The Valkyrie plot was really a thing that happened (the cognoscenti call it the Schwarze Kapelle), and it’s got all the makings of a great spy thriller … except one: There’s no good guy. Claus von Stauffenberg was a better guy than Hitler, I suppose, but that’s a bar so low it’s subterranean. Von Stauffenberg was a Wehrmacht colonel who’d seen action in pretty much every theater up to that point, including the invasions of Poland and Russia. It’s safe to say that one does not rise to the rank of colonel via combat in the Nazi armed forces without being involved in some shady shit. Indeed, as Wiki informs us, von Stauffenberg was fine with the way things ran in Poland, and initially declined to participate in the resistance out of a sense of personal loyalty to the Führer.
A movie can get away with showing mostly shades of gray, but in the case of the Valkyrie plot, both shades are pretty damn close to black.
Nor was the 2008 movie, starring Tom Cruise, an isolated case. A few years earlier, Jude Law and Ed Harris squared off as dueling snipers in Enemy at the Gates … set during the Battle of Stalingrad. Who do you root for, the Nazi or the Commie? The producers opt for “commie”, obviously, but their attempts to humanize the Jude Law character are embarrassing — even if we accept Law’s character as totally apolitical, no movie featuring a political commissar in a vital supporting role, not to mention “cameos” by Khrushchev and Stalin himself, can fail to remind viewers that everyone involved was awful. Even the most gripping battle scenes (and to be fair, some of them were pretty good) can’t make up for the fact that the world would be a far, far better place if they somehow both could’ve lost.
Those are high-level failures, conceptual mistakes, the kind that professional storytellers simply shouldn’t make. Not only that, though, both movies have unforgivable mistakes in the execution, at almost every level. Tom Cruise, for instance, is comically miscast as Stauffenberg. I’ve written before about how weird it is that casting directors seem to obsess over finding actors who look like even obscure historical figures. Cruise looks a bit like Stauffenberg, I guess, but there’s simply no way a guy with his … ummm … distinctive acting style should be anywhere near a historical drama. Tom Cruise only ever really plays Tom Cruise, so “Tom Cruise dressed up as a Nazi” is really jarring.
And that’s before you consider the accents. Maybe Tom Cruise can’t do a German accent, I dunno. I seem to recall he did an Irish accent in a movie once, and that turned out ok, but again, whatever character he was playing was just “Tom Cruise with an Irish accent.” So maybe if you feel you must cast him as a German, letting him use his “natural” American accent is the way to go. But if you’re going to do that, please, for pete’s sake, make everyone else do an American accent, too. I know Kenneth Branagh can do one. So either cast guys who can do the right accent, or, failing that, who can do each other’s accent. Otherwise you get a huge, distracting mess.
Enemy at the Gates was actually worse: Law, Joseph Fiennes (the commissar), and Rachel Weisz (the love interest) all used their native British accents … but they’re different kinds of British accent, at least in Law’s case. Meanwhile, Ed Harris (the Nazi antagonist) uses the “neutral” American accent, while supporting player Ron Perlman, who is American, does a comically over-the-top Russian … as do the guys playing Khrushchev and Stalin. It’s just weird. In both movies, you’ve got supposedly tight groups of friends (or, at least, co-conspirators) talking to each other in wildly different accents. That kind of thing is bad enough in a movie like Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, which made no pretenses to historical accuracy; it’s movie-destroying in a supposedly serious, historically-based thriller.
Severian, “Storytelling Fail”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-13.
August 27, 2024
QotD: Who were the good guys?
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