A Canadian operative (Brad Pitt) marries a French resistance fighter (Marion Cotillard).
Allied could easily be a romantic war drama recently rediscovered from the 1940s, perhaps one inspired by Casablanca. There’s certainly a wonderfully old-fashioned feel to the tale of the Canadian intelligence operative (Brad Pitt) and the French resistance fighter (Marion Cotillard) who team up to assassinate a Nazi official in French Morocco...in, yes, Casablanca. A year later, they have married and are living in London when their loyalties are called into question by the Royal Air Force, to which he is transferred. There are a few good bits of stuff blowing up — the sequence in which a damaged German bomber slowly falls from the skies over London is full of exquisite tension — but the action of war mostly takes a back seat to the emotional turmoil that inevitably occurs when spies whose lives depend on the success of their lies must trust one another, if they can. Director Robert Zemeckis judiciously balances psychological and physical suspense, and ends up with an elegant potboiler that seems to hail from a cinematic era when silences heavy with suspicion spoke louder than words.
