Pitt spends the rest of the movie mostly looking stricken and uncomfortable, as if he’d eaten substandard tinned meat, and you mentally start taking note of other actors who could have been slotted in to provide the same mix of gravitas and testosterone: Clooney, DiCaprio, maybe Damon. And maybe he sort of is – maybe he has to be.
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Robert Zemeckis won an Oscar for directing “Forrest Gump”.
These spies are named Max, a Canadian intelligence officer (Brad Pitt), and Marianne, a French resistance fighter (Marion Cotillard).
Initially professional, they warm to each other – she teases him for showing up with a French accent that’s more Quebecois than Parisian, and he pokes fun of her clumsiness with a machine gun.
“I want to reach simplicity and authenticity in every aspect of my life”, say Cotillard, who is a spokeswoman for Greenpeace. She, by contrast, goes all in. I am very thorough.
While Pitt is the cliched American hero – jut-jawed, retro and rugged – Cotillard is luminous as the conflicted Marianne, who always appears as if she’s hiding something just out of sight. One egregious example of this happens early on when the couple go from first kiss to confession of love in seemingly no time flat. Zemeckis and Knight scale these large ideas down to a manageable story in “Allied”, but they don’t draw out enough emotion to make it truly effective and emotionally wrenching, despite the rafts of sorrow in which it’s steeped. The first time they make love, it can’t be somewhere as pedestrian as a bed or a couch.
Allied wears its conventionality on its sleeve, and proudly so. But it’s a thin gruel, one that peaks well before even its halfway point, and opts for arbitrary spectacle or (occasionally thrilling) action over drama and character development. If the suspicions are true, the nonnegotiable deal requires that Max kill Marianne with his own hands. But she’s so good at deception, so good at playing the part, that we, too, begin to wonder just what is in her heart.
One intimate sandstorm encounter and shot-up Nazi shindig later, the film shifts forward to Max and Marianne’s wedding – which Max’s boss (Jared Harris) doesn’t exactly support wholeheartedly – and family time with kids in London, though still living with the constant danger of German bombing. This unusual structure is also jarring when the couple completes their big mission roughly 30 minutes into the film and you are left wondering how the next hour and a half will be filled.
Directed by Robert Zemeckis.
“I’ve never had princess dreams when I was a kid, but I really wanted to be an actress, because I was a big fan of Audrey Hepburn and Greta Garbo and all the glamour of this era”, Cotillard says. “But we made a decision to present Casablanca how it was and how it looked then”. And here’s where the crux of the story turns up, halfway through: Max’s superiors believe that Marianne is double-agent, a German spy.
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Allied star Marion Cotillard has suggested that “art is going to be even more important now” after the election of Donald Trump as United States president. Rated R. 124 minutes. It would be released in USA on November 23.
