Three films in three days. Allied opened today, featuring excellent performances from Brad and Marion. It’s another great effort from Director Robert Zemeckis, who keeps this WWII spy yarn well paced and tense.
Allied (Brad Pitt, Marion Cotillard) – Put two of the world’s most beautiful people together with legendary director Robert Zemeckis and you expect sparks to fly. In Allied, it’s the bullets that fly for the first third of this World War II spy flick. Agent Max Vatan (Brad Pitt) parachutes into North Africa in 1942 to join up with a beautiful French spy, Marianne Beausejour (Marion Cotillard), to kill the German Ambassador to Morocco.
Of all the gin joints in all the towns of the world, he drops into a bar in Casablanca. Dashing but all business, Vatan masquerades as Beausejour’s long-absent husband. She is a master spy whose reputation on the “circuit” is legendary though her last caper in Paris went awry. Vatan is cool and lethal but even he is not immune to Beausejour’s charms. After coolly gunning down a few dozen Nazis, they escape and head to England to marry as Act II begins.
They have a baby and settle down. She becomes a housewife/mother while he gets a desk job, all the while wondering when the foreign intelligence service will come calling again. When they do, it is not to promote him as he suspects. It is to accuse his wife of being a German double agent.
In Act III, the trap is set and Max is forced to play along all the while refusing to believe he has been duped but trying to find out for himself. If she is a spy, he has to kill her or face death himself.
Pitt and Cotillard are definitely up to the task of carrying this period piece. His introverted nature contrasts with her gregarious personality as we see in party scenes from Casablanca to London. The on-screen chemistry between the two feels real (though they both say that she wasn’t the one who broke up his marriage to Angie), and they both appear to be self-assured and genuine. It is these layers of personality that both actors master. And with the deft direction of Zemeckis (Forrest Gump, Back To The Future, The Walk, Cast Away, etc.), this war movie feels as much like a love story. While the action scenes reminded me of Zemeckis’ Romancing The Stone, the love story seemed more strained and contrived.
But that doesn’t ruin the film. Allied is a character study set in the middle of the worst conflict of the 20th century. It takes an old genre and breathes new life into it thanks to the acting and directing. And it keeps the audience hanging until the end before revealing whether Beausejour is bad or good.