The Good German

In true noir-ish fashion, much of the intrigue with The Good German is about to whom, and why, the title applies. For a film that has so much devotion to being a 40s recreation or homage, and in spite of another mesmerising performance from the very talented Cate Blanchett, it is also a mystery as to why it is not more of a runaway success.

Employing the grainy black-and-white look of Good Night and Good Luck, only more so, The Good German is a formal exercise in original 40s technique. It uses as its subject 1945 Berlin and the nightmare scenarios of post-war safety. Blanchett plays Lena Brandt, a Jewish German, who attributes her amazing survival to being the ex-wife of an SS man. (She claims he is dead, by the way). Her boyfriend is the violent and abusive Patrick Tully, engagingly played by Tobey Maguire. But haunting her life is also good-guy George Clooney, in the shape of US Captain Jake Geismer. They go back a long way. In more than one sense, to put it delicately. He is disturbed to see her turning tricks as much as he is to see her hanging out with a low-life like Tully.

Lena wants to get out of Berlin, but that is easier said than done. Our film is awash with intrigues as everyone individually tries to help her, but everyone also schemes against each other. Who is a war criminal and who is just an ordinary German? Understandably, no-one wants to be caught with their pants down, and everybody is in Lena's.

Lena herself plays her cards very close to her chest. She only reveals her hand towards the end. As she takes over centre-stage, her story provides some tension and emotional ballast to a plot that is otherwise a bit lifeless. Disappointingly, the usually capable Clooney is the weak link in the acting. His usually charismatically chirpy, cheeky style seems anachronistic and makes him look both typecast and mis-cast. The part could have been written for Humphrey Bogart. There and many thematic and visual references to Casablanca. But Clooney's lack of gravitas highlights the film's stylistic weakness. The Good German is ponderous without conveying a seriousness of the subject matter and so ends up just seeming self-important.

Beautiful noir-ish chiaroscuro lighting is a delicious hearkening back to more substantial classics of old. But, with the exception of Lena, the characters lack the moral ambiguity that was so characteristic of such films. Jake mentions, "the good old days - when you could tell who was the bad guy by who was shooting at you." But, although the line could have come out of the mouth of Bogart, it refers to a period and style of film-making that is a world away from what this tries to be.

Lena (Cate Blanchett) is a mystery, and the film is worth seeing for this magnificent, towering performance, that is also a study in emotional complexity. Long-suffering, she oozes oceans of repressed emotion in a way to make Ingrid Bergman proud. Although more complex than female protagonists of 40s movies, she is still the most successful part of the whole homage.

The story does have a little more subtlety than one might have expected, but I find it hard to imagine vast audiences wading through it joyfully until the pace eventually picks up enough to warrant serious interest. It's good to see the usually very capable Steven Soderbergh directing serious cinema again (instead of his Ocean's Eleven romps) but this over-ambitious project doesn't quite cut it. See it if you're a fan of Blanchett, or if you enjoy seeing Clooney getting beaten up.

Soderbergh is a director with a decent amount of guts but not a lot of talent. Here he attempts to make a classic Hollywood film, reminiscent of The Third Man and Casablanca, by mimicking, or at least trying to mimic, the classical style of cinematography, by scratching the negative, having the dialogue recorded on mono (I think), and having the actors deliver performances along the lines of the studio days. The gimmick honestly doesn't work all that well. Lovers of classic films will notice how different the film-making is from that of the '40s. How hazy the cinematography is compared to Casablanca or The Third Man (it looks like you're watching a movie on a black and white television). Or how much more swearing and sexual content there is in the film. Yes, the gimmick is a weak one and somewhat detrimental to the rest of the film. Otherwise, it's a pretty good mystery. Not a great one. The pacing lags in the middle, and the mystery only starts to make sense right near the end, when much of the audience has stopped caring. The film's strongest asset is Cate Blanchett, who channels Marlene Dietrich. She is easily one of today's best actresses, and the only cinematographic triumph of the film is the lighting of her face – she's drop-dead beautiful. I'll probably be hung by the nostalgists, but I'd take her – in both her acting skills and beauty – over the lead actresses of Casablanca and The Third Man. George Clooney is decent, but his character is fairly two-dimensional. He's a pretty boring hero. I really liked Tobey Maguire, though. His character was much more interesting, and I wish he could have been in the movie more. I absolutely loved the climactic sequence, but the film continues on for too long after that. Blanchett's big revelation at the end feels rather anticlimactic.

I was so aware of the attempted style of the film that I could hardly concentrate on anything else. The look, oh, the look. Clooney and Blanchet - Bergman, Bogart, shadows and fog. Pity. It could have been a tense war time thriller - Who is he? Where is he? What is it about? I was always mesmerized by questions like that on films that "The Good German" seems to want to emulate. Sodebergh is one my most recent favorites and one of the main reasons is because he is unafraid of taking chances. The question is, what are the chances taken for? I get more "Bubble" - sort of - than "The Good German" Blanchet is great to watch, she's Hildegarde Kneff and/or a lip-full Gloria Grahame but other than admire her right there on the screen I wasn't permitted to feel anything. George Clooney is just as solid in black and white as he is in color and Tobey McGuire - well, the best I can say is that his contribution is brief. What I took with me as the most valuable aspect of this experiment is/was Thomas Newman's classically colorful score.

I read the book, then saw the movie and cannot for the life of me figure out why screenwriters/producers/directors, et al take a perfectly good story and bastardize it all to hell! The only resemblance between the book and movie is the title and the character's names. How disappointing the movie was, they combined subplots into the main plot, distorted the main characters and made it something it wasn't. Generally books are better than movies, granted, but in this case they aren't even in the same universe, not even a parallel one. The music was overkill, nothing like a 40's flick. Overall, a HUGE disappointment! Don't waste your time/money. Read the book instead!

The War brought out some very interesting moral questions, some of which are hinted at in the classic-looking film. Was the use of the atomic bomb moral? Did the average German bear some measure of guilt for letting the Holocaust happen? And, most importantly, was it right for America to hide the sins of the German scientists to gain their knowledge? That is the key question running throughout the film.

Fans of classic film - those who love Casablanca, The Third Man, or A Foreign Affair - will appreciate the references to those films in the look and feel of this one.

Fans of George Clooney and Cate Blanchett will be thrilled at their performance, especially Blanchett's. Fans of Tobey Maguire may be shock at his anti-hero, but he really played the part well.

The look and feel of Steven Soderbergh's homage is brilliant, and the music of Thomas Newman made this an extremely enjoyable experience.