What’s the major problem with the movie Valkyrie?

Writing in The New American magazine, Selwyn Duke argues that the film’s chief shortcoming is that Tom Cruise doesn’t do justice to the faith and character of the man he portrays, Col. Claus von Stauffenberg.

Von Stauffenberg was the aristocratic Catholic war hero who led the failed 1944 plot, codenamed “Valkyrie,” to kill Adolf Hitler and overthrow Hitler’s Nazi regime. 

After Hitler narrowly escaped death from a bomb planted by von Stauffenberg, the German colonel was arrested and summarily executed a few hours later.

Duke says Valkyrie does a good job on the technical details of the assassination plot, but fails abysmally when it comes to providing viewers with an understanding of von Stauffenberg’s motivations.

“Tom Cruise portrays von Stauffenberg as having the personality of the Terminator — and not the quite lovable robot in T-2 but the instrument of death in the original,” Duke writes in his article, which recounts the relevant details about von Stauffenberg’s life and religious beliefs that were largely omitted from Valkyrie. “The actor seems to spend the entire film wearing the same expression, a stone-faced scowl; I can honestly say it’s the only look I remember on his face. Is this the von Stauffenberg whose eldest son, Berthold, professed love for and called ‘our always-cheerful father’? Is this the man who, after suffering those horrific injuries that robbed him of most of his digits, quipped to friends that he had never really known what to do with so many fingers while he still had all of them anyway? I think not.”

Comments Duke, “Even more significantly, little is said about von Stauffenberg’s deepest motivations. What brought a career army officer to the point at which he was willing to undertake such a radical act? What were his moral conflicts and struggles with conscience? What was the evolution in his thinking?”

In fact, Duke notes, it was von Stauffenberg’s Catholic faith that impelled him to assume leadership of the plot to assassinate Hitler — but only after he wrestled with his conscience over the question of whether it was his Christian duty to commit such an act of deliberate “high treason.”

“Yet the film allows religious motivations to be a casualty of war, either the war on Christianity or war-movie priorities or both,” Duke writes. “Thus is von Stauffenberg, the brave soldier, witty friend and father, philosopher, and faithful Catholic — a true man for all seasons — reduced to a mere instrument in the assassination plot, much like the bomb he carried. It’s a defect that prevents the audience from forming the kind of emotional connection with the character that a more soulful treatment would engender.”

— Tom McFeely