‘Allied’ finds common cause with older films

It takes either moxie or madness to make a WWII-era romantic thriller partially set in Casablanca because of the obvious parallels to, well, Casablanca. With the handsome and elegant Allied, starring Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard as spies who fall in love against a backdrop of Arabian Nights intrigue in a romantic, wartime Morocco, director Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump, Back to the Future) doesn’t embarrass himself or sully the memory of “round up the usual suspects” and all it conveys.

Pitt is Max Vatan, a Canadian spy for British intelligence who is literally dropped into Morocco to team up with glamorous French Resistance spy Marianne Beausejour to assassinate a Nazi official. To the outside world, Vatan is merely a businessman coming to join his long-suffering wife who has had to make do living the high life among the German and French collaborationist elite while he ran his phosphates company.

The wedding rings, the kisses, the dances, are all a ruse to cover what they’re really doing. When they’re alone, however, she ridicules his French accent as being too Quebecois and he seems to just want to complete the mission. His big dream is to retire to a ranch in Medicine Hat, Alberta.

Then the acting turns to fact as the emotional barriers fall, and they fall madly, passionately in love. This complicates and endangers their lives, even after they have moved to London and had a child.

Working from a script by Steven Knight (Locke, Eastern Promises), Zemeckis has created a well-wrought cinematic throwback as he avoids contemporary thriller tropes. The film blooms slowly, taking its cues from the pace of older films. Despite a couple of shootouts, Allied is not an action movie but a romance with an impending sense of dread as the plot navigates its way through twists and turns.

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.

Shot in the Canary Islands and England, Allied has a rich, sumptuous look and the music — especially the use of Louis Prima’s raise-the-roof swing classic Sing Sing Sing — perfectly suits the mood.

Allied won’t make anyone forget Casablanca, but it won’t make them wish they’d stayed home and watched it instead either.

This story was originally published November 22, 2016 at 1:19 PM with the headline "‘Allied’ finds common cause with older films."