Rico's rants: Movies to see

Michael Cieply has an article in The New York Times about some upcoming World War Two movies:

In Fury, brutal American tankers beat Hitler with grit. “These are the guys who won the war,” insists David Ayer, who wrote and directed the film.

But The Imitation Game, which arrives on screens a month later, credits victory to cold British logic. “Blood-soaked calculus” is what the film’s hero, Alan Turing, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, calls his code-breaking during World War Two.

In contrast to both, Unbroken, due at Christmas, finds triumph in the soul. Directed by Angelina Jolie, it tells the story of Louis Zamperini, an Olympic runner and downed B-24 bombardier whose captivity and torment ended in spiritual redemption.

So what was it that led the Allies to victory? And, perhaps more pressingly for Hollywood, which makes the best movie?

These three pictures, each with a radically different perspective on the lessons of World War Two, are likely to open fresh conversations about the War. With major stars and prominent filmmakers, all three films are virtually certain to be widely seen. And each is backed by a studio that appears bent on pushing it toward the Academy Awards ceremony, on 22 February 2015:

The Imitation Game, directed by Morten Tyldum, is a prime prospect for the Weinstein Company, which, in 2011, captured the Best Picture award with another World War Two-themed film, The King’s Speech. Like its predecessor, The Imitation Game was introduced at film festivals in Telluride and Toronto, and will open in late November of 2014, just as awards voters start crystallizing their opinions.
Fury, which stars Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, and Logan Lerman, among others, has been positioned by Sony Pictures Entertainment very differently, as an action film: a poster for it shows an exhausted Pitt slumped over the cannon of a tank he commands and for which the movie is titled. But the studio, in a sure sign that it is trolling for prizes, has retained Lisa Taback, an Oscar consultant who has been aligned with successful campaigns by Weinstein.
Universal Pictures, for its part, will come late to the race with Unbroken, based on the book by Laura Hillenbrand. Angelina Jolie is in Malta working with her husband, Pitt, on a new film, so she will not be able to hit the awards circuit here and in New York City for at least another month.
Though unusual, the sudden convergence of World War Two films has precedent:
In 1999, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, and Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful, all set during the War, captured three out of five nominations for the Best Picture Oscar. In what was widely seen as an upset over Spielberg’s film, the award went instead to a romance, Shakespeare in Love, directed by John Madden (the director, not the football coach). (Elizabeth, directed by Shekhar Kapur, was the other nominee.)
David Rensin, who collaborated on two books with Zamperini, who died in July of 2014 at the age of 97, suggests that the current alignment may pose a sort of cultural reconciliation with fast-disappearing veterans of the War. “It’s the last great shot for the greatest generation,” said Rensin, whose new book with Zamperini, titled Don’t Give Up, Don’t Give In: Lessons From an Extraordinary Life, is being published by HarperCollins’ Dey Street Books imprint in November of 2014.

If the films are indeed a final accounting, they add up in very different ways. They are far less reliant on a warm “Band of Brothers” sentiment than were earlier war movies like Saving Private Ryan, Battle of the Bulge, and The Big Red One:

The new movies’ heroes are a diverse group: the fictional Wardaddy Collier, played by Brad Pitt, is a ferocious tank commander; Turing, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, is a persecuted, gay mathematician (he died in 1954, at just 41); and Zamperini, played by Jack O’Connell, was tortured and starved by his Japanese captors, but later, with guidance from the evangelist Billy Graham, learned to forgive his enemies.
Peter Biskind, a film historian who is at work on a book about what he calls “extreme culture”, said he was not surprised to find the new war films telling harsh stories that drive toward opposing conclusions. He spoke earlier this month of a cultural landscape in which consensus has faded, and studio filmmakers are pushing toward edges they might not otherwise have tested. “The center has shrunk considerably,” Biskind said.
Unbroken is perhaps the closest of the three to a conventional Hollywood film in its focus on an empathetic protagonist. But Fury pushes the envelope with its unblinking look at the behavior of American forces who, in older films, were often simply lionized, while The Imitation Game stretches elsewhere, with its admiration for a hero who was ostracized in his time.
In recent Oscar seasons, Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, which celebrated a drug-fueled fraud artist, and Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, which explored the use of torture in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, were simultaneously admired and denounced for working on just such edges.
Graham Moore, who wrote The Imitation Game, noted that Turing’s story— in which a chilly moral calculus and the secretiveness of a hunted homosexual turn the War’s tide— had once seemed too difficult for a major film. “About once a year, I would tell my agents I really wanted to write this movie about a gay English mathematician who committed suicide in the 1950s, and they would say: ‘Please don’t’,” Moore said.
Now, he added, “Lots of unique and special movies are getting made, and I get to watch them.”

A.O. Scott has a review of Diplomacy by Volker Schlöndorff :

“We’ll always have Paris,” Rick promised Ilsa at the end of Casablanca, recalling a romantic idyll cruelly interrupted by the German occupation. In the real world, in the late summer of 1944, as the Allied armies drew closer, the Nazis decided that, if they could not have Paris, nobody else would, either. Hitler ordered the complete destruction of the city. Bridges and monuments— the Opera, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre— were to be blown up; he hoped to leave tens of thousands dead amid the rubble and erase centuries of art, architecture and civilization.

The man charged with carrying out the demolition was General Dietrich von Choltitz, the German military governor of Paris. That he disobeyed the Führer’s orders is obvious enough, even to those who don’t know the historical details. How and why he did so is the subject of Diplomatie (French for Diplomacy), a fascinating film directed by Volker Schlöndorff and based on Cyril Gely’s play, in which General von Choltitz is portrayed by the great French actor Niels Arestrup (photo), who originated the role onstage and who is joined by André Dussollier as Raoul Nordling, the Swedish ambassador to France.

The story of Nordling’s contribution to saving Paris has been told on film before, in René Clément’s Is Paris Burning? (1966), an artifact of the grand era of international co-production, which cast Orson Welles as the Scandinavian diplomat Nordling, and Gert Fröbe as the German general. Schlöndorff’s film, though it offers a few scenic glimpses and an occasional burst of gunfire, presents a more concise narrative. It is a two-person chamber drama unfolding over a long, tense August night in a single enclosed space, von Choltitz’ suite at the Hotel Meurice.

The conversations depicted here, in which Nordling uses all of his diplomatic skills to persuade von Choltitz to spare the city they both love, never took place, though the film’s timeline is otherwise accurate. It is, in any case, less a docudrama than an allegory, an attempt to distill the moral and psychological essence of a complex historical moment, and to illuminate that moment through the verbal interaction of two very different personalities.
Von Choltitz, a veteran of both world wars, from an old German military family, is blunt and brutal. He is also exhausted and demoralized, suffering from terrible asthma and the realization that the cause he has served is on the verge of defeat.
Arestrup, a broad-chested, brooding bull of a man— so terrifying and charismatic as the jailhouse kingpin in A Prophet— declines to portray the character as a mensch in monster’s clothing. Von Choltitz may have good taste in food and art, and an appealing sense of irony, but he is someone who has, without hesitation or compunction, supervised the massacre of Jews near the Eastern Front and the leveling of cities less glamorous than Paris.

The general is a puzzle for the ambassador to solve. Dussollier, a fixture in the intellectually nimble work of Alain Resnais, is as elegant as Arestrup is rough, and his Nordling is a smooth and dapper gentleman, whose impeccable manners disguise a gift for guile. Though he insists that he and his government are unwaveringly neutral, he is clearly in communication with the Resistance and has been spying on his interlocutor. He disarms the general with tales of bygone Parisian intrigue— they are in the very room where Napoleon III kept one of his mistresses— and appeals, in turn, to his conscience, his vanity and his self-protective instincts.

Schlöndorff, who served his apprenticeship in France with Louis Malle and Jean-Pierre Melville before becoming one of the leading figures in the New German Cinema of the 1970s, turns the talkiness and the staginess of Diplomacy to the film’s advantage. His precise, restless camera creates a feeling of claustrophobic suspense as the plot races against the clock toward what is, for the audience at least, a foregone conclusion. The real mystery lies not in the outcome but in von Choltitz’ motive. Has Nordling tapped into a hidden spring of decency, or does von Choltitz, like so many Germans (including Hitler) harbor a sentimental affection for Paris? Does the general care more about the safety of his wife and children in Germany, or about the status of his nation in postwar Europe?

You could say that the answers don’t matter, insofar as Nordling’s diplomacy was successful, and we still have Paris. But the value of Diplomacy is that it produces at least as much unsettlement as relief, compelling the viewer to remain haunted by nightmarish thoughts of what might have happened. Other cities were flattened, after all, and other populations were wiped out during World War Two, which permanently collapsed the distance between the unthinkable and the actual. What seems unimaginable now was, a mere seventy years ago, not only imagined but also carefully planned and very nearly carried out.