DAVID ADAMS finds some interesting questions about the complexities of war raised in Allied…
Allied (M)
In a Word: Intriguing
Brad Pitt plays Max Vatan and Marion Cotillard plays Marianne Beausejour in Allied. PICTURE: Daniel Smith © 2016 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
“There’s plenty of glamour and action – in Morocco, London and France – and the film’s second-half does run a little like a whodunit as Vatan attempts to find out the truth about his wife, but it’s the wrestle with complexities of wartime life that’s really the film’s strength.”
Morality isn’t always clear-cut in a time of war – should you commit what would normally be seen as a crime to save others, for example? – and romantic spy thriller Allied is an exploration of some of those complexities.
The film tells the story of Canadian spy, Wing Commander Max Vatan (Brad Pitt), who is inserted into Morocco in North Africa where on meeting up with French Resistance agent, Marianne Beauséjour (Marion Cotillard) they conduct an operation aimed at killing the German ambassador and so damaging the Nazi war machine.
Vatan falls in love with Beauséjour on the mission and they escape to London together where, despite his ongoing role in the war, they – and their new baby – live something of an idyllic existence (as much as one can in war) in a leafy part of the city.
But a spanner is thrown into the works when Vatan is summoned by his bosses and, meeting with a representative of the notorious V section, told his wife is a suspected German spy and they are setting a trap to catch her, one that, if proven true will mean Vatan has to execute her by his own hand.
That much we’re told in the shorts before the film and it’s well into the movie itself before we catch up and the most interesting part of the narrative begins.
Evocative of films like 1942’s Casablanca (the setting of the initial operation there is, one assumes, no accident), it’s a beautifully shot period piece although its depiction of life in wartime London is perhaps a little heavy-handed in showing how the looming spectre of death lead to an atmosphere of hedonism.
Pitt and Cotillard do a fair job but director Robert Zemeckis (Back to The Future/Cast Away) cuts the story in such a way that it doesn’t really allow for any on-screen chemistry to develop, leaving them both a little wooden.
There’s plenty of glamour and action – in Morocco, London and France – and the film’s second-half does run a little like a whodunit as Vatan attempts to find out the truth about his wife, but it’s the wrestle with complexities of wartime life that’s really the film’s strength.
The end when it does come, is a little bit of an anti-climax, but that doesn’t take too much away from the audience enjoyment – it’s the hunt, the chase for the truth, that forms the heart of what the film’s all about.
Not a film that will echo through the ages but it’s a thought-provoking enough offering for the holidays.
