In the immortal words of Heidi Klum on her “Project: Runway,” I’ve got two words for “The Good German”: Auf wiedersehen.
This convoluted, boring piece of black-and-white pretension deserves a less-than-fond farewell because in director Steven Soderbergh’s quest to pay homage to the vintage films set around the 1940s war era, he forgot what made them great. While adding the flavor of modern day standards of graphic content, he mimics all the technical elements of the past with precision in his mystery drama about murder and survival in post-World War II Berlin. But it wasn’t just the old-fashioned cameras and boom-mike sound recording, the monochromatic film noir starkness or the credit typeface, or even the stylized acting that gave power to classics including “Casablanca,” “The Third Man” or “Judgment at Nuremberg” — which are sometimes directly referenced in “The Good German,” even with specific scene set-ups.
It was a feeling, a magic elixir that somehow came out of all of those elements that informed some of the best work from the golden age of Hollywood. And it was the larger-than-life size of movies and movie stars at a time when a leading man or woman was a treat to be seen 20 feet high only on a night out, never reduced to a constant presence in people’s living rooms every night on “Entertainment Tonight” or cable movie reruns.
But most of all, those old movies had scripts!
Instead here, screenwriter Paul Attanasio’s adaptation of Joseph Kanon’s novel is a confusion of contradictory character motivations and manufactured plot elements. George Clooney is the protagonist Jake Geismer, an American journalist sent to cover the Allies’ Potsdam Conference in 1945, which was assembled to divide up the spoils of war. But Jake may have really come back to Berlin to look up his old German girlfriend, Lena Brandt. It’s a role that has Cate Blanchett doing a pale imitation of Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich, meant to give off the sensual world-weariness of those timeless icons as a put-upon prostitute.
Is Lena Jewish and yet a Nazi collaborator, too? Apparently so. But when hard-bitten American corporal and blackmarketeer Tully turns up dead — played by a miscast Tobey Maguire, who seems too boyish-looking and stilted trying to play tough and ‘40s retro — she and Jake find themselves more than a little involved.
The hunt for Nazi war criminals and the grab for the old Nazi scientific brain trust muddle up a whodunit that gets even more bogged down by the intentionally heightened emoting of the usually more convincing Clooney and Blanchett. They, like the audience, are victims of director Soderbergh’s noble experiment gone wrong.
‘The Good German’
Stars: George Clooney, Cate Blanchett and Tobey Maguire
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Rated: R for language, violence and some sexual content
