News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
It's hard to make a thriller work when the audience comes in knowing the outcome. It's a matter of history:
On July 20, 1944, a group German Wehrmacht officers led by the aristocratic Claus von Stauffenberg attempted to kill Adolf Hitler with a bomb in a satchel placed under a table during a military staff conference in East Prussia.
The bomb went off, but Hitler was not seriously hurt. The attempted coup that followed failed, its perpetrators rounded up and executed on the spot or later hanged.
Somehow, director Bryan Singer and an outstanding cast makes us forget that we know how it all comes out and go along for a pulse-pounding ride.
Most moviegoers are at least vaguely familiar with the assassination attempt. Fewer realize the extent of the plot. Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators planned to take over the Reich using Hitler's own emergency plan to save the State, Operation Wålkure (Valkyrie). They hoped to negotiate a peace with the Western Allies and avoid invasion of the Fatherland by the steamrolling Red Army.
It is the development of this plot, including other failed and abortive assassination attempts, that give the movie its tension.
It's a fast-moving tale, but one that gives a little room for reflection. The plotters were mostly career soldiers who had taken a personal oath of loyalty to Hitler. They must betray a sacred oath in order to save their sacred nation. And the risks are huge. They know that their lives are forfeit if they fail, and all whom they love will go down with them.
The risk is highlighted in brief but affecting scenes of Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) with his family. His wife Nina (played pitch-perfectly by that luminous Rhinemaiden Carice van Houten) is pregnant and she knows her unborn child and the rest of her children are at grave risk from the actions of her noble, mangled husband. Yet she swallows her fear and releases him to the salvation of the nation or to death.
Cruise is outstanding as Stauffenberg, an aristocrat from a family of soldiers who has suffered grievous wounds in North Africa - one hand and an eye gone, only two fingers and a thumb left on his other hand.
When a celebrity of Cruise's stature (and, of late, controversy) can make you forget you're watching him and instead absorb the viewer into his character, you know you have seen a fine piece of acting. And it's supported by a stellar cast including Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branaugh and Terrence Stamp, who communicate roiling emotions of duty, fear and self interest that drove the conspirators.
There has been some quibbling about accents, but it is misplaced. Tom Cruise with a German accent would have been distracting; it was a wise call to leave the accent alone. The transition from German to English is smooth and you are so involved in the story, so absorbed in the German resistance, that it seems natural that voices sound familiar.
It's hard to say what would have happened had the coup succeeded. We do know that about one million Germans, thousands of Allied troops (500,000 Russians in the taking of Berlin alone) and countless Jews died between July 20, 1944 and the German surrender on May 7, 1945.
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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