Hitler may be, the screenwriters keep mum on ideology, and the extermination of Jews, queers and others - to cite but one of its many tenets - barely gets a mention. It's also unclear how much the film sticks to the facts (or at least to historical accounts of the facts). Intent on keeping a straight face and a serious tone, the film's impact hinges on our faith in the storytellers' truthfulness. When the coup unfolds, it's easy to imagine its scope and scale augmented for the sake of heightened drama. This is, after all, a Hollywood movie. It's hard in other words to suspend disbelief when what you're asked is to believe what you're told.
In fact I almost wished Singer had pushed the revisionist fantasy to its logical conclusion and imagined a successful coup against Hitler. The story already unfolds like a big budget, extended Twilight Zone episode, why not take it a step further: camp up the tone a notch and save Europe from itself? Tom Cruise and the Hollywood machine make a decent film striving to do justice to the darkest hour of history. They might've made a great one had they not even bothered.
Valkyrie is out in the US. It hits Australian multiplexes on January 22 and British screens the next day. I recommend seeing it on DVD, dubbed in German and with the colour saturation turned down to zero.
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