In Casablanca -- yes, Casablanca -- they fall in love amidst the escalation of war. It wasn't supposed to be real: Brad Pitt is Commander Max Vatan, a Canadian intelligence officer parachuting into French Morocco at the height of World War II to meet his contact, a French resistance fighter Marianne Beausejour, played by Marion Cotillard. They only need to pretend to be lovers in order to fool the Germans in the lead up to the assassination of a German ambassador. But like in Casablanca, which is a thousand times more romantic and sad by the way, Max and Marianne can't resist the dangerous lure of romance as the spectre of death and war smother them.
Allied is billed as a spy thriller. In fact that's just half of it, because when the story moves from Casablanca to London, where Max and Marianne become husband and wife while the war rages on, the Robert Zemeckis film morphs into a domestic melodrama involving a key plot twist that, well, the trailer has surprisingly revealed in full (I don't want to divulge it here anyway). For love, for country or for suspense, Allied packages the timeworn love-in-the-time-of-war trope with dutiful, uninspiring attention.
Pitt is stiff and strangely jaded. His channeling of Bogart -- the weary resignation, the casual sex appeal -- is almost amusing, and I don't think it was meant to amuse. Cotillard, in contrast, is all flirty, smart, sexy, and she rises above the bland material she's stuck with here. The transformation of her character, Marianne, from a fearless resistance fighter who boasts of her ability to kill as effectively with machine guns as with cutlery into a domesticated, cowed, trembling housewife in the second half is, to me, one of the biggest holes in the plot. In North Africa, Marianne -- the name that's a symbol of France -- is a terrorist chic in fashionable clothes, someone ahead of her time and far more attractive than the lacklustre Max, and yet the reversal of their characteristics once the couple settle in London comes across like a conservative stereotyping.
You'll hear how the film is suspenseful and beautiful to look at. That's small compensation; Zemeckis (whose last film was The Walk and this one is 22 years after Forrest Gump) goes all out for cinematic and historical nostalgia and ends up giving us glamorous artificiality that's emotionally unfulfilling. In other words, it looks like a project crafted to attract Oscar attention (around November, Allied was mentioned as a player), but even the Academy seems to have passed on this one. That's perhaps the most telling review.
Allied
Starring Brad Pitt, Marion Cotillard. Directed by Robert Zemeckis.
