Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Hitler's
Willing Executioners
(Valkyrie, 1/12/09)
By Nicholas Nicastro
The
last battle of WWII is the struggle over the war's historical legacy,
and it ain't over yet. For example, Edward Zwick's upcoming Defiance
is ostensibly about three Russian-Jewish partisans who save their neighbors
from deportation. What it's really about, though, is countering the
popular impression that the victims of the Nazi Holocaust went down
without a fight. Bryan Singer's Valkyrie tells the true story
of a plot by a handful of conscientious German insiders to kill Hitler
in 1944. Its real target is a possibly even more tenacious myth: that
every last citizen and soldier in 1940's Germany was a boot-clicking,
stiff-armed, genocidal Nazi—or as one popular book called them,
"Hitler's willing executioners."
Tom Cruise plays Colonel Klaus von
Stauffenberg, a good soldier who was disgusted by the Third Reich and
foresaw that the Führer was leading the German army to nowhere
but total annihilation. As most probably already know (though nobody
ever lost money betting against the historical knowledge of most Americans)
Hitler died by suicide in a Berlin bunker in 1945, so it shouldn't count
as a spoiler to say that von Stauffenberg's assassination plot didn't
go off as planned. What is surprising is that Singer's movie isn't just
a by-the-numbers star vehicle for Cruise. In fact, it is an understated,
glamour free, taut—even illuminating—political thriller. Like
Obama, what it lacks in dynamism it makes up in cool technocratic commitment.
When much of the action in a war film lies not in gunplay but in people
speaking tensely on the telephone, yet is still compelling, the director
has indeed accomplished something. Valkyrie is not just a WWII
movie, it is (to borrow a term from the cop genre) a good coup
procedural.
Much of the critical resistance
to Singer's film has inevitably focused on Cruise. Being the senior
half of the Tom-Kat paparazzi juggernaut has arguably done little for
the craft of either Tom or Kat, and few feel obliged anymore to accept
them in serious roles. Some have even objected to what is so obviously
American about Cruise here, including his attitude and accent. To be
fair, though, his physical appearance is actually quite close to the
real von Stauffenberg's. Nor should we think the film's gaggle of British
actors (including Eddie Izzard, Tom Wilkinson and Kenneth Branagh) have
any inherent advantage in playing German. Those best prepared for major
roles, you'd think, would be actual Germans, though we see nothing of
Bruno (Wings of Desire) Ganz or Jürgen (Das Boot)
Prochnow in Singer's movie.
What may be news to some (it was
to me) is that, as portrayed in the script by Christopher McQuarrie
and Nathan Alexander, von Stauffenberg's plot didn't necessarily require
Hitler to die to topple the Nazis from power. Just rumor of his demise
might have been enough to tip the balance against Himmler, the SS, and
the rest of the gang. "Might have been," that is, if a few
well-placed bureaucrats and telephone operators had placed their loyalties
with von Stauffenberg the war hero instead of Hitler the war criminal.
As presented by Singer and Cruise,
von Stauffenberg is a moral hero who was prevented by circumstances
from scoring something more than a moral victory. In the telling, however,
he's something of a pitiable figure, leading his corps of brave but
mediocre conspirators with his one good eye and one good hand. Singer
perpetuates his "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is
king" metaphor as von Stauffenberg fumbles to arm the bomb but
only has the time to prime half the explosive. For lack of one good
hand and a missing stick of plastique, the worst bloodletting in history
would have nine more months to run .
©2009 Nicholas Nicastro
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