Allied (Robert Zemeckis, 2016)

[hearthesilence]

It's no masterpiece, but Allied is a reasonably intelligent popcorn film. I'm not a huge Zemeckis fan, but there's enough moments in this film that should give a skeptic a better understanding on why Dave Kehr speaks so highly of him ("I always expect great things from [Zemeckis].") The opening shot, the love scene that unfolds in a sandstorm, wordless stretches at a party (nearly the centerpiece of the film), a suspenseful and "unseen" killing and the film's climax are masterfully done. Even with a strong (albeit uneven) script by Steven Knight (who wrote the excellent Eastern Promises), these moments are wonderfully visualized by Zemeckis. And if much of the film doesn't approach the brilliance of these scenes, there are long stretches that show an effortless economy and efficiency, especially in their editing - the film is full of excellent transitions from one time/place to another, especially one that leads to a series of pillow shots that quickly set up everything we need to know.

Some of the CG is still too slick (the opening would've been impossible without it, but my God would it have looked amazing if it wasn't) and there are scenes that feel too ridiculous, but this is first-rate entertainment.

Without giving too much away, two other films came to mind when I saw this. Casablanca, which was made and released at the heigh of WWII, is famous for a couple that puts the world above their own personal lives. 50 year later, such concerns aren't there for the WWII epic The English Patient - the lead character sells out to the Nazis in order to save the woman in his life. Now with this film, we have an American/British agent doing ridiculous things that clearly endanger the war effort against the Nazis, all for his wife. I kept thinking that it's easier to indulge in such fantasies decades removed from WWII because the populace doesn't have a strong memory of how high the stakes were. Hoping we don't get a harsh lesson in that fact with the turmoil that's taken over the Western democracies in the world.

[Brian C]

It's no masterpiece, but Allied is a reasonably intelligent popcorn film. I'm not a huge Zemeckis fan, but there's enough moments in this film that should give a skeptic a better understanding on why Dave Kehr speaks so highly of him ("I always expect great things from [Zemeckis].") The opening shot, the love scene that unfolds in a sandstorm, wordless stretches at a party (nearly the centerpiece of the film), a suspenseful and "unseen" killing and the film's climax are masterfully done. Even with a strong (albeit uneven) script by Steven Knight (who wrote the excellent Eastern Promises), these moments are wonderfully visualized by Zemeckis. And if much of the film doesn't approach the brilliance of these scenes, there are long stretches that show an effortless economy and efficiency, especially in their editing - the film is full of excellent transitions from one time/place to another, especially one that leads to a series of pillow shots that quickly set up everything we need to know.

Some of the CG is still too slick (the opening would've been impossible without it, but my God would it have looked amazing if it wasn't) and there are scenes that feel too ridiculous, but this is first-rate entertainment.

Without giving too much away, two other films came to mind when I saw this. Casablanca, which was made and released at the heigh of WWII, is famous for a couple that puts the world above their own personal lives. 50 year later, such concerns aren't there for the WWII epic The English Patient - the lead character sells out to the Nazis in order to save the woman in his life. Now with this film, we have an American/British agent doing ridiculous things that clearly endanger the war effort against the Nazis, all for his wife. I kept thinking that it's easier to indulge in such fantasies decades removed from WWII because the populace doesn't have a strong memory of how high the stakes were. Hoping we don't get a harsh lesson in that fact with the turmoil that's taken over the Western democracies in the world.

I agree that it's a worthy film, but I also actually liked the way that these characters are set up.

I love Casablanca, but it's also a movie that works to flatter its audience. We all like to think that we're Rick, tough-talking, no-nonsense realists who nonetheless have a soft spot for doing the right thing. Ultimately, the movie takes a very easy way out, by making "the right thing" pretty easy. No one gets hurt, and the worst thing that happens are a few tears at lost love. Sure, the war itself was a high-stakes affair, but the stakes for those characters were pretty low, even as the movie patted itself on the back for the moral greatness of its characters.

I love The English Patient, too, because it ups the ante for its characters. It makes "the right thing" somewhat more ambiguous. It makes clear that the heroes aren't always heroic and challenges viewers to wonder what they'd do in a situation that will produce real human suffering either way. It views the war - war in general, perhaps - as not a battle of right and wrong, but a series of actions taken out of self-interest producing a moral order out of control.

What Allied does is different still.

SpoilerShow

It makes the "good" person - the one who will ultimately prove to be the most heroic, by being the one most willing to make sacrifices - a German spy! And she even makes those sacrifices on behalf of her enemy at war! What I took away from it is that we're asked to look at the good in our enemies, even if those enemies are literally Nazis - not to put up with or endorse Nazism, of course, but rather to see that our enemies are people too, capable of love, honor, and sacrifice. It seems pretty subversive of a slick Hollywood film to carry that message.

[hearthesilence]

Excellent point about that subversive notion. It was appreciated, but at the same time, I think it's been explored in nearly every film I treasure about Occupied France (Leon Morin) or European Resistance groups (Army of Shadows, Black Book) and in much more profound ways too, so the concept made less of an impact for me in Allied.

[Brian C]

Well sure, I will certainly grant that the two Melvilles were superior films!

[DarkImbecile]

Some of the CG is still too slick (the opening would've been impossible without it, but my God would it have looked amazing if it wasn't) and there are scenes that feel too ridiculous, but this is first-rate entertainment.

This pointless overuse of CGI was almost absurdly distracting from otherwise fine scenes at multiple points in Allied, in particular

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the sex scene in the car during the sandstorm, which I found really effective as the camera swirled around Pitt and Cotillard with the only sound being the sand hitting the car around them... until Zemeckis has the camera pull through the back window and into the storm for 1.5 seconds of really obvious and utterly unnecessary CGI camera trickery.

Same with the opening shots of Pitt parachuting into the Moroccan desert: why do we have to see him hit the ground? Just show us his parachute in the wind, pan over as he wraps it up and hides it, and we're set without the awkwardly inhuman tumble of CGIPitt down the sand dune.

Or the two nighttime air raid sequences, which would have been substantially more compelling and disturbing as an obliquely glimpsed chaos of motion and light that could bring death at any moment, rather than the clearly fake and on-the-nose shots of bombers and fighters diving towards the camera and characters.

Zemeckis just can't seem to help himself, but it would have probably saved him some money and definitely measurably improved the film in my mind to have avoided these and several other instances of CGI overkill like them.

Overall, while I thought the film was admirably and appropriately old-fashioned in its sensibilities and story-telling style, it had too many flaws - mostly rooted in Zemeckis' visual indulgences and inability to direct Pitt to a performance in the same ballpark as Cotillard's (and I really appreciate Pitt when he's paired with a director that uses him well) - to fully come together.

That said, there were a few scenes and sequences that worked beautifully and made me glad I caught it, my favorite being

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the sequence beginning with Pitt bringing Cotillard to the piano and ending with Pitt entering the jeweler's shop, leaving Cotillard in an increasingly tense wait for an anticipated gunshot until she finally begins to prepare to leave the baby in the car and go inside herself. Very well executed scene in the midst of the best portion of the film.