Spy tale luxuriates in its wartime nostalgia
“I keep the emotions real. That’s why it works.” So says French operative Marianne Beausejour in wartime Morocco, proudly explaining her ability to infiltrate the Nazi-run regime. But she also notes that the biggest mistake spies make isn’t having sex, it’s developing feelings. So which maxim do we believe?
As Marianne, Marion Cotillard keeps everyone — Brad Pitt, British Intelligence, audience members — guessing for a very long time in this stylish, old-fashioned spy-thriller/romance.
Pitt plays Max Vatan, a wing commander in the RAF who starts the movie by parachuting into Morocco and meeting Marianne in a Casablanca watering hole so movie-perfect you expect Rick Blaine to be tending bar. (In another nod to the 1942 classic, a pivotal scene involves someone being told to play a song on the piano.)
Max and Marianne must pose as husband and wife until they can pull off the assassination of a German ambassador.
She schools him in how to behave like a besotted spouse, even though she’s clearly the first one to be feeling that this might be the beginning of more than just a beautiful friendship. She playfully chides his provincial French accent, calling him “le Quebecois,” to which he grumpily replies that he’s from Ontario.
When the assignment goes off without a hitch, Max impulsively invites Marianne to follow him back to England and be his wife, for real this time. And so we move from exotic Morocco to grimand-grey London, where the couple gets a house in Highgate, and baby makes three.
Allied is the latest from director Robert Zemeckis (Flight, The Walk), working from a script by Steven Knight (Eastern Promises, Locke). But let us also praise the production-design and artdirection teams for a gorgeously realized world bristling with such period detail as “Cheers Adolf” chalked on the side of an RAF bomb, or a Blitz-damaged London shop with a defiantly handlettered sign out front: “Open as usual.”
How much you enjoy Allied may depend on how prepared you are to submit to its nostalgic charms, and how forgiving to the tension between the modernist streak in Pitt’s character and the old-fashioned look and feel of the rest of the picture. Allied won’t go down in history alongside Casablanca, but that won’t be from lack of effort.