Movie Review: Allied
There’s a gigantic moral lapse in Allied, written by the talented Steven Knight (Amazing Grace, The Hundred-Foot Journey, Locke) and directed by the masterful Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future trilogy, The Walk). Explaining what it is gives away the whole plot, which I don’t want to do because this lush, glamorous romantic movie is too gorgeous and marvelous to dismiss. Mr. Zemeckis is an ambitious filmmaker with a keen sense of story and picture, though he does not always match philosophy to the scale, scope and sensibility of his grandest visions. His Cast Away, which I think is excellent, Contact, Forrest Gump and other movies come to mind.
Add Allied to the list of his movies that are impaired from the start and don’t achieve the greatness of the ingenious Back to the Future pictures and last year’s magnificent cinematic elegy to the World Trade Center (1973-2001), The Walk. Allied comes very close and should be seen. Know in advance that a major problem cuts its power. See if you can figure it out as you watch.
I was held throughout the two-hour movie—which is an old-fashioned movie movie—until the end credits. Allied, which is about the shared values that bind, begins with a long, slow and neatly choreographed glide into enemy territory as the north African desert sun hovers on the horizon. Brad Pitt’s Max drops on the dunes of French Morocco. He’s in Casablanca by nightfall, meeting the hummingbird-coded Frenchwoman, Marianne (Marion Cotillard, Macbeth, Midnight in Paris). Both Cotillard and Pitt (Moneyball, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, 12 Years a Slave, World War Z) shine in demanding roles, the type of parts that aren’t written anymore because they’re layered and glamorous and intended for movie stars that don’t totally exist.
The leading man and woman rise to the challenge. Stunning costumes, lacquered hair and lustrous photography by Don Burgess (Eight Below) serve to enhance the sensual air and infuse this Forties war drama with suspicion, romance and prolonged tension and suspense. Max and Marianne meet in an Allied undercover operation against the National Socialist Germans. They ride, dance, cavort, smoke cigarettes—in the best use of cigarettes since Now Voyager—kiss on moonlit African rooftops and take target practice together, too, all toward the goal of eradicating Nazis. Marianne and Max have moments alone, too, in long takes with deadly and intriguing implications. Both are trained professionals. As such, they remain mysterious, her in smooth talk and him in cold glances. To the distant sound of Moslem prayers and ghostly presence of a Nazi wife behind a curtain, watching them is irresistible.
Allied is a movie star movie, to be sure, and it exists to keep the audience watching this deadly male-female dance as both are imperiled. And, with 60-40 odds against pulling off the Casablanca mission, it’s natural that they fall in love. Or do they? Allied doesn’t let on and instead lets the viewer make the connection (if it’s there to be made) after an insatiable sex scene in a swirling sandstorm.
Do they or don’t they and will they or won’t they take secondary status to Allied‘s basic theme, beginning with that incredible sandstorm, that the world at war rages, explodes and crashes around Max and Marianne. As the action shifts to London and, periodically, France, this theme plays out in childbirth and at a party, with certain angles, shadows and light casting the two at the center of a world spiraling out of control. To entice and add to the puzzle in rising tension, Knight and Zemeckis include friendly and unfriendly witnesses and observers to their ongoing ordeal, from officers, a secretary and lesbians to the beautiful baby who changes everything if babies change anything.
The sensuous and tense affair draws to a memorable conclusion as raindrops, tracer fire and bombs fall and there’s a picnic at what feels like the end of the world.
Allied grants the grand, romantic wish fulfillment of us against the world as it bumps, tests and teases with its lacquered, polished glamour in the face of war, which it does not gloss over. But this involving war mystery does skimp the moral estimate, or activates moral evasion, oversimplifying itself. A narrative device and epilogue help but do not escape the need for moral accounting in an otherwise elegantly, beautifully rendered love story.