Good

An easily Seduced Academic is separated from His Wife and His Conscience by a Flirtatious Blonde Student and a Allure of an Easy Life from the Nazis. A Weak Intellectual Type is probably an Easy Mark for both. The "Good" Man who does nothing while Evil is all around Him is the Heart and Soul of the Film, Subtly and Methodically showing how it can readily happen.

The Movie is so easily paced that it lacks a few Hard and Disturbing Scenes to jar the Viewer into some sort of Urgency. Nothing here seems at all Desperate until it is too late and that's the Thesis. But in Cinematic Terms it all just sort of happens and the Impact of the Implications and the Fingerpointing gets smothered in a Lethargic Pace and the Exclamation Points become Periods.

Not a Bad Movie, it is quite Good. However, the Profound Warnings it attempts to Reflect with its Historical Mirror are never given enough Hutzpah to be anything more than a Muse. A Sincere and Important Muse to be sure, but it fails to use its Fiction and its Medium to bring Home its Message. Apathy is nothing but Self-Preservation at the Expense of Everything Else.

I watched this film expecting little. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find the film educational and interesting throughout. It paints a picture of the 'Jewish Question' and events leading up to it, focusing on a few characters to give it a personal feel.

Granted, some of the acting was a little ropey, but I would urge people not to let that put them off. I have a particular interest in the second World War, and perhaps that makes me biased, but suspect that even those with no interest in that period of time would still be able to let the film absorb them into the plot.

Recommended, 9/10.

A new movement for change, promising a life richer in education, physical prowess, diminished crime, and increased wealth is like a magnet, and the promises that National Socialist Republic created in all forms of the media in the 1930s were probably heady enough that the post World War I Germans could turn a blind eye to the vacuous reality of a rising maniac's promises. GOOD is a film that suggests how the good common people responded to the rise of the Third Reich - the Nazi party with its loathsome guardianship in the Gestapo. It suggests how personal needs could cloud the mind to see only the benefits of a new order that would eventually destroy millions of people and attempt to transform the world in a new social order. And it is painful to watch the disease progress into every aspect of life in Germany.

John Halder (Viggo Mortensen) is a professor of literature and a writer of novels: his latest novel is a fictional story about a man who, out of love for his suffering wife, assists her dying. This novel catches the eye of Hitler and the Reichminister Bouhler (Mark Strong) who encourages Halder to draft a paper describing how euthanasia is a good and righteous act - a paper that will eventually 'justify' the massacre of Jews and other 'undesirables'. Halder's life is in such upheaval (his mother (Gemma Jones) is dying of tuberculosis while living with Halder and his piano obsessed wife Helen (Anastasia Hille) whom he divorces, Halder finds happiness only with a student Anne (Jodie Whittaker) who is fascinated with the Nazi party, and Halder's only close friend is psychiatrist Maurice Israel Glückstein (Jason Issacs) who is Jewish and loathes the Nazi party. Because of Halder's needs in life and also because of the glory he feels being praised for his novel, he agrees to be an 'advisor' to the party. His confrères include Adolph Eichmann (Steven Elder) and Josef Goebbels (Adrian Schiller) and slowly the good man John Halder becomes immersed in the Nazi party.

Maurice, being Jewish and detesting John's alliance with the Nazis, must escape Germany as the Jewish purge begins. His only hope is aid from Halder's Nazi affiliation and he desperately seeks Halder's help. Halder is unable to come to Maurice's aid; Maurice is evacuated and Halder's inspection of the concentration camps makes him face his worse fear about his selling out his morals and honor and his losing his closest friend.

GOOD began as a play by C.P. Taylor and was transformed into a screenplay by John Wrathall. Vicente Amorim directs a cast of mixed experience, but from Mortensen and Isaacs and Jones he draws fine performances. Throughout the film Halder has aural delusions: at times of stress he hears music, a factor that in retrospect makes us question his own stability. The music he hears is a sad rewriting of the works of Gustav Mahler -' Die Zwei Blauen Augen von meinem Schatz', and 'O Mensch!' from the Mahler 3rd Symphony (both sung in English translations by people on the street!), bit and pieces of score quoting phrases from Mahler in a very pedestrian arrangement, and finally orchestral recordings of moments from Mahler's Symphonies No.1 and No.3. The pedestrian quality of the score weights the film down. The cinematography by Andrew Dunn is fine (the film was shot in Hungary). Overall, it feels like this is a strong idea of a statement of what happens to the minds common men in times of crises. For this viewer it simply doesn't accomplish its goal, despite the worthy attempt Viggo Mortensen makes.

Grady Harp

What have I done? What have I done? You can imagine that Professor John Halder (Viggo Mortensen) was asking that question over and over.

He seemed not to understand what was happening to him as he let himself be used by the Nazi's. First, he joins the party, then he loses his lifelong friend simply because he was Jewish. It was only when he was picked to inspect the death camps did he come to a full realization of the depths into which he had sunk.

How do you cook a lobster? If you throw it into a pot of boiling water it will scream and jump out. But, if you put it in water and slowly raise the temperature, it boils before it knows what/s happening. Professor Halder was put in tepid water and the temperature raised gradually until the shock hit him full force, and he could not escape.

Mortensen was very good, but his friend Morris (Jason Isaacs), a Jew, was excellent.

I never give much attention to the titles of films. Usually titles represent an idea of a film, or a line, or a character. The context of "Good" implies that it was wanted to say "Virtuous people" by the title.

Were SS good people? Decent? Average? Normal? OK? Bearable? "Good" presents a point of view of a person who thought himself to be virtuous, but then faced a society which was completely different, but thought so too.

Viggo Mortensem gives us an interesting character with it's ups and downs, and these ups and downs are in the behavior of a character, not the acting.

Furthermore, it was not the acting or an idea that dragged the film down and bored me or others at certain moments. It was the fact that WWII has been discussed for many times, so there are only minor differences between one film and the other.

Those who haven't watched a lot of WWII films or who would like to see one more example of censure will like "Good".