I’m way behind on blogging of late, so I’ll be trying to rectify that in the run-up to the Oscars.  Several weeks ago I met up with a friend from out of town and we caught Tom Cruise’s new film, Valkyrie.  I had caught Scott Simon’s interview with Cruise and director Brian Singer a few days earlier and it had caught my interest.  I wasn’t particularly jazzed to see Valkyrie until Simon’s interview caught me up on some of the background of the film.

Valkyrie is the story of Col. Claus von Stauffenberg (played by Cruise) and a band of other Nazi insiders who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler.  I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff.  One of my favorite films, Amen, tells the true story of SS officer and scientist Kurt Gerstein and his struggle to cripple the concentration camps from within while risking everything to reach the Pope with the truth of what was happening in Hitler’s Germany in order to alert Christians all over the world.  Valkyrie is also the story of a solider whose conscience leads him to commit treason – another theme I’m quite taken with and which reminds me of yet another of my favorite films, The Four Feathers.

I admire filmmakers who tackle historical narratives where the “end of the story” is already obvious.  Think, Titanic, for example, there is no suspense about whether or not the boat would sink.  Similarly with Valkyrie, all the trailers have made it obvious that the film is about an assassination attempt on Hitler… and we all know that Hitler wasn’t assassinated.  But Valkyrie doesn’t suffer as a film from the known outcome of the operation.  Instead what Valkyrie thrives on is suspense and tension.  We know that Stauffenberg & Co. will fail, but we don’t know when, or how, or if they’ll be caught.  What unfolds is one of the most stressful films I’ve seen.  Think of the kind of tension you felt the first time you saw Jaws.  It’s that intense.

Beyond all the tension and suspense, Valkyrie gave me pause to think about the courage it took men to put country and patriotism aside to do what they thought was right.  As a Christian pacifist I still prefer the methods of men like Kurt Gerstein to those of Stauffenberg, but I am still sympathetic with the position they found themselves in.

Another moment that gave me pause was Hitler’s response to the failed assassination attempt.  In a radio address to Germany shortly afterwards he spoke of the event as a sign that God’s providence had saved him and his survival was a sign from God that he was on the right path.  I always grimace a bit when people say that “everything happens for a reason,” and this is exactly why.  That kind of theology is just what Hitler drew on to justify his own genocidal designs.