Friday, May 11, 2007

Movie Review: The Good German

This was playing in my local art theater and I wanted to catch it on a big screen. It's a Steven Soderbergh homage to post WW II noir films like The Third Man. It succeeds in capturing the look and feel of such films with high contrast black and white and lots of shadows. In fact it was filmed as much as possible with the technology available in the 1940s (fixed length lens, harsh incandescent lights, boom mikes). The plot's involved but not quite fun.

George Clooney plays Captain Jacob Geismer, a war correspondent in Berlin at the time of the Postdam summit. Cate Blanchett plays Lena Brandt, his former German flame who's now seeing
Patrick Tully played by Tobey Maguire. Tully is Geismer's driver and is also involved in the black market. The allies are there to divide up Germany (and its scientists) but there are war crimes, murders, and the black market to deal with. Geismer uncovers mystery after mystery.

Clooney does very well as William Holden or Joseph Cotton. Blanchett is brilliant as Marlene Dietrich or Ingrid Bergman. Toby Maguire stands out as being out of place. They're going for the evil innocence but it didn't really work for me. it could be that I just saw him as Peter Parker and didn't really like him in Spider-Man 3 since he had the same odd grin the whole film. He did creepy evil very well in Sin City but he didn't speak in that role.

I think my problem with The Good German was that all of the big issues of the time were treated merely as plot elements in a mystery. It didn't explore difficult moral choices, it barely stated they existed. I didn't feel a lot of tension and I didn't really care about the characters. The mystery was fine and the noir was fun, but it wasn't enough.

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