Mark Reviews Movies: THE MAN WHO KILLED HITLER AND THEN THE BIGFOOT

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 7, 2019

The title is jarringly strange and to the point. In that context, the approach of The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot is even stranger and quite apart from the point of the title. For here is not some outlandish tall tale, presented with the sort of cheap, B-movie thrills that one might expect from the inherent promise of what will unfold in this story. Instead, writer/director Robert D. Krzykowski's debut feature is a melancholy examination of the utter loneliness of a man whose adventures are fantastical but, as he sees them, without any meaning.

There are, as it turns out, far more important things to a meaningful life than killing one of history's greatest figurative monsters and hunting down a monster of legend. That's not what Calvin Barr (Sam Elliott) had been told, though, when he went off to war in Europe on a mission so secret that no one with him at the time could know it, no one after the war could be told it, and no one in the government kept an official record of it. The mission, obviously, was to kill Adolf Hitler, which a younger Calvin (Aidan Turner) most certainly and definitively did, disguised as a Nazi officer and using a makeshift pistol constructed of various unsuspicious items that he snuck into Hitler's country estate.

Krzykowski's screenplay isn't some alternative history, though. The history we know has played out in the intervening decades of Calvin's life. The real Hitler was killed, but only certain people in the Allied Forces and the Nazi government knew the truth. There were doubles of the tyrannical madman, and the one who died in the end wasn't the first double, either. That death was a killing, too, by the Soviets but reported to be a suicide for propaganda purposes.

It's not as if it really mattered at that point in this version of history, since every horror of the war played out as it actually did, even without the man who started it. Hitler, the real one, had been dead for years by that point, killed by an ambitious American soldier who left behind a family and the promise of starting one of his own. The older Calvin is only left with the emptiness of his deeds and the regrets of what he wasn't able to do because of those actions.

The success of the film is partly in this de-romanticizing of a heretofore unheard American fable. It was previously unheard, naturally, because Krzykowski made it up, although it's wholly of a piece with the ambitions and concerns of Calvin's generation, the ideal of the conscientious soldier who fights because of patriotism and is haunted forever after, and the distrust in systems that came in the following decades, leading people to create conspiracies that Hitler was indeed killed or that he ran away to Argentina or that his brain was kept in a mason jar for scientific research.

It's a surprise that Krzykowski appears to have arrived at this premise first, because it seems so obvious in retrospect. It's a pleasant surprise, though, because the filmmaker treats that premise with a mind toward examining whether those ideas and ideals are all they're cracked up to be.

As for the remainder of the film's success, it rests with Elliott's performance. The larger-than-life actor, with the rich baritone and the trademark mustache, looks and sounds like the kind of mythical figure who, in his heyday, very well might have been the sort to kill Hitler and keep mum about that business for four decades. That's all intelligent casting on Krzykowski's part, though. The performance is in how Elliott clearly recognizes and trusts his iconic status and stature, only to downplay the attitude we'd expect of such a man. The look and the sound of Elliott tell us what Calvin once was. The inherent defeat in his every action, his every intonation, and his every moment of sitting in silence tells us the cost of that former self.

For the most part, the story follows the Calvin of the present day of the 1980s and his 40-years-younger self in flashbacks moving toward that fateful confrontation with Hitler. The scenes in the past are filled with legends (an encounter with a Russian spy who believes a shave can influence the future or create an inescapable curse) and romanticized Americana. The latter portion revolves around Calvin's relationship with a pretty schoolteacher named Maxine (Caitlin FitzGerald). The younger Calvin misses his chance to marry or even propose to her before he's sent off to war, and in the present day, alone in the same house to which he returned after war, it's obvious that the chance never materialized again.

The older Calvin's life is all lonely routine. That's interrupted when an FBI agent (played by Ron Livingston) shows up with a tale about the legendary creature of the title in the forests of Canada. It's the host of a new plague, which is steadily killing every human and animal that catches the virus. Conveniently, Calvin is immune, so the U.S. government asks for one more favor of its secret hero: to kill the bigfoot before the government drops a nuclear bomb in the heart of Canada to stop the beast.

This should be ridiculous, but Krzykowski and Elliott play the material with absolute sincerity. The plot of The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot can be explained by its title, but the story is less about fictionalized, legendary standoffs and more about how people—and maybe even mythical beasts—aren't big enough to be legends.

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