[rating:4]
Director: Bryan Singer
Starring: Tom Cruise, Kenneth Brannagh
When Angelina Jolie does a serious movie, people crawl out of the woodwork to moan that they can’t accept her as a dramatic actress because they can only see the pouty-lipped tabloid goddess, overshadowing anything she might do. I don’t get that. If there’s anyone that should apply to, it’s not Jolie, it’s Tom Cruise, because he’s been playing the same character his entire career. Specifically, he’s been playing the guy who jumps up and down on Oprah’s couch because he’s finally been “cleared” of Xenu’s “Thetans.”
“Nuh-uh,” people say to me. “What about Magnolia?” Totally the guy high on the self-help fake-philosophy Kool-Aid, jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch. “What about in Tropic Thunder?” Jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch in a smugly self-loving fat suit. “But, but, Top Gun …” Jumping up and down in a flight suit, same cockiness, more homoerotic undertones.
Yet in Valkyrie, the new film by Bryan Singer, Cruise manages to not seem like a 100% Tom Cruise Character. Maybe it’s because his German general here never smiles. Take that thousand-watt shit-eating madman’s grin away from Cruise, and you nearly have a human being. In the opening scene, the film uses a technique to sort of break us through the language barrier (of what, in reality, should be a story spoken entirely in German) and deal with the fact that Mr. Cruise will not be doing a German accent. Almost nobody in this film has a German accent. There’s American accents and different British accents, and I don’t know what. And it’s all better than Tom Cruise doing a German accent, because you know that even if he goddamn nailed it, they’d be giggling in every multiplex in America.
Don’t get me wrong, thought. The film is good, and Cruise rises above his Cruise-itude. Singer puts together a cookin’ little potboiler here based on apparently the most successful of the not-at-all successful attempts to assassinate Hitler during WWII. A cursory bit of research suggests that the film is dramatically over-dramatizing the degree to which Cruise’s team nearly conquers Berlin with a crazy martial law con, but it seems that mostly the film is playing fair with reality. The story moves quickly and has very, very little depth of character, as a clockwork script demands that we keep it moving, people, keep it moving. The style works–there is not a wasted frame of film here; Singer’s work is amazingly tight. It’s enough to get him forgiven for molesting the Superman canon a couple years back, or for wasting his talent on a couple X-Men movies.
It would be interesting, someday, to see Tom Cruise play somebody, oh, relaxed. Maybe with some self-doubt. It would also be interesting to see cotton candy clouds rain chocolate sprinkles down on all the good boys and girls of the world. Until then, we have Cruise very effectively channelling his one-note mania in a film assembled like a Swiss watch (that was no doubt previously looted by Nazis).
Tags: drama, historical, nazi, tom cruise
