Valkyrie (2008)

Bryan Singer's Valkyrie is an almost successful movie about an almost successful plot to kill Adolf Hitler. The story is a fascinating one, the cast is superb, and the look of the film is spectacular. What it gains in those areas, though, it loses in strange storytelling and choppy editing. In these days of blockbuster bloat, here is a rare movie that should be about half an hour longer.

In the spring and summer of 1944, with the Allies invading at Normandy and tides turning on other fronts, a group of disaffected German army officers and anti-Nazi civilians conceived a plot to remove Hitler from power and redirect the course of the war. They believed a truce with the Allies could save Germany, but Hitler, of course, was single-minded and implacable. So he had to go. But how? Their plan was ingenious. A detailed plan already existed whereby the military could seize power, lock down Berlin and maintain order in the event of Hitler's death. This plan was called "Operation Valkyrie," after the goddesses, made famous by Wagner's operas, who decided the fate of Nordic heroes. The conspirators, many of whom were military men themselves, meant to rewrite Valkyrie to give their commands more power, and then trigger the plan by blowing up Hitler and pinning it on the SS. In theory, this was brilliant: accomplish their own aim of killing the dictator, let the hated secret police take the blame, and use Hitler's own armies to cover their tracks and remove Hitler's remaining friends. The government would, if all went well, essentially overthrow itself. If all went well.

The movie gets us into this plot by following Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise), an officer already disenchanted with the Third Reich even before he loses a hand and an eye in an Allied ambush. We meet him scribbling anti-government notes in his diary, shortly before being blown up. Why, exactly, he is so unhappy is never explained, but his injuries seal the deal, and when he is approached by anti-Hitler generals Henning von Treskow (Kenneth Branagh) and Friedrich Olbricht (Bill Nighy) to join the attempted coup, he accepts. It is Stauffenberg who suggests altering Valkyrie. He is a master planner, and, wearing his wounded-hero credentials on his empty sleeve, is well-placed to gain government sympathy and a position close to Hitler. This he does, and it is Stauffenberg who must get Hitler to sign off on the altered plans (his own death warrant, as it were), and who also ends up being best-placed to plant the bomb meant to kill the dictator.

Despite its war-movie trappings, Valkyrie is really a caper film, more Ocean's 11 than Saving Private Ryan. We meet the principal players, and they explain their plan. Then the caper is wound up, and we watch it go, or, in this case, not go. If you've cracked a history book, or watched the endless WWII programming on the History Channel, you know that the Nazi regime did not end this way. That means that the fascination of the movie has to lie in the details, and it's here that the movie goes astray. There aren't enough details. The early sections of the movie jump from person to person and place to place (using the inevitable typewriter-font onscreen locale and time updates) much too quickly. To get to the lines of the conspirators' plot, the film elides their identities and motives. Who are/were these men, that they disliked Hitler so? Did they object to all his policies, or just his war strategies? Of course Hitler is generally unsympathetic, but universal ill-will is not enough to drive a movie. Even the Ocean's gang were given specialties and unique quirks. These conspirators are a bunch of well-known faces in suits and uniforms. Yes, we root for Stauffenberg, but that's because we spend the most time with him and, well, because he's Tom Cruise. I'm sorry, but that's a cheat. The endless locale jumps give the whole affair a claustrophobic, piecemeal feeling. It's like the Cliff's Notes of a coup, and that doesn't do justice to the enormity of the plan, the frustrating arbitrariness of the circumstances that wrecked it, or the brave men who carried it out. It's an odd experience to watch a "thriller" film and find myself wondering what Ken Burns might have done with this material.

And it is good material. The movie, like the plot itself, generates a frustrating sense of "if only." Singer shows that he can manage real tension. The scene where Stauffenberg brings the rewritten Valkyrie plan before Hitler, pushing the man's own downfall under his nose, and a few scenes involving the fate of an explosive-laden briefcase are real spine-tinglers. Too bad the pacing of the rest of the film doesn't match up.

There's also no faulting the acting. Valkyrie boasts the finest collection of British character actors I've seen in a movie without the words "Harry Potter" in the title. Among the conspirators, in addition to Branagh and Nighy, we have Terence Stamp, Kevin McNally, and Eddie Izzard. On the Reich side, David Bamber plays Hitler and is ably supported by Tom Wilkinson, Tom Hollander, and fellow "Rome" alum Kenneth Cranham. Every one of them is underused, although Nighy, Wilkinson, and Bamber make the most of what they're given. Cruise is the marquee name, of course, but he brings in a remarkably restrained performance. This low-key approach is the right one, because it sells Stauffenberg through his convictions, and not through histrionics or trumped-up heroism.

Overall, though, the result is strangely unsatisfying, and all the more so for the amount of talent on hand. "This is an odd movie," my wife and I kept saying to each other as we watched, and therein lies a key to the problem. With a premise this good, we should notice the story, not the movie itself. The film gets in its own way. "This is a military operation," says one of the conspirators about "Operation Valkyrie," "nothing ever goes 'according to plan.'" How true that is in life, and, unfortunately for the movie Valkyrie, sometimes art imitates life a little too well.