A couple of weeks ago, I watched the Quentin Tarantino movie that I have come to refer to as Inglourious Fellows.
That movie strays far from reality, turning World War II into the
setting for a spaghetti western in which the heroes always have the
upper hand on the villains - though some of their methods are just as
despicable. I guess I hadn’t had quite enough of Nazis for one month
because the other night, I watched Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie, a considerably more sedate film about a group working to bring down Hitler.
Valkyrie, which is based on a true story, stars Tom Cruise as Colonel Claus van Stauffenberg, a German war hero who is disgusted with Nazism and leads a plot to kill Hitler (David Bamber) and show the world that not all of Germany is in agreement with his policies. Kenneth Branagh
portrays Major-General Henning von Tresckow, another important
architect of the plan, though his chief concern seems to be making
Germany look good, and actually succeeding in their mission seems like
less of a likelihood to him, at least initially. Putting together an
assassination attempt and subsequent government takeover is a complex
task, but they manage to find allies in their quest, some more firm than
others. One of the most wishy-washy is General Friedrich Fromm (Tom
Wilkinson), who is terrified that the plot will fail and he will be
found complicit.
Of course, because this is a movie based on actual events, we know that the plot will
fail, which puts a bit of a damper on the whole thing. I had never
heard of this event before, so I didn’t know exactly what would go
wrong, but I knew something would, since clearly, this was not the way
Hitler died. I figured the movie would be a downer, and it certainly is;
the ending is especially bleak. What’s more, I found it a bit on the
dull side, at least in the beginning; once the fateful day arrives,
there was enough action and tension to keep me engaged, but prior to
that, it’s mostly a lot of nervous strategizing.
There’s
little humor to be found in the movie, though there is a dash of
romance, thanks to Claus’s wife Nina (Carice van Houten), who remains
deeply devoted and openly affectionate to her husband, unrattled by the
war injury that leaves him missing an eye, a hand and several fingers. I
like Claus, who comes across as a quiet, pensive family man as well as a
determined soldier; he’s not as entertaining as Brad Pitt’s
Nazi-killing vigilante in Tarantino’s movie, but he’s not as cruel
either. He also feels much more realistic. On the other hand, I had an
issue with Cruise’s enunciation throughout the movie. I was tempted to
turn on the subtitles because it seemed to me like he was mumbling the
whole time.
I know the problem wasn’t his accent because he
didn’t have one, which I found a little hard to get used to; all of the
characters in the movie are German, but Bamber is the only one who
switches to a German accent, since the filmmakers felt an English Hitler
would be too distracting. Everyone else uses their natural accents, so
some sound German, but others sound American or British, and I had to
keep reminding myself that they were all German.
Valkyrie
is the kind of movie I can imagine being shown in history classes. It
illuminates an interesting piece of German history with which I was
unfamiliar, and it seems worthwhile to show that there were plenty of
Germans who weren’t under Hitler’s spell. While it didn’t hold my
attention as well as it might have, I would recommend it to anyone
fascinated by World War II.
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