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Someone turn me round—can I start this again?
I think I wanted to see Bryan Singer's Valkyrie (2008) from the moment I read the cast list; I finally watched it last night.
It's an intelligent film. It doesn't bolt itself down with portentous entrances and solemnly delivered ironies; it trusts its audience to grasp the initial conditions and follow the characters from what they say to what they do not. At times it has the quick-change twistiness of a caper movie, except that the stakes are incalculably higher than a diamond heist, and yet there is surprisingly little action for the story of an attempted assassination and coup; what draws up the tension is the talk. (It shares with 1776 a trait I respect in historical films, that of fashioning characters' dialogue from their own real-life words. The dead are allowed to speak for themselves.) And it never simplifies or consolidates its characters into types rather than their own ambiguous selves; I think a lesser film would have wasted time directing the audience between "good" Nazis and "bad" Nazis, but Valkyrie drops us among them with equal frankness, from the ex-Chief of General Staff, Ludwig Beck (Terence Stamp), who never objected to a German war of aggression, but revolted in every professional and patriotic fiber against a war that could only destroy Germany a second time,1 to Henning von Tresckow (Kenneth Branagh), the Generalmajor who believed passionately that even if the plot against Hitler failed, it was imperative to make the attempt, to demonstrate to the world that not all Germans had clicked their heels and lined civilians up against the wall, closed their eyes and whistled when the cattle cars went by—Wenn einst Gott Abraham verheißen hat, er werde Sodom nicht verderben, wenn auch nur zehn Gerechte darin seien—to their strongest ally in the political sphere, Dr. Carl Goerdeler (Kevin McNally), who had finally given up on ousting Hitler through law and order and yet found himself equally impatient with a military-run resistance. The skeptical General of Communications, Erich Fellgiebel (Eddie Izzard), whose well-known lack of love for his Führer was not a guarantee of conspiracy. The second-in-command of the Reserve Army, Friedrich Olbricht (Bill Nighy), who wore the Knight's Cross at his collar and had distrusted the Nazis as far back as 1923.2 Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) is not the inspiration, but the catalyst; it is not irrelevant that he's also a Roman Catholic. And all sorts of others with all their sorts of motives, some of which we might identify as moral and others we might dismiss as self-serving, but all of them crossed at the place where Hitler dies and Germany casts off National Socialism. And what is breathtaking about the film is not how nearly they succeeded, but the freak chance fact that they did not.
(An adjutant wants a better look at a map. He moves a briefcase. He dies in hospital the next day instead of Hitler. This is so stupid, it couldn't be invented. It is not so much that everything pear-shaped à la Murphy—the initial attempt is note-perfect until at the last minute it's called off—as that the small things that went wrong interacted toxically. And the film does not pause to suspend disbelief: there's no time to boggle. Nobody back in 1944 had a chance to think, either, except on their feet. "You think it's a coup?" a soldier asks the commander of a battalion in Berlin, mobilized according to Operation Valkyrie to contain an uprising by the SS. "Of that I'm certain," his superior snaps. "What I can't say is which side we're on." So it is with the events unfolding onscreen, like a high-wire act of alternate history. Where are our protagonists going to land, when they finally fall?)
In short, while Valkyrie may not be one of the films that stops your heart, it is a very good one and I am glad the events it fictionalizes3 are being appropriately remembered. Twenty-four hours later, I'm still thinking about the history, the story, the shadowy places in between; they were worth this particular retelling. That doesn't stop me from still being sorry I missed the movie in theaters. It came out the same day I received a copy of Jo Walton's Ha'penny. They would have made a hell of a double feature.
1. One of the saddest details I read afterward belongs to Beck: in 1938, having resigned his post and acting under the conviction that any German move against Czechoslovakia would pull first France and then England into a second world war, he contacted the British Foreign Office and requested that Britain deliver Hitler a formal ultimatum to stay away from the Sudetenland. Britain sent back the Munich Agreement and peace for our time. One of these things is not like the other.
2. And has one of the better, exasperated lines in the aftermath of the aborted first attempt: "The point of replacing Hitler is to negotiate a truce with the Allies. The Allies, I suspect, would be more amenable to a truce if we offer it to them before they get to fucking Berlin!" I don't demand profanity from my historical fiction, but I'd have been suspicious of its total absence where a bunch of highly stressed soldiers were concerned.
3. Although very little, so far as I can tell; while there is information left out for the sake of a feature presentation's runtime, I couldn't find a lot that had been flat-out invented, making Valkyrie one of the most retentively accurate historical films I've seen in a while.
It's an intelligent film. It doesn't bolt itself down with portentous entrances and solemnly delivered ironies; it trusts its audience to grasp the initial conditions and follow the characters from what they say to what they do not. At times it has the quick-change twistiness of a caper movie, except that the stakes are incalculably higher than a diamond heist, and yet there is surprisingly little action for the story of an attempted assassination and coup; what draws up the tension is the talk. (It shares with 1776 a trait I respect in historical films, that of fashioning characters' dialogue from their own real-life words. The dead are allowed to speak for themselves.) And it never simplifies or consolidates its characters into types rather than their own ambiguous selves; I think a lesser film would have wasted time directing the audience between "good" Nazis and "bad" Nazis, but Valkyrie drops us among them with equal frankness, from the ex-Chief of General Staff, Ludwig Beck (Terence Stamp), who never objected to a German war of aggression, but revolted in every professional and patriotic fiber against a war that could only destroy Germany a second time,1 to Henning von Tresckow (Kenneth Branagh), the Generalmajor who believed passionately that even if the plot against Hitler failed, it was imperative to make the attempt, to demonstrate to the world that not all Germans had clicked their heels and lined civilians up against the wall, closed their eyes and whistled when the cattle cars went by—Wenn einst Gott Abraham verheißen hat, er werde Sodom nicht verderben, wenn auch nur zehn Gerechte darin seien—to their strongest ally in the political sphere, Dr. Carl Goerdeler (Kevin McNally), who had finally given up on ousting Hitler through law and order and yet found himself equally impatient with a military-run resistance. The skeptical General of Communications, Erich Fellgiebel (Eddie Izzard), whose well-known lack of love for his Führer was not a guarantee of conspiracy. The second-in-command of the Reserve Army, Friedrich Olbricht (Bill Nighy), who wore the Knight's Cross at his collar and had distrusted the Nazis as far back as 1923.2 Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) is not the inspiration, but the catalyst; it is not irrelevant that he's also a Roman Catholic. And all sorts of others with all their sorts of motives, some of which we might identify as moral and others we might dismiss as self-serving, but all of them crossed at the place where Hitler dies and Germany casts off National Socialism. And what is breathtaking about the film is not how nearly they succeeded, but the freak chance fact that they did not.
(An adjutant wants a better look at a map. He moves a briefcase. He dies in hospital the next day instead of Hitler. This is so stupid, it couldn't be invented. It is not so much that everything pear-shaped à la Murphy—the initial attempt is note-perfect until at the last minute it's called off—as that the small things that went wrong interacted toxically. And the film does not pause to suspend disbelief: there's no time to boggle. Nobody back in 1944 had a chance to think, either, except on their feet. "You think it's a coup?" a soldier asks the commander of a battalion in Berlin, mobilized according to Operation Valkyrie to contain an uprising by the SS. "Of that I'm certain," his superior snaps. "What I can't say is which side we're on." So it is with the events unfolding onscreen, like a high-wire act of alternate history. Where are our protagonists going to land, when they finally fall?)
In short, while Valkyrie may not be one of the films that stops your heart, it is a very good one and I am glad the events it fictionalizes3 are being appropriately remembered. Twenty-four hours later, I'm still thinking about the history, the story, the shadowy places in between; they were worth this particular retelling. That doesn't stop me from still being sorry I missed the movie in theaters. It came out the same day I received a copy of Jo Walton's Ha'penny. They would have made a hell of a double feature.
1. One of the saddest details I read afterward belongs to Beck: in 1938, having resigned his post and acting under the conviction that any German move against Czechoslovakia would pull first France and then England into a second world war, he contacted the British Foreign Office and requested that Britain deliver Hitler a formal ultimatum to stay away from the Sudetenland. Britain sent back the Munich Agreement and peace for our time. One of these things is not like the other.
2. And has one of the better, exasperated lines in the aftermath of the aborted first attempt: "The point of replacing Hitler is to negotiate a truce with the Allies. The Allies, I suspect, would be more amenable to a truce if we offer it to them before they get to fucking Berlin!" I don't demand profanity from my historical fiction, but I'd have been suspicious of its total absence where a bunch of highly stressed soldiers were concerned.
3. Although very little, so far as I can tell; while there is information left out for the sake of a feature presentation's runtime, I couldn't find a lot that had been flat-out invented, making Valkyrie one of the most retentively accurate historical films I've seen in a while.
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If Tom Cruise was your sticking point: I have felt wary about him since he freaked out at Brooke Shields, despite his excellent performances in Magnolia (1999) and Collateral (2004), but he is fine here. It's an ensemble piece; he didn't astonish me as Stauffenberg, but he serves the character well.
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He was a big part of it, yes. I've felt much the same.
It's an ensemble piece; he didn't astonish me as Stauffenberg, but he serves the character well.
I'd figured you'd not have given the film such a positive review if he'd been a problem, but it's good to know that he actually did well with the character.
Part of what put me off the film when they were showing clips on television was the disorientation induced by a group of senior Wermacht officers speaking in upper-class English accents (fair enough as a stand-in for Hochdeutsch, I suppose) except for Cruise with his American accent. (Of course, now that I've said this I'll discover that Stauffenberg actually spoke with a regional accent.)
I suppose I should have realised that it wouldn't necessarily be a problem over the length of the film.*
*After seeing Cruise demonstrate his swordsmanship on a talk show, I was worried about how this was going to affect The Last Samurai, but as it turned out the filmmakers were well able to shoot around his relative lack of martial arts ability, as compared with both the Japanese actors and the skills that his character was supposed to have developed.
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I would indeed have said if I thought the film had a void shaped like Tom Cruise at its center. I suspect the historical Stauffenberg had more of a sense of humor than Cruise's portrayal—after he was blown up in Africa and lost his right hand and two fingers off his left, he is supposed to have joked that he never knew what to do with all ten fingers when he had them anyway—but I don't want to hold the actor responsible for the script. He does drop his glass eye into someone's drink to get their attention.
a group of senior Wehrmacht officers speaking in upper-class English accents (fair enough as a stand-in for Hochdeutsch, I suppose) except for Cruise with his American accent. (Of course, now that I've said this I'll discover that Stauffenberg actually spoke with a regional accent.)
They seem to have decided against that approach—attempting to find equivalent accents in different languages—presumably because it is just as artificial as having them all speak with German accents; how do you even pick a target form of English to translate into? The actors all appear to be working with their native accents, resulting in a spectrum of British and German accents with some admixture of Dutch and at least one American. (I didn't hear any other than Cruise, but I can't swear to all the bit parts.) There is one exception: Hitler: the actor who plays him, David Bamber, is British. I assume the German accent he uses is adapted from Hitler's own speech patterns. It is a little jarring. I understand why it might have been done; an audience might blink badly at a non-comedic Hitler who doesn't sound German. But then why not cast a German actor and (insofar as it's possible in a film where all the characters are German and most of the actors are not) preserve the authenticity of accent? Or having cast Bamber, let him use his own accent and let the audience sort the cognitive dissonance on their own time? Etc. But again, if my strongest argument with the film is its handling of Hitler's accent, it's not doing too badly.
I suppose I should have realised that it wouldn't necessarily be a problem over the length of the film.
I didn't think about it after the initial transition of languages; I think you'll be fine.
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I don't remember terribly well how Hitler spoke in the movie, but I'm reminded of an interesting fact: there is only one extant recording known to contain Hitler's casual speaking voice. It was made by a group of (I believe) Czech resistance members who bugged a tent in which Hitler met with one of his generals and bemoaned the troubles on the Russian front. Other than that, all we have is what he sounded like when he shouted speeches at rallies.
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That's fascinating. In the same way I probably shouldn't have been surprised by color photographs and home-movie footage of Hitler, I had assumed there were recordings. What did he sound like when he wasn't orating?
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And it trusted its audience enough to be accurate. I had read some about the 20 July plot; I still learned things from Valkyrie. That's such a rare and pleasant change from historical movies that feel the need to invent romances or simplify loyalties just to keep the audience's attention from wandering.
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Thank you. It's possible that our parameters differ enough that you will not be impressed. But I hope you enjoy it!
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I found at least one exactly reproduced passage and several lines that had been altered for conversation from letters; I imagine there are more. I like that sort of thing. It implies that even if no one notices, someone cares.
Overall, I think this is one which will be appreciated most in retrospect, stumbled over and discovered haphazardly by people to whom "the couch incident" is (hopefully) a distant, stupid pop-cultural memory.
I was surprised it got so little notice at the end of the year: all historical awesomeness aside, there is some terrific acting in Valkyrie. It's not news that I love Bill Nighy, but I hadn't seen Kenneth Branagh in quite some time; and by now I would probably listen to a phonebook by Terence Stamp, although he might try to kill me with it afterward. Maybe ensemble movies are easier to discount than solitary best actors? Or just most people have to taste?
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Weirdly, I was constantly distracted by the sound of the dialogue. I have trouble with the convention of foreigners speaking English with foreign accents so as to indicate that they're really speaking a foreign language—a serious disability when watching American films—and it didn't help that each of the main cast members had a different idea of what constitutes an appropriate accent.
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See my second reply to