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Trailer: Allied
In 1942 intelligence officer Max Vatan encounters French Resistance fighter Marianne Beausejour on a deadly mission behind enemy lines. Reunited in London, their relationship is threatened by the extreme pressures of the war.
Deep into several difficult years co-writing the screenplay for the 1996 romantic drama Up Close & Personal, which would eventually star Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer, the novelist John Gregory Dunne asked one of the project's producers, Scott Rudin, what he thought the movie was actually about. Rudin replied without hesitation: "It's about two movie stars."
That's also exactly what Allied, a World War II thriller starring Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard, is about. In a filmmaking era where no intellectual property is as valued in Hollywood as a comic book, Robert Zemeckis' movie, with its nods to golden era classics, trades on our pleasure in watching the two leads together on the screen. They are in turn dynamic when engaged and beautiful in repose, and between them they obscure the picture's failings.
![The beauty of Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard, in action and in repose, is a key pleasure of watching <i>Allied</i>.](http://web.archive.org./web/20171204115933im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/k/v/0/l/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gt45mg.png/1481858514313.jpg)
Reviewer rating | |
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Title | Allied |
Genre | Action/Adventure |
Director | Robert Zemeckis |
Screenwriter | Steven Knight |
Actors | Brad Pitt, Marion Cotillard, Jared Harris, Lizzy Caplan, Matthew Goode |
OFLC rating | M |
Run Time | |
Year | 2016 |
Language | English |
Synposis |
In 1942, an intelligence officer encounters a female French Resistance fighter on a deadly mission behind enemy lines. Reunited in London, their relationship is threatened by the extreme pressures of the war. |
Full synopsis
It begins in French Morocco in 1942, with the arrival by parachute of Canadian intelligence officer Max Vatan (Pitt), who is so deep into the period's conventions that a suitcase he collects has a false bottom and he's told "to find the hummingbird" when he's taken to his contact. That gets him to Marianne Beausejour (Cotillard), a French resistance operative already in place, with Max posing as her newly arrived husband.
They meet in Casablanca, just to make Allied's screen loyalties clear, although the Rio de Janeiro of Alfred Hitchcock's 1946 classic Notorious is a better indication of the shifting suspicions and knife-edge deception. "I keep the emotions real, that's how it works," Marianne tells Max, and even as they infiltrate the Nazi German embassy their attraction to each other is balanced by the image they're projecting as a means of staying alive.
You can try to spot the moment where the illusion of love between the two characters becomes authentic, or you can just soak in the gorgeous desert locales, glossy sets and Cotillard's magnificent wardrobe; Marianne's outfit for target practice is so chic it could loosen gun laws. The physical consummation is clear-cut, occurring in the midst of a desert storm in a scene that recalls another 1996 release, Anthony Minghella's The English Patient.
This is unexpected terrain for Zemeckis, a filmmaker whose definitive screen relationship was the friendship between Marty McFly and Doc Brown in a trio of Back to the Future adventures. Allied sometimes struggles to liberate Max and Marianne from the budget's considerable embrace, and encapsulate their connection. It is in turn a mystery and a romance, but it's not always evocative beneath the conventions of genre.
What it does do is subtly suggest that every marriage is to some degree an act. When Max and Marianne return to London – helpful clue: a Brit declaring "you're a bloody fool" within seconds – and get married are they truly any closer than when they merely pretended to be wed? Even with a baby daughter born during a 1943 bombing raid (the movie's military timeline is dodgy) they sometimes still wonder what each of them truly knows of the other.
That's an ideal intersection for Cotillard, an actor who holds a fierce concentration that never quite defines itself. Marianne can be uneasy in her loving and caring in her menace, a process that's only accentuated when Max and his boss, Frank Heslop (Jared Harris) are summoned to a secluded basement and told that she may in fact be an enemy spy.
"Routine procedure" for Max to exonerate himself if that's the case is for him to execute Marianne, a realisation that throws him into action. Pitt's best performances – Moneyball, The Tree of Life – come from a brooding restraint, but when Max tries to exonerate Marianne his purposefulness is vigorous but shallow.
Zemeckis' direction is clean and restrained, yet passion is the movie's heartbeat. Wartime London, with death a daily contingency, is revealed as a hotbed of licentious freedom. In the fight against totalitarianism the forces of freedom comfort themselves by snorting and shagging. When Max and Marianne host a party, fornicating couples fall out of the pantry. "We have a garden for that," Max casually explains.
Max's sister, Bridget (Lizzy Caplan), who's also a spook, is openly in a relationship with another woman, and with its paranoia and pleasure there's a hint of Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow. But perverse comedy is no match for intimations of tragedy, and Allied makes sure that it gets the most out of its two movie stars.