Lost in Translation

For that small but passionate subsection of moviegoers who attend George Clooney movies in hopes of seeing his cranium repeatedly subjected to violent blows, The Good German has arrived like a wondrous early Christmas present. In the first ten minutes of his new movie, George Clooney gets punched in the head. Then Clooney gets kicked in the head. Then Clooney gets hit in the head with a wooden stick. Then Clooney gets knocked upside his head with a rifle. Then Clooney has a chair broken over his head. Then Clooney’s head is slammed into a wall.

For a bonus, there’s even a scene of Clooney–lantern-jawed, broad-shouldered, man’s-man that he is–beaten senseless by puny, scrawny, 98-lbs.-soaking-wet Tobey Maguire.

But what is there for the rest of us to enjoy about The Good German? Well, for journalists still enraged by the memory of the plagiarisms of Ruth Shalit and the fabrications of Stephen Glass, there’s the fact that Jake, Clooney’s punching bag of a character, is a correspondent for the New Republic. But Jake is not suffering for the sins of Shalit and Glass. The Good German is set decades before they were born, in 1945 Berlin just weeks after the German surrender.

Clooney is a war correspondent who has ostensibly come to cover the Potsdam confab among Truman, Stalin, and Churchill. His real purpose, though, is to find Lena (Cate Blanchett), the married woman who was his mistress years earlier when he was the AP reporter there. It turns out that Jake’s driver, Corporal Tully (Maguire), is Lena’s paramour of sorts. Whom does Lena love? What happened to her husband? Why are the Russians in Berlin willing to pay 200,000 marks to find the husband? Why are the Americans killing people to see that it doesn’t happen?

And most important, why does Cate Blanchett sound like a cross between Natasha Nogoodnik, the Russki femme fatale on the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, and the German floozy-chantoozie played by Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles? Kahn was parodying Marlene Dietrich. Blanchett does her one better. She’s parodying herself, in what will certainly be the worst performance this glorious actress has given or will ever give.

It fits the movie, though, which makes no sense whatsoever. The Americans are trying to get hold of German rocket scientists before the Russians do. They even have a rocket scientist holed up in a secret apartment. But why is the rocket scientist holed up in a secret apartment? Not to keep him from the Russians, who don’t have access to the American zone in Berlin. Rather, they’re keeping him away from an American prosecutor trying to bust Nazis. But then it turns out the American prosecutor is in on it with the American army.

So–once again–why do they have the guy holed up in a secret apartment?

The Good German is a ridiculous piece of work, and it’s really a shame, because who doesn’t long for a rich and juicy romantic melodrama starring two of the best-looking people on earth looking sharp in vintage 1940s clothing? Even sadder, it’s based on a terrific potboiler of a novel by Joseph Kanon that could have made a great movie. But this isn’t Kanon’s Good German. Rather, it’s The Good German as adapted by screenwriter Paul Attanasio and director Steven Soderbergh, and their adaptation is a disaster.

They decided that Kanon’s novel was far too complicated a tale and chose to simplify it by merging characters and streamlining the plot. The result is narrative goo. Characters in the movie continually do inexplicably stupid things, and why? Because a different character in the novel did them and the filmmakers retained the action without retaining the character. Scenes that make perfect sense in the book are incoherent in the movie. Quite a trick.

The incompetence of the storytelling is due, in part, to the fact that director Soderbergh was far more interested in how he was making his movie than in the movie he was making. He decided to make The Good German almost as if he were filming it in 1945–in black-and-white, using period camera lenses and staging the proceedings on a studio backlot.

He’s trying to be Michael Curtiz, the greatest of the studio hacks, director of Casablanca and Mildred Pierce. But while a Curtiz movie is certainly an exercise in style, it’s far more than that. He was primarily an efficient story teller who always managed to steer his audience through the curves and turns of a film noir plot with the skill of a Formula One driver. Steven Soderbergh handles The Good German like a trucker who gets his 18-wheeler trapped on a narrow street and has to smash cars on both sides to get out.

After the conclusion of principal photography, Clooney dissolved his partnership with Soderbergh. Maybe he was sick and tired of getting beaten up.

John Podhoretz is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.