The Good German

Synopsis: It's July 1945 and war correspondent Jake Geismer (George Clooney) arrives in Berlin to cover the peace summit to be held in Pottsdam. Unexpectedly he meets a former lover (Cate Blanchett), now the girl of his designated driver, (Tobey Maguire) and gets involved with the mystery of Lena's supposedly dead husband, an SS scientist (Christian Oliver).

To achieve authenticity in his retro-thriller Steven Soderbergh shot The Good German as it would have been had it been made in the late 40s with only the equipment of the day, exclusively on sound stages and in black and white with a 1.66:1 aspect ratio that is as close to the 1:33:1 that was the standard then.

There's no doubt that as an exercise in style the result is impressive but in every other respect it is, almost curiously given the talent involved, a dull affair. Partly this is, I suspect, because the characters, even Clooney's, who comes closest to being a good guy, are such a seedy bunch, mired in the overall tone of cynicism and permanently obscured by Soderbergh's chiaroscuro lighting that they offer nothing that an audience would want to engage with. Partly it is because Soderbergh, who clearly learnt little from his irrelevant 2002 remake of Tarkovsky's Solaris, has badly miscalculated in his recreation of the classic Warners film noir style. Whilst of course we all love to watch these films this is because, over and above their inherent merits, on many levels they are a window on the past. To recreate this style today, even given the broad relevance of the film's exposé of political machiavellianism on the part of the Americans, seems a largely pointless exercise and even worse, when given a modern spin by upping the ante on the profanity, violence and sex, tastelessly anachronistic.

With a complicated plot that is far from thrilling and never comes off dramatically, characters that are at best two-dimensional and sometimes, as in the case of Jack Thompson's rotund US senator, irrelevant, and an end section that seems tacked-on, The Good German evidences much effort for very little gain and one can only hope Soderbergh gets back to the kinds of films that originally made him a director to watch.

 

 

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