Milking the Valkyrie

It's odd how two completely different movies, just by virtue of being released at the same time, can get connected in a viewer's mind. I saw Milk and Valkyrie last week and I've got to the point that I can't think of one without the other.

Both are, of course, about real historical events. Specifially, they're about assassination attempts - one successful, the other not. In one case, we're rooting for the victim, in the other for the perpetrators.

Both films spare no trouble to re-create the environments of their times. Both used genuine locations for key scenes - in the case of Milk, staging his camera shop in the very premises he had occupied back in the 70s, and in the case of Valkyrie, dragging the German Ministry of Defence back 60 years.

Several of the players in the San Francisco gay scene of the 1970s take bit parts in Milk. None of the players in the Valkyrie plot are able to participate (mainly because all the key players were executed!), although I have noted one poignant piece of trivia - Philipp von Schulthess who plays Tresckow's aide, is the real Stauffenberg's grandson (in the film Mrs Stauffenberg is shown to be pregnant - the child she was carrying is Schulthess's mother...).

The events of both films should be familiar to most well-informed people, and have been the focus of high-profile documentary productions; The Times of Harvey Milk won the Academy Award in 1984 and the "Stauffenberg/20th July Plot" has had much said and written about it, most recently a major documntary production tied in with this movie, Valkyrie: The Plot to Kill Hitler.

Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man elected to significant public office in the USA and thus an important figure to the gay community worldwide, and the Stauffenberg plot, at least in its bare bones, should be covered in any history of World War II.

Valkyrie tries to be a thriller, but regrettably fails miserably. It is incredibly difficult to present as a thriller a story whose ending we all know. The only way to pull it off is to make the viewer feel for the characters, feel their tension and pain. But there were just too many characters and too many grand=standing speeches to make any of the people involved even slightly human or worth caring about.

Milk takes a more interesting, if less populist, route, as a social and personal commentary, and tells in a series of flashbacks how Harvey Milk got to the point that he feared for his life. We all know that Harvey was shot and killed, so the movie tells us up front.

A weak element of both movies is that there are simply too many characters in both. In Valkyrie, this becomes a serious issue because by the end of the film we don't actually care about/for any of them. Perhaps oddly, the only one whose fate concerned me at all was von Schauffenberg's aide, played by Jamie Parker. Most of the characters get cameo appeareances at best and so to make them even slightly memorable from one scene to the next, the casting agents pulled out their Who's Who of British Acting - although I suspect that outside the UK most of them aren't such big names and thus the effect is a bit lost. (Although it must be said that seeing Eddie Izzard in a very dramatic and serious role was a real eye-opener!)

Whilst Valkyrie needed the large cast list to indicate the extent of the conspiracy (the end titles pointed out that over 200 people were executed for their involvement in the plot), the vastness of the Milk cast is probably due to the fact that most of those involved are still around and just wanted to see themselves on the screen... There was plenty of scope for some of the characters to be amalgamated or simply not included for what they added to the plot.

As is the habit with screen biographies, both films whitewashed their main protagonists a little and surrounded themselves with stereotypes to ease the story-telling. From all I've read about him (which admittedly isn't a lot), von Stuaffenberg was a nasty piece of work and not the heroic altruist as portrayed by Tom Cruise - he was apparently a big fan of gassing Jews and other undesirables and had his plot succeeded, the death camps would have continued their work. As far as I can tell, the main issue most of the conspirators had with Hitler was not his set of beliefs but the fact that he was losing the war.

Similarly, Milk seems to have overlooked some of Harvey's (and his circle's) less noble charactersitics - apparently Harvey was quite the drama queen and would go off on raging temper tantrums at the slightest provocation. He was also apparently something of a notorious bed-hopper and I find it a little difficult to swallow that in the mid 70s San Francisco gay scene, everyone else was so faithful to their partners! AIDS was still unknown and the SF gay scene was notoriously decadent. I actually found the disinfected view of that milieu quite insulting in a way - a more realistic portrayal would also have been a mine of dramatic possibilities! Then again, this was a movie that was trying to speak not only to gay viewers but rather admirably tried to paint a picture of the struggle for freedom and equality to a mass audience and showing our hero hitting on a string of rent boys was hardly going to endear him...

Nevertheless, as a record of a moment in time when all things were possible because a charismatic and intelligent leader was willing to draw attention to issues with which the population would prefer not to be confronted, this was a great attempt. We all owe Harvey Milk a debt of gratitude and the final scene of the movie, the genuine footage of the mass candle-lit silent tribute through the streets of San Francisco by the same people who had been rioting just days before says pretty much everything we need to know about what he achieved.

As for the Stauffenberg plot, much as the historical event ended in abject faiulre for all concerned, I don't see this movie leaving any of its participants crowned in glory, except perhaps for a very nicely judged performance by Bill Nighy.