Valkyrie (2008)
Tom Cruise as Col. Claus von Stauffenberg in “Valkyrie.”
Mission Imperative: Assassinate the Führer
There are no discernibly nasty Nazis in “Valkyrie,” though Hitler and Goebbels skulk about in a few scenes, shooting dark, ominous looks at the heroic German Army officer played by Tom Cruise. Perhaps they’re wondering what this Hollywood megastar is doing in their midst, a sentiment that you may come to share while watching Mr. Cruise — who gives a fine, typically energetic performance in a film that requires nothing more of him than a profile and vigor — strut about as one of history’s more enigmatic players.
That enigma was Claus von Stauffenberg, a count and a colonel who, though he lost one eye, an entire hand and several fingers while fighting on behalf of the Reich, made several attempts to assassinate Hitler and seize control of the government. At the core of Stauffenberg’s spectacularly ambitious plot was Valkyrie, Hitler’s plan for the mobilization of the home army that Stauffenberg hoped to hijack in order to quash the SS and its leaders. It didn’t work, of course, for complicated reasons, though also because by 1944, as William L. Shirer bluntly puts it in “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” the conspirators were “terribly late.”
You don’t learn how belated the coup d’état was in “Valkyrie,” which might matter if this big-ticket production with Mr. Cruise in an eye patch and shiny, shiny boots had something to do with reality. But the director, Bryan Singer (of the “X-Men” franchise), and the writers, Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander, aren’t interested in delivering a history lesson: that’s why Ken Burns was born. Slick, facile entertainment is the name of the game here, as it is in all Mr. Singer’s films, including “Apt Pupil” (about a Nazi war criminal and the American boy next door who outs him) and “The Usual Suspects,” an intricately plotted story with men and guns, secrets and shadows that Mr. McQuarrie wrote. The secrets have already begun swirling by the time “Valkyrie” opens with Stauffenberg, stationed in North Africa, bitterly recording his opposition to Hitler in a diary right before losing various body parts to the war. After his convalescence he meets Maj. Gen. Henning von Tresckow (Kenneth Branagh), who, sometime earlier, tries to blow up Hitler with a bomb hidden in bottles of French liqueur. (Russian vodka might have been more effective.) Stauffenberg soon joins the conspiratorial party that includes other British class acts brandishing high military rank and speaking in lightly accented or unaccented English: Bill Nighy as Gen. Friedrich Olbricht, Tom Wilkinson as Gen. Friedrich Fromm, Terence Stamp as Gen. Ludwig Beck and Eddie Izzard as Gen. Erich Fellgiebel.
Most of the crucial rebellious officers are played by British actors, while some of the Nazi diehards are played by Germans, which wouldn’t be worth mentioning if this cacophony of accents weren’t so distracting. But, as with the casting of Mr. Cruise, whose German voice-over quickly eases into English, this international acting community invokes an earlier studio age, when Peter Lorre and Claude Rains delivered their lines in exotically flavored English and everyone pretended that Rick’s Cafe really was located in Casablanca and not on a back lot. If Mr. Cruise doesn’t work in “Valkyrie,” it’s partly because he’s too modern, too American and way too Tom Cruise to make sense in the role, but also because what passes for movie realism keeps changing, sometimes faster than even a star can change his brand.
Though Mr. Singer’s old-fashioned movie habits, his attention to the gloss, gleam and glamour of the image, can be agreeably pleasurable, he tends to gild every lily. Hitler (David Bamber) doesn’t need spooky music or low camera angles to be villainous: he just has to show up. Mr. Singer’s fondness for exaggeration can even undercut his strongest scenes, as when Stauffenberg visits Hitler to secure approval for the rewritten Valkyrie plan. If implemented, the plan will bring down the Führer who, for his part, seems intent on bringing down the house with leers and popping eyeballs. Mr. Singer appears to have taken cues here from “Black Book,” Paul Verhoeven’s World War II romp, but he’s too serious to make such vaudeville work.
Stauffenberg, who hated Hitler but worshipped the Reich, sacrificed himself on the dual altar of nationalism and militarism, which makes him a more ambiguous figure than the one drawn in “Valkyrie.” He’s a complex character, too complex for this film, which like many stories of this type, transforms World War II into a boy’s adventure with dashing heroes, miles of black leather and crane shots of German troops in lockstep formation that would make Leni Riefenstahl flutter. It’s a war that offers moral absolutes (Nazis are evil) and narratives (Nazis are evil and should die) that seem easier to grasp than any current conflict. Truly, World War II has become the moviemaker’s gift that keeps on giving, whether you want it to or not.
The Simple Job That Morphed Into ‘Valkyrie’
Tom Cruise in the World War II thriller “Valkyrie.”
TWO Christmases ago the director Bryan Singer was looking for a modestly scaled movie to make, something he could slide in quickly between behemoths.
Bryan Singer, director of “Valkyrie,” which opens Christmas Day after several delays and much speculation and gossip.
He had just come off three consecutive comic-book adaptations (“X-Men” in 2000, its sequel in 2003 and “Superman Returns” in 2006), he had helped to create the hit Fox series “House,” and he was now in the market for something different. When he read “Valkyrie,” a script co-written by Christopher McQuarrie, who had been a friend since high school and won an Academy Award for writing Mr. Singer’s most acclaimed movie, “The Usual Suspects” (1995), he knew he had found that change of pace.
Two years, a reported $90 million, half a dozen Internet-fueled controversies and the arrival of one big movie star-turned-mini-mogul later, “Valkyrie,” with an eye-patched and jackbooted Tom Cruise as Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, the leader of a failed attempt within the German military to kill Hitler in 1944, arrives in theaters on Dec. 25.
“This was my shot at a small movie, and I blew it,” Mr. Singer said with a laugh during a Thanksgiving week visit to New York. “Maybe I just discovered I’m a big-movie guy. Even when I was making ‘Usual Suspects,’ which I shot in 35 days for $6 million, I had to have this giant boat, this police car, explosions, all that stuff. No matter what the circumstances are I tend to amplify.”
The film’s subject matter alone promised that “Valkyrie” would receive plenty of attention, given the danger of its being used to create the countermyth of a widespread German resistance. But the oppressive scrutiny of every aspect of the movie’s making probably became inevitable the moment Mr. Singer and Mr. McQuarrie, who are also two of the film’s producers, took the script to United Artists, which MGM had revived for Mr. Cruise as a boutique label.
Once Mr. Singer found himself making a Tom Cruise movie, it became hard for anything to happen quietly.
In June 2007, shortly before several months of production in Germany were to commence, German officials, distressed by Mr. Cruise’s connection to the Church of Scientology, banned the filmmakers from using certain essential locations, including the Defense Ministry. (The officials eventually relented.) A lawsuit filed by 11 extras playing German soldiers who were injured when they spilled out of the back of a truck made headlines too.
Release dates — June 2008, October 2008, February 2009 — were changed more often and more publicly than any filmmaker would like. And more recent speculation about “Valkyrie” has centered on things like a change in the advertising campaign that appears to de-emphasize Mr. Cruise and rumors of nonexistent reshoots. (The film did return to production months after shooting wrapped in Germany, but only to film a long-postponed opening set in the Tunisian desert.)
The movie’s stock has seemed to crest and crash with every fluctuation in the much-discussed fortunes of United Artists and Mr. Cruise. Intended to produce four films a year, the studio to date has released only one, “Lions for Lambs,” which opened in late 2007 to a chilly critical and commercial reception. And Paula Wagner, Mr. Cruise’s longtime producing partner, is no longer running the studio.
The nonstop chatter is enough to make Mr. Singer, who is a slightly built and boyish-looking 43, amiably guarded in the presence of a reporter.
“It’s a terrible problem, and I’m not saying that selfishly,” Mr. Singer said about the advance scrutiny. “I understand that there is an excitement about knowing something about the making of a movie, even something dramatic or scandalous. But it’s very hard to have the experience of being transported when your mind is full of what you read, very often from a not-credible source.”
That willingness to enter the film’s world on its own terms will be particularly crucial for “Valkyrie.” Although the history it recounts is well known in Germany, it’s less familiar to audiences in the United States.
Mr. McQuarrie, who composited characters and collapsed timelines to streamline his historical narrative, said that when he first became interested in the Stauffenberg story, he was told, “You can’t make a World War II movie with no American soldiers in it,” let alone one about a conspiracy whose outcome is a foregone conclusion. (Spoiler alert: Hitler lives.) He said he took it as a challenge.
It wasn’t the only one the movie would present. “Valkyrie” asks its viewers not only to buy Mr. Cruise as a German officer but also to accept that he and his co-stars — among them the British actors Tom Wilkinson and Kenneth Branagh and Carice van Houten, who is Dutch — speak in their own accents. The accent question is one that continues to bedevil directors of World War II movies. The Nazis in the current release “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” deploy clipped British accents straight out of “Brideshead Revisited,” and the Polish and Byelorussian freedom fighters in Edward Zwick’s forthcoming “Defiance” use Lithuanian inflections. “If everyone was trying to do German accents, the risk of it feeling false was really high,” Mr. Singer said of his film. “It would make no sense. Why would they be speaking in German accents? They’re German.”
Nazis are something of a leitmotif in the work of Mr. Singer (who, like Mr. McQuarrie and the film’s publicists, takes pains to point out that Stauffenberg was not one). His 1998 suspense film “Apt Pupil,” based on a novella by Stephen King, depicts the creepily sadistic relationship between a former SS officer and an American teenager who discovers him living alone in a small town. And it was Mr. Singer’s decision to identify Magneto, the villain of the first X-Men movie, explicitly as a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust.
For Mr. Singer, who is Jewish and who grew up in Princeton Junction, N.J., knowing that his adoptive parents “had lost a lot of their family history to the Holocaust,” the fascination with the subject is lifelong and fueled by influences as varied as his elementary-school friendship with two German children and regular early doses of “Hogan’s Heroes.”As a young child he first learned about the Holocaust when his shocked mother saw him wearing a crayoned swastika armband he had made without knowing its meaning. And he first heard of Stauffenberg’s July 20 plot in the early 1980s when his mother, an environmental activist, visited Bonn and stayed in the home of Freya von Moltke, the widow of a leader of the wartime resistance movement in Germany.
Tom Cruise, left, and Kenneth Branagh in a scene from “Valkyrie,” the story of a real-life plot to kill Hitler.
By then the teenage Bryan was shooting eight-millimeter World War II movies in his yard as Mr. McQuarrie watched. “What’s remarkable is how little has changed,” Mr. McQuarrie said. “There has always been what I would call a reactive certainty about the way Bryan directs. It’s a process not just about what he wants, but about what he doesn’t want. He’ll know when he sees something if it’s right or wrong. He tends to let people do what comes naturally and then provide guidance based on what he sees.”
After nearly a decade of comic-book movies, “Valkyrie” might seem to represent Mr. Singer commanding himself to do something different. But he said: “I think my work has a real continuity, not in style but in theme. Themes of identity, principal characters who aren’t what they seem: that’s the X-Men, the boy in ‘Apt Pupil,’ Superman of course.”
Mr. Singer’s next move is uncertain. A plan to direct an adaptation of Randy Shilts’s Harvey Milk biography, “The Mayor of Castro Street,” fell apart when Gus Van Sant’s “Milk” beat the project to the finish line. And Mr. Singer tenses visibly when asked about his potential involvement in a “Superman” sequel. “I really don’t know,” he said. Last summer Jeff Robinov, the president of Warner Brothers, told The Wall Street Journal that “Superman Returns” “didn’t quite work as a film in the way we wanted it to” and failed to “position the character the way he needed to be positioned.”
Mr. Singer says his own love of Superman lore may have given the movie the weight of too much nostalgia — “I’m learning to introduce characters a lot quicker and more aggressively,” he added — but he is otherwise disinclined to second-guess his decisions or even revisit his past work.
After promoting “Valkyrie” internationally, he plans to take a short vacation, then look for “something big, fantasy or sci-fi.”
“I really like the buildup to a movie like that: the prep, working with the art department, the planning. I’ve always wanted to make big movies, and I still do. Unless another really interesting plot to kill someone comes along.”
“Valkyrie” is rated PG-13. (Parents strongly cautioned.) Bombs, guns and executions, though little blood.
VALKYRIE
Opens on Thursday nationwide.
Directed by Bryan Singer; written by Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander; director of photography, Newton Thomas Sigel; edited by John Ottman; music by Mr. Ottman; production designers, Lilly Kilvert and Patrick Lumb; produced by Mr. Singer, Mr. McQuarrie and Gilbert Adler; released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures and United Artists. Running time: 2 hours.
WITH: Tom Cruise (Col. Claus von Stauffenberg), Kenneth Branagh (Maj. Gen. Henning von Tresckow), Bill Nighy (Gen. Friedrich Olbricht), Tom Wilkinson (Gen. Friedrich Fromm), Carice van Houten (Nina von Stauffenberg), Thomas Kretschmann (Maj. Otto Ernst Remer), Terence Stamp (Gen. Ludwig Beck), Eddie Izzard (Gen. Erich Fellgiebel), Kevin R. McNally (Dr. Carl Goerdeler), Jamie Parker (Lieut. Werner von Haeften), Christian Berkel (Col. Mertz von Quirnheim), David Bamber (Adolf Hitler), Tom Hollander (Col. Heinz Brandt), David Schofield (Erwin von Witzleben), Kenneth Cranham (Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel) and Halina Reijn (Margarethe von Oven).
Tom Cruise
Gender: Male
Born: July 3, 1962
Birthplace: Syracuse, New York
Nationality: American
Full Biography
From All Movie Guide: An actor whose name has become synonymous with all-American testosterone-driven entertainment, Tom Cruise spent the 1980s as one of Hollywood's brightest-shining golden boys. With black hair, blue eyes, and unabashed cockiness, Cruise rode high on such hits as Top Gun and Rain Man. Although his popularity dimmed slightly in the early '90s, he was able to bounce back with a string of hits that re-established him as both an action hero and, in the case of Jerry Maguire and Magnolia, a talented actor.
Born Thomas Cruise Mapother IV on July 3, 1962, in Syracuse, NY, Cruise led a peripatetic existence as a child, moving from town to town with his rootless family. A high-school wrestler, Cruise went into acting after being sidelined by a knee injury. This new activity served a dual purpose: performing satiated Cruise's need for attention, while the memorization aspect of acting helped him come to grips with his dyslexia.
Moving to New York in 1980, Cruise held down odd jobs until getting his first movie break in Endless Love (1981). His first big hit was Risky Business (1982), in which he entered movie-trivia infamy with the scene wherein he celebrates his parents' absence by dancing around the living room in his underwear. The Hollywood press corps began touting Cruise as one of the "Brat Pack," a group of twentysomething actors who seemed on the verge of taking over the movie industry in the early '80s. But Cruise chose not to play the sort of teen-angst roles that the other Brat Packers specialized in -- a wise decision, in that he has sustained his stardom while many of his contemporaries have fallen by the wayside or retreated into direct-to-video cheapies.
Top Gun (1985) established Cruise as an action star, but again he refused to be pigeonholed, and followed up Top Gun with a solid characterization of a fledgling pool shark in The Color of Money (1986), the film that earned co-star Paul Newman an Academy Award. In 1988, Cruise took on one of his most challenging assignments, as the brother of an autistic savant played by Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. "Old" Hollywood chose to give all the credit for that film's success to Hoffman, but a closer look at Rain Man reveals that Cruise is the true central character in the film, the one who "grows" in humanity and maturity while Hoffman's character, though brilliantly portrayed, remains the same.
In 1989, Cruise was finally given an opportunity to carry a major dramatic film without an older established star in tow. As paraplegic Vietnam vet Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Cruise delivered perhaps his most outstanding performance. Cruise's bankability faltered a bit with the expensive disappointment Far and Away in 1990 (though it did give him a chance to co-star with his-then wife Nicole Kidman), but with A Few Good Men (1992), Cruise was back in form. In 1994, Cruise appeared as the vampire Lestat in the long-delayed film adaptation of the Anne Rice novel Interview with the Vampire. Although she was vehemently opposed to Cruise's casting, Rice reversed her decision upon seeing the actor's performance.
In 1996, Cruise scored financial success with the big-budget actioner Mission: Impossible, but it was with his multilayered, Oscar-nominated performance in Jerry Maguire (also 1996) that Cruise proved once again why he is considered a major Hollywood player. 1999 saw Cruise reunited onscreen with Kidman in a project of a very different sort, Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. The film, which was the director's last, had been the subject of controversy, rumor, and speculation since it began filming. It opened to curious critics and audiences alike across the nation, and was met with a violently mixed response. However, it allowed Cruise to once again take part in film history, further solidifying his position as one of Hollywood's most well-placed movers and shakers.
Cruise's enviable position was again solidified later in 1999, when he earned a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his role as a loathsome "sexual prowess" guru in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia. In 2000, he scored again when he reprised his role as international agent Ethan Hunt in John Woo's Mission: Impossible II, which proved to be one of the summer's first big moneymakers. His status as a full-blown star of impressive dramatic range now cemented in the eyes of both longtime fans and detractors, the popular actor next set his sights on reteaming with Jerry Maguire director Cameron Crowe for a remake of Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar's (The Others) Abre los Ojos titled Vanilla Sky. Though Vanilla Sky's sometimes surreal trappings found the film recieving a mixed reception at the box office, the same could not be said for the following year's massively successful sci-fi chase film Minority Report. Based on a short story by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick and directed by none other than Steven Spielberg, Minority Report scored a direct hit at the box office, and Cruise could next be seen gearing up for his role in Edward Zwick's The Last Samurai alongside Ken Watanabe, who was nominated for an Oscar for his performance.
For his next film, Cruise picked a role unlike any he'd ever played; starring as a sociopathic hitman in the Michael Mann psychological thriller Collateral. He received major praise for his departure from the good-guy characters he'd built his career on, and for doing so convincingly. By 2005, he teamed up with Steven Spielberg again for the second time in three years with an epic adaptation of the H.G. Wells alien invasion story War of the Worlds.
The summer blockbuster was regarded as a good popcorn film, but was in some ways overshadowed by the negative publicity that Cruise had been gathering. It began in 2005, when Cruise became suddenly vocal about his beliefs in the principles of Scientology, the religion created by science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard. Cruise publicly denounced actress Brooke Shields for taking medication in order to combat her postpartum depression, citing antidepressants and the psychological sciences as immoral and unnecessary, going so far as to call it a "Nazi science" in an Entertainment Weekly interview. On June 24, 2005, he was interviewed by Matt Lauer for The Today Show during which time he appeared to be distractingly excitable and argumentative in his insistence that psychiatry is a "pseudoscience," and in a Der Spiegel interview, he was quoted as saying that Scientology has the only successful drug rehabilitation program in the world.
This behavior caused a stirring of public opinion about Cruise, as did his relationship with 27-year-old actress Katie Holmes. The two announced their engagement in the spring of 2005, and Cruise's enthusiasm for his new romantic interest created more curiosity about his mental stability. He appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show on May 23, where he jumped up and down on the couch during his interview, professing his love for Holmes. He also ecstatically shook Winfrey's hands and at one point fell dramatically to one knee. The actor's newly outspoken attitude about Scientology linked intimately to the buzz surrounding his new relationship, as Holmes converted to the faith despite a lifelong adherence to Catholicism. The media was flooded with a rumor that the young actress had a "lost" period around this time, when for two weeks she was unreachable to her parents, friends, and extended family. Many suspected that Cruise's strange public behavior was nothing more than a failed publicity stunt to raise interest in War of the Worlds, a general attitude that continued through October 2005, when he and Holmes announced that she was pregnant.
Some audiences found Cruise's ultra-enthusiastic behavior refreshing, but for the most part, the actor's new public image hurt his fan base, as he alienated many of his viewers. As he geared up for the spring 2006 release of Mission: Impossible III, his ability to sell a film based almost purely on his own likability was in question for the first time in 20 years. Despite a cast that boasted such names as Philip Seymour Hoffman and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, curiosity about the film's success seemed to hinge solely on Cruise's controversial personal life. The movie ended up performing essentially as expected, despite lining up almost conspicuously with the birth of he and Holmes' daughter Suri in spring of 2006.
The media frenzy that followed the pregnancy and birth were no less involved. There were whispers of dangerous or inadvisable methods of childcare and feeding, rumors that the Scientology endorsed method for birthing demands complete silence from everyone -- including the mother -- and questions about what kind of access to medical care and pain medicine Holmes would have in accordance with the practices of Scientology. Holmes said little publicly of her new relationship, religion, or role as a mother, but Cruise insisted in interviews that the process of the "silent birth" demands others in the room be quiet, but not the mother.
Even after the child was born, controversy surrounded the name that the couple chose for her, as Cruise's public statement claimed the name Suri was chosen because it means "princess" in Hebrew and "red rose" in Persian, while experts on both languages insisted that this was not accurate. Scholars and speakers of the languages in question said that in Persian (conventionally known as Farsi) the word denotes the color red but has no connection whatsoever to roses, while in Hebrew, the closest connection it bears to its claimed origin is that the Jews of Eastern Europe use it as a nickname for the name Sarah, and that in ancient Hebrew Sarah is the feminine form of the word Lord. After the birth, the couple finally set their wedding date and held the event in July of that year.
Cruise next made headlines on a business front, when -- in November 2006 -- he and corporate partner Paula Wagner (the twin forces behind the lucrative Cruise-Wagner Productions, est. 1993) officially "took over" the defunct United Artists studio. Originally founded by such giants as Douglas Fairbanks and Charles Chaplin in 1921, UA was run into extinction after the Heaven's Gate fiasco in the early '80s and its purchase by Transamerica's Kirk Kerkorian. The press announced that Cruise and Wagner would "revive" the studio, with Wagner serving as Chief Executive Officer and Cruise starring in and producing projects. MGM (UA's parent company) handed the team the rights to almost single-handedly develop United's production slate, and gave them an allotment of four films per year, a number expected to dramatically increase. Harry Sloan, the chairman of MGM, remarked in a press release, "Partnering with Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner, we have the ideal creative foundation from which to reintroduce the United Artists brand. United Artists is once again the haven for independent filmmakers and a vital resource in developing quality filmed entertainment consistent with MGM's modern studio model."
One of the fist films to be produced by the new United Artists was the tense political thriller Lions for Lambs, which took an earnest and unflinching look at the politics behind the Iraq war. Cruise both starred in and produced the film, and though it performed unevenly with critics and at the box office, he soon green-lit another UA production, Valkyrie. Both producing and starring again, Cruise would play Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, a Nazi officer who infamously attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler during the Thrid Reich in Germany. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Education
Location - Glen Ridge, NJ
Year range - 1980
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