Allied Review

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An admirable love letter to Hollywood’s Golden Age from director Robert Zemeckis.

By Alex Welch

There’s something admirable about the relaxed nature that courses through a majority of Allied, the newest film from director Robert Zemeckis. Starring Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard, the film is a love letter to Hollywood"s old-fashioned, wartime love stories that Zemeckis learned his love of the craft by watching. Where his sole focus on pushing the visuals of his projects as far as they’re seemingly willing to go in recent years has led to some disappointingly shallow efforts (see Beowulf or The Walk), Allied is yet another visually-stunning and technically pristine effort from the veteran filmmaker, even if the rest of the film doesn’t manage to live up to that same level of craftsmanship.

Opening with a stunning shot of Pitt’s Max Vatan, a Canadian wing commander in the Royal Air Force, parachuting into the Moroccan desert, Allied goes on to follow Max as he meets with his “wife,” Marianne Beauséjour (Cotillard). She’s a French Resistance fighter he’s been partnered with to help assassinate a German Nazi ambassador living in Casablanca.

The city makes for more than just a romantic setting in the film’s first act, and it’s clear that the 1941 classic film of the same name is perhaps the largest inspiration for Allied. Marianne and Max eventually fall in love during their time in Casablanca, move to a home in Hampstead, England, and have a daughter. The same foundational groundwork is there to make Max and Marianne’s romance reminiscent of Bogart and Bergman’s, but try as it might, Allied doesn’t come even close to replicating the same romantic magic as the iconic love story it so clearly idolizes.

That’s just the first act of Allied though, and while the desire to speed through what might normally be the entirety of most spy love stories in just its opening number is admirable, there are also moments when you feel like you’ve missed out on some important building blocks in Marianne and Max’s relationship. Sure, they’re two beautiful people risking their lives together, but is that really enough to warrant the almost fairytale romance that grows between them? The film would like you to think so, but it can’t help but feel thinly sketched nonetheless.

So what happens next? What causes Max and Marianne’s idyllic life in Hampstead to be thrown into disarray? I’m honestly hesitant to say, even if some of the film’s more recent trailers aren’t. The twist, written and built up to brilliantly by Steven Knight’s script, allows the film to throw aside it’s more straightforward romantic themes in exchange for some morally complex issues. It’s here where Allied fully embrace some of its more Hitchcockian influences, filling the second half in with added levels of tension, intrigue, mystery, and sex. At times, it even feels like a direct homage to Hitchcock’s underrated 1941 film Suspicion, which saw a woman’s life being torn apart when she begins to suspect her husband may be planning to murder her.

Playing with Cary Grant’s seemingly perfect movie star persona at the time, Hitchcock staged the intensely personal mystery as if it were a spy film itself, giving you just enough to try and solve the mystery before Joan Fontaine"s character, but never providing you with enough to know the actual answer until the closing few minutes. Thanks to Hitchcock’s unparalleled technical skill and its leads" versatile performances, it’s one of the filmmaker’s quieter masterpieces.

Allied grows and becomes better over time because of these similar ambitions, but it doesn’t quite manage to capture the same uncertainty or tension as that of Hitchcock’s film, mostly due to a peculiarly wooden performance from Brad Pitt. Max is an almost cripplingly quiet character of very few words, and instead of filling that in with a well of underlying emotions, Pitt’s plainspoken turn instead feels empty. Like a majority of the rest of the film, his performance gets better in the final 30 minutes or so, but where the first two acts could have benefitted from simmering performances from both of its leads to help make their romance feel more organic rather than formulaic, Pitt does Allied a disservice.

The same cannot be said for Marion Cotillard, who brings about as much to Marianne as any other actress could have. There’s a passion that she gives the character, teasing a past of untold horrors and guilt, that provides her present day self with an empathetic desperation to live a happy life with her husband and child. Like Grant in Suspicion, she uses her beauty to her advantage, and even when you’re rooting for her, you never quite know whether or not to trust Marianne either.

Thanks to Zemeckis’ skills as a technical filmmaker and Steven Knight’s surprisingly deft script, which evolves and transforms over time, Allied is a fun, and even occasionally emotional, love story. Unlike most other blockbusters, it’s the little tangents that Knight injects into his script that make it stand out from the rest, like when Pitt’s Max Valant asks a rookie air force pilot who he’s thinking about before his first mission. “My mother,” the young boy replies. “Don’t. Think of your father. He’s proud of you,” replies Max. These are the kind of moments that most other blockbusters or similar films might have skipped over, but they’re what make Allied feel fully alive, which is saying a lot for a film so completely governed by its structure and plot.

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