untitled
THE
GOOD GERMAN
Directed by: Steven Soderbergh
Written by: Paul Attanasio
Internet
Movie
Database Entry for full details
GRADE: B-
2006.
Steven
Soderbergh, for no discernibly good reason, was apparently desperate to
prove that he could be Michael Curtiz if he really wanted to, and
thusly decided to make a film by aping his style—but not so much
his substance—in the process channeling not only Casablanca but other directors' work like The Third Man, The Maltese Falcon, Notorious, and just about every other Hollywood movie made in the 1940's, in some way or another, into his mishmash pastiche The Good German.
Soderbergh & Co. falter quite a bit in the film's first half,
struggling to find the right tone in visual, performance and narrative
style—to capture the '40sness while adding a modern
flair—but against all odds the last half of the film starts to
work, though it's never able to escape the fact that it's inherently
gimmicky and unnecessary, or shake the feeling that everyone, from the
actors to the visuals, looks as though they're playing dress-up in
granddad's wares.
George Clooney, cut from the right old-fashioned-movie-star cloth for
the part, plays a reporter for the New Republic sent to post-war Berlin
in order to cover the peace conference being held in Potsdam. Tobey
Maguire, overdoing it a bit in a desperate attempt to shake his Peter
Parker reputation—like Leonardo DiCaprio in Celebrity,
but far less convincingly so, he's a vulgar, violent, screaming
prostitute puncher—is his appointed driver engaged in the
black-market underbelly of the quadrisected city; coincidentally, his
girlfriend/favored strumpet (Cate Blanchett) is Clooney's former,
pre-war, flame, and she's engaged in some shadiness of her own
involving her possibly dead husband and her own wartime perfidy.
Clooney, with a bandaged ear that recalls Nicholson's cut-up nose in Chinatown
(and both characters are named Jake), investigates both Blanchett's and
Maguire's pasts, uncovering many layers of complex intrigue (really,
what other word is appropriate?) involving several international
governments. "You'll only get hurt," his sympathetic bartender (Tony
Curran) warns him, "or hurt someone," but Clooney refuses to give up,
monomaniacally consumed.
Even going to the questionable lengths of using the same lenses and
cameras in use during the '40s—really, what's the point?—The Good German
has the look down pat, including: its anachronistically hazy and soft
black-and-white (which also allows for stock footage of the real
post-war Berlin to be inserted for establishing shots); the full-screen
format (1.37:1); the screenwipe transitions no one but George Lucas has
used in fifty years; the cheekily blatant rear projection; and Howard
Shore's epic, ersatz Max Steiner score. Clooney, in full-on Bogart mode
even though he's really more of a Cary Grant, gets beat up a number of
times and even gets a take on Casablanca's famous gin joints
line: "This whole goddam country, she winds up fucking my fucking
driver," he spits out to the bartender over drinks. One thing
Soderbergh and friends have decided to abandon from their mimetic
production is Production Code restrictions, letting the characters, and
Tobey in particular, swear up a storm while even featuring an imprudent
sex scene.
While Soderbergh has the visual style under control, for the film's first half he apparently doesn't understand that Casablanca is not merely a beloved film because it looks like Casablanca; as Tobey says of Blanchett, "just because you're a German doesn't make you a Nazi." The Good German
aspires to be a romantic mystery, but in its first half it is neither
romantic, due to Blanchett's understandably cold performance as a
bitter post-Holocaust Jew laden with survivor guilt, nor mysterious, as
too much information is given away too soon. Perhaps that's a
consequence of there being too much information to reveal, as the
script is rather gratuitously knotty, approaching The Big Sleep
levels of confoundment. Soderbergh's major fault is the lack of
narrative focus; the film's first third feels like a starring vehicle
for Tobey Maguire with a George Clooney cameo, until it radically
changes gears at the thirty minute mark. Soderbergh stumbles most
egregiously whenever he wanders away from the focus on Clooney's
character and his investigation of the predominant mystery; imagine if The Maltese Falcon had devoted a few reels, in their entirety, to Mary Astor or Jerome Cowan?
But once Soderbergh settles down, near about the fifty minute mark, he
efficiently churns out an effective yarn whose intricacy and imitation
actually become unlikely virtues; each scene gets better, culminating
in a chase sequence through parade crowds that is at once derivative
and worthy of Hitchcock. The lighting becomes increasingly shadowy as
the story gets more sinister, and the noted liberal filmmakers insert a
lot of critical swipes at war in general and America's foreign policy
history specifically; there's a central conspiracy about getting Nazi
scientists/war criminals to America, to get them working for our side,
and the cover-up of wartime atrocity involving thoroughly corrupted
military brass, while the mise-en-scene is a carefully constructed
tableau of ravaged destruction, from the bombed out buildings to the
physically and/or mentally injured city dwellers that pack every frame
outside of the comfortable military men's offices. "You can never get
out of Berlin," Blanchett bemoans, implying that anywhere she went
she'd just be taking it with her, the theme offering a knock at the
current situation in Iraq. ("If war is hell, then what comes after?" as
the poster's tagline asks.)
But beyond the critical attitude towards America (something you'd never
see from a wartime Hollywood '40s picture) and the rampant foul
language, Soderbergh has added one more important alteration to the
classical style that's revealingly indicative of our times; Clooney's
character, unlike Casablanca's Rick, doesn't learn that there
are greater forces and larger causes than himself. In fact, he
sacrifices justice and truth for the sake of love and romance, a cruel
reflection of modern narcissism and a charge that Soderbergh, as this
project shows, is certainly not exempt from. The Good German is a self-indulgent formal exercise, but at least it works well enough, here and there, to enjoy on a superficial level.
--
Henry Stewart
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Steven
Soderbergh, for no discernibly good reason, was apparently desperate to
prove that he could be Michael Curtiz if he really wanted to, and
thusly decided to make a film by aping his style—but not so much
his substance—in the process channeling not only Casablanca but other directors' work like The Third Man, The Maltese Falcon, Notorious, and just about every other Hollywood movie made in the 1940's, in some way or another, into his mishmash pastiche The Good German.
Soderbergh & Co. falter quite a bit in the film's first half,
struggling to find the right tone in visual, performance and narrative
style—to capture the '40sness while adding a modern
flair—but against all odds the last half of the film starts to
work, though it's never able to escape the fact that it's inherently
gimmicky and unnecessary, or shake the feeling that everyone, from the
actors to the visuals, looks as though they're playing dress-up in
granddad's wares.
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