The Good German (2006)

Directed by Steven Soderbergh; written by Paul Attanasio, based on the novel by Joseph Kanon; director of photography, Mr. Soderbergh (under the name Peter Andrews); editor, Mr. Soderbergh (under the name Mary Ann Bernard); music by Thomas Newman; production designer, Philip Messina; produced by Ben Cosgrove and Gregory Jacobs; released by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 105 minutes.
WITH: George Clooney (Jake Geismer), Cate Blanchett (Lena Brandt), Tobey Maguire (Tully), Beau Bridges (Colonel Muller), Tony Curran (Danny), Leland Orser (Bernie), Jack Thompson (Congressman Breimer), Robin Weigert (Hannelore) and Ravil Isyanov (General Sikorsky).

Like other contemporary film people, Soderburgh has alternating careers. His makes entertainments that provide the freedom for his independent experiments. Clooney has become the Mastroianni to his Fellini, abetting many of these projects. So, for every opening of an “Ocean’s #,” there is a “Syriana,” “Full Frontal” or “Bubble”. Soderburgh has tacked this zig-zag course for a long time. “Sex, Lies & Videotape” (1989), “Out Of Sight” (1998), “Erin Brockovich” (2000), “Solaris” (2002), etc.

Also like others, Soderburgh’s “experiments” can devolve into self-indulgent vanity projects, wish fulfillment that, as one critic observed, cares little about the audience. The dictum that an artist’s only duty is to please himself is usually a refuge of artists embittered by audience derision. Soderburgh is among the fortunate elite who can truly brag, “Oh I could be popular if I wanted to” and also can claim to produce “Art for its own sake”.

“The Good German” is a cute experiment that tries to bridge the gap to popular acceptance. The concept is to make a film the way the Studio made it back in the day — like “Casablanca”, but with a contemporary freedom to tell it like it REALLY was. Tell the unsentimental truth about love and war and the American Way, using the Studio crafts that created the myths back then — an anti-“Casablanca”. He also tries to recapture the mood of Carol Reed’s “The Third Man”, the “Neo-Realism” of Rossellini’s “Open City” and “Germany Year Zero” and some of the cynicism of Wilder’s “A Foreign Affair.” (Apparently, Soderburgh screened the film for critics paired with John Huston’s “The Maltese Falcon.”)

Many loved the idea and were licking our chops at the thought of seeing Clooney’s spin on Bogie; Blanchett’s on Bergman, Soderburgh’s on Curtiz and all those others. He fails miserably. And it is too bad.

It fails for a lot of reasons. First in my view, Attanasio’s script lacks polish, coherence, wit and surprise. Second, the acting is a disappointment: Clooney seems unsure of himself in every scene. Soderburgh’s instruction was to act like a contract player of the ‘40's, dropping the internalized modern acting. Clooney, who seems the most traditional of today’s screen personalities, apparently interpreted the direction as elimination of all Cloonyisms. Thus, we get no self-deprecating winks or stammered anger, no personality at all. The actor was more charming as Fred Friendly.

Blanchett is trapped in a “Deitrich” accent and faux fatale look that provokes comparison with her caricature of Hepburn in “The Aviator” crossed with Natasha of “Rocky And Bullwinkle”. The high contrast black and white close-ups are the antithesis of 40's glamour photography and the unflattering hard look, accentuated by the deep voiced German accent and her burnt out flat delivery fails to hint at the woman she was before the war that is now lost in her fight to survive.

And there is absolutely no chemistry between the stars. Clooney earned his star stripes in a car trunk and hotel room with J-Lo in "Out Of Sight." Here, we get a blackened screen kiss and quick cut back to plot.

Neither character, the "world weary reporter" returning to recapture his love, or the bitter survivor, is written, directed or acted with enough passion to make us care very much.

Sentimentality is overwrought emotion. Anti-sentimentality is not the absence of any feeling.

In “Casablanca,” the chemistry was carefully cultivated during the flashback sequence showing pre-war innocent intimacy between the lovers that has been lost. Soderburgh could not bring himself to insert such a now-hackneyed device and he finds no substitute. When he does use a brief flashback, it is to show Lena being raped and shooting a Russian officer to explain her frigidity and fear of the Russian Zone, while he conceals her deeper secret until the very end.

Jake’s obsession with Lena should be like Rick’s with Ilsa, repressing his cynicism for one last stab at redemptive love or at least self-sacrificing nobility. The script wants Lena to seem like a hardened femme fatale with a soft heart or is it vice versa? But neither the plot nor the style nor the pace nor the acting successfully conveys any of this feeling to the audience.

Soderburgh hopes that his stylish photography and cutting will carry the day. He wants to be a heroic auteur like Huston, Reed, Curtiz, Welles, overcoming trite material and studio strictures to create distinctive and personal art. He is correct that those classic directors had style, but he ignores the fact that for the most part, their work was intended to and did enhance the mood, to tell the story and make the audience feel.

Every movie of this kind tells both a micro and macro story — in the breathless Studio trailer parlance: “a love story set against a backdrop of intrigue and danger.” The macro story is the postwar beginnings of the Cold War, the rush to capture German scientists amid the wreckage of Berlin ... “where everything and everyone has a price...”

Lena’s husband is a mathematician who aided the leader of Camp Dora, the concentration camp / project to build the V-2 rockets. “Emile Brandt” is a composite of real figures including Arthur Rudolph, and his boss, “Franz Bettmann,” is based on Wernher Von Braun. Both Rudolph and Von Braun were captured by the US Army and hustled to America in Operation Overcast / Paperclip, evading war crimes trials for abuse of slave laborers, at least 20,000 of whom were killed (more than were victimized when the rockets exploded in England).

The script rather transparently mimics wartime and immediate postwar liberal sentiment. Jake is a reporter for “The New Republic” and he wants to uncover the nasty truth that America is willing to use Nazis and Nazi methods to survive the rocket age. His adversaries are American soldiers named “Muller” and “Shaeffer,” and a Congressman named “Breimer” while an officer who helps him is a Jew trying to gain evidence to punish war crimes. But there will be no happy ending in this re-write of history. The truth will be suppressed on the grounds of national survival.

The last scene is obviously intended to mimic and undercut “Casablanca’s” famous airport finale. Everyone who has tried to act nobly has failed. Emile's secret dies with him. Lena's guilt remains. Jake has traded suppression of the truth for Lena’s safe passage out of Berlin. Now he wants to know why she is so desperate to leave Berlin. She confesses that she is a war criminal; she turned in twelve of her fellow Jews to the Gestapo. This is meant to be a shock, a crescendo that reveals her corruption and the end of possibilities for redemption.

Like Rick, Jake will give up the love of his life. But not in order to continue any noble fight alone; not because she is worthy. Maybe because she is no good and Jake feels — well, we don’t know exactly what — disappointment, disgust, resignation, disillusionment, guilt?

The scene falls flat. You can almost hear the audience murmuring: “so what?” With what we now know about what everyone did to survive the Holocaust and The War and The Post War, Lena’s revelation seems almost trivial.

A better, more dramatic re-write would have echoed “The Maltese Falcon’s” climactic scene, allowing Jake to disclose his knowledge of the truth about her, cruelly forcing her to confess.

Alternate endings could then follow. (1) He could have done the sentimental thing: said something like, “Go ahead, get out of my sight. I can’t stand to look at you.”

Or (2) he could have said something really shocking and unsentimental: (With A Shrug) “Okay babe, it doesn’t matter. I want you anyway. Maybe you'll look better in Technicolor. Besides, who am I to judge? I spent the war getting drunk in London.”