"The Good German" is shot as though it might have been made in 1945. But it couldn't have been made then, which makes the exercise ..
. well, an exercise. This movie comes from director Steven Soderbergh and star George Clooney, who have produced some offbeat pictures with their shared production company, Section Eight.
This may be their oddest. Adapted by Paul Attanasio from a novel by Joseph Kanon, "The Good German" tells a tale of moral compromise in Berlin in the weeks following the end of the Second World War. But that's not what you walk out of the theater humming.
What makes or breaks the film is Soderbergh's decision to shoot in black-and-white, with a look and style that would not have been terribly out of place in "Casablanca" or "The Third Man," two classics this movie deliberately invokes. There's a stylized quality to the acting, too, although this varies from performer to performer. The story?
It's about a war correspondent, Jake (George Clooney), who arrives in Berlin to cover the Potsdam Peace Conference, where Europe will be divided up into spheres of influence. Berlin itself is a divided city, and an American crossing into the Soviet sector might find himself floating face down in the river. Just such a murder triggers Jake's curiosity about what's actually going on in Berlin - in particular, the trail of important Nazis useful to the Allied cause.
There's a woman from Jake's past, of course - or had you forgotten "Casablanca"? Of all the war zones in all the world, she had to come to Berlin: Lena (Cate Blanchett), a married woman now prostituting herself to stay alive. Her husband is hidden somewhere, and she's involved with Jake's opportunistic driver (Tobey Maguire).
This unappealing but original character is a rancid variation on the "scrounger" in endless military movies, the guy who operates his own little black-market empire. Maguire is annoying in the role, but he's supposed to be. Despite the retro look, Soderbergh isn't slavish about re-creating a 1940s style; in fact, he wants you to be jarred by the collision of old-movie vibe with modern profanity and disillusionment.
(This is sourly put to us with an early shot of Maguire callously copulating with his indifferent partner.) The murder mystery isn't compelling, and Jake's love story is unconvincing. The issue of the West's soft treatment of certain valuable Nazis is an interesting one, but I suspect Soderbergh's main point here is in demonstrating how little those old movies have to do with hard, cold geopolitical reality.
Well, maybe, but Billy Wilder's "A Foreign Affair" is a lot more observant and cynical about life in Berlin after the war - and that was a comedy. Plus, those old movies had snap; Soderbergh's pokey pace falls well short of the era's style. Cate Blanchett gets closest to conjuring up a period feel, as she channels Marlene Dietrich; but George Clooney comes off less like Humphrey Bogart than perennial second banana Ralph Bellamy.
So, it doesn't work. But "The Good German" is an interesting experiment to watch. Maybe 10 years from now it will look bold and brave.
Right now it looks peculiar. George Clooney stars in "The Good German.
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