REVIEW: Movie

I didn't hold out great hopes for "Valkyrie" for two reasons: Tom Cruise plays the hero, and anyone who didn't sleep through the World War II unit in history class knows how the last plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler ended. Despite these two handicaps, the film succeeds in drawing you into a thriller.

Yes, I'm aware that not everyone will consider Cruise a handicap. After the couch-jumping incident, I lost all faith in his ability to handle a role like Colonel von Stauffenberg, an officer in North Africa who has become disillusioned with the Third Reich. Von Stauffenberg returns to a staff job in Germany after losing a hand and an eye and is quickly absorbed in a plot to kill Hitler and negotiate peace with the Allied forces.

The movie begins as von Stauffenberg writes in his journal about the war crimes he sees around him and concludes the army can serve "Germany or the Fuhrer. Not both!" Perhaps the filmmakers hoped to establish context, but it comes off false, as if the audience needed to be persuaded that von Stauffenberg had a good reason for wanting to kill Hitler.

Fortunately, from there it moves into the complicated maneuvers needed to pull off the plot with a dash of von Stauffenberg's wife and children to illustrate the difficulties of treason.

Cruise pulls it off far better than I expected, losing the self-righteousness from the beginning of the movie. When von Stauffenberg urges the other conspirators to action, he doesn't mention the rightness of their path, only that Germany will be destroyed if the war continues. It makes him a realistic hero for the times rather than a projection of what we who know the truth about Hitler's Germany wish someone had said.

The realistic hero is vital to the movie, since the actual assassination attempt lasts only a few minutes of the two hours. Roughly half the time goes to plotting the attempt and the other half to trying to take over the government in the few hours of confusion during which everyone believes Hitler is dead. Rooting for von Stauffenberg is as futile as hoping Romeo and Juliet get to welcome a bundle of joy into their family, but watching the coup fall apart is fascinating.

The score reminded me of a horror movie, particularly when von Stauffenberg actually meets Hitler, who is played by David Bamber. It raises tension to the point that von Stauffenberg's fears of the whims of a frail-looking man who was foolish enough to sign an order just because the man presenting it knew about German opera seem natural.

Hitler never directly commits any violence, and apart from a few explosions and shootings, almost no one else does either. The action is psychological; the violence is potential. If you removed one colorful vocabulary choice, you could show it on network television.

The one noticeable flaw, the minor characters, likely resulted from an attempt to be historically accurate about the number of people in the plot. Only about four conspirators are recognizable; the rest are stocky men in late middle age with light hair who wear uniforms. That could have been easily avoided by varying their ages, body types, etc., and though it is a minor flaw it was enough to make me wonder what I had missed.

Overall, though, "Valkyrie" is a fine piece of filmmaking, and provides an interesting perspective on the German resistance, a group often ignored in films about World War II. I won't say it's guaranteed an Oscar, but if nothing else, it shows that despite his behavior offscreen, Cruise can still pull off a convincing hero.

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