Stauffenberg- Tom Cruise
“Attention must be paid to such a man.” While Valkyrie highlights the resistance made by Claus Von Stauffenberg, it doesn’t pay enough attention to the man himself. Valkyrie is a well-made, tightly woven story of a plot to assassinate the Fuhrer and save not only Germany via a truce with the Allies, but in doing so to save all of Europe. While the film contains much to be admired and ought to be seen simply for the compelling story, there is an element which is missing and that’s motivation which might be scripted more for the intensity that actors like Tom Cruise and Kenneth Branagh could bring to their parts.
Stauffenberg has sensed that Germany will be ruined under Adolf Hitler even before he loses his hand and eye in North Africa. While placing the missing element which would take the film from a very good, nodding assent to a sublime, cathartic, stopped-me-short-of-breath finale, we need to be taken deeper with Stauffenberg. Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, and Hotel Rwanda all make use of historical figures willing to risk lives for fellow countrymen. But in Schindler’s List, we are allowed to enter Oskar Schindler’s revelation at the end from a self-serving, hands-off businessman to the frantic look that selling his ring might have saved one more life. Adding to the films is the emotional impact felt of seeing Schindler survivors’ descendants, Private Ryan as an indebted older man, and the Rwandan orphans meeting with a hotel owner who, like Schindler, risked his job and then life for others.
Except for a brief diary entry and conversation, we know that Stauffenberg feels Hitler must be replaced or Germany fall to ruins, a conclusion that tells without showing. We’re wondering the American political intrigue question of “What did Stauffenberg know and when did he know it?” It is no small task to ask a director to seamlessly interweave flashback of family, an ascent in the ranks, the initial attraction of Hitler to Weimar Germany, and an a imaginary vision of what the country might look like with Stauffenberg’s vision. But absent this, Valkyrie works more as a historical docudrama with some high-intensity action scenes. Some layers are added by showing Hitler’s motivations in discussing Wagner and in his eerie address to the German people conveying that his survival of the assassination attempt was the hand of God.
Director Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects, X-Men) accomplishes a technique which gives Valkyrie as much emotional impact as it can absent a deeper look into Stauffenberg’s soul. He plays upon the camaraderie felt between Stauffenberg and his right-hand man whose eyes meet Stauffenberg’s before their fated end. And Stauffenberg’s eyes wander to a secretary whose repeated calls represent the only feminine reprieve from the male-dominated intrigue around him and whose continual attempts to reach his family fail.
Singer’s storytelling works well here, much like The Usual Suspects did, by withholding key information from the viewer. While inside Berlin, Stauffenberg and the others appear to have changed the course of history. Hitler is dead. “Operation Valkyrie” has initiated the arrest of all the SS Elite, and Stauffenberg’s men have replaced Hitler and Himmler with their own chosen leader. By confining the action to the compound, Singer is able to withhold the information that Hitler suffered but a minor burn and cuts, that the orders by Stauffenberg to arrest SS Elite were discovered to be rogue orders instead of actual ones, and that their seeming history of changing the 20th century landscape of Europe had become a hiccup in one section of Berlin for a brief time. Thus, the words of Hitler dismissing the assassination attempt show that for all their work, they affected Hitler to have a mere, raised-eyebrows, shrugging of the shoulders. The effect for Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators, however, is certain death.
And so they die. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the young German pastor, had a purpose for his death, which was to lay down his life not only for the good of humanity but because he revealed long before in his writings that grace was costly. Grace cost something (the Cross) and demanded a cost, that one pick up his own cross and follow. Bonhoeffer died in Flossenberg after walking naked to the gallows and being hanged with a piano string.
See Valkyrie which is well-crafted because even without getting to really know Stauffenberg as a man, it is well worth knowing Stauffenberg’s noble deeds and those of his comrades.
Thankyou for your review. Until reading it I had not fully realized that the writer and director’s trick was to put us in the midst of the conspirators with only their knowledge and lack thereof re. Hitler’s fate. Prior films on the topic made it clear right after the bomb exlosion that Hitler ahd survived, thus removing any sense of suspense.
Re. Bonhoeffer – he was in prison on July 20 and his fate was sealed with the explosion of Stauffenberg’s bomb as the related Gestapo investigation led to Dohnanyi’s Zossen documents. While not a member of the July 20 conspiracy per se, he was a committed resister and a victim of Hitler’s purge.
Heroes all!
Colin Fraser
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