The Good German
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Those comments could also be used for Soderbergh's Kafka.The Original BJ wrote:There's not much to say about this film except for to reiterate what's been said in the negative reviews. The cinematography is gorgeous and the score is terrific . . . but what's the point of it all?
Characters and story take a gigantic back seat to technical imitation, and the whole thing feels stuffy and distant. It's an exercise, and a completely uninteresting one in my opinion.
If ya ain't going to use older styles to comment on earlier films and eras (a la Far From Heaven), why bother?
"I want cement covering every blade of grass in this nation! Don't we taxpayers have a voice anymore?" Peggy Gravel (Mink Stole) in John Waters' Desperate Living (1977)
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There's not much to say about this film except for to reiterate what's been said in the negative reviews. The cinematography is gorgeous and the score is terrific . . . but what's the point of it all?
Characters and story take a gigantic back seat to technical imitation, and the whole thing feels stuffy and distant. It's an exercise, and a completely uninteresting one in my opinion.
If ya ain't going to use older styles to comment on earlier films and eras (a la Far From Heaven), why bother?
Characters and story take a gigantic back seat to technical imitation, and the whole thing feels stuffy and distant. It's an exercise, and a completely uninteresting one in my opinion.
If ya ain't going to use older styles to comment on earlier films and eras (a la Far From Heaven), why bother?
Increasingly, Mr. Soderbergh’s oscillation between glossy divertissements like the “Ocean’s” films and modest diversions like “Bubble” seems less like the natural workings of a restless imagination than a disengaged one. Even more than “Bubble” or “Ocean’s Twelve,” “The Good German” feels like the product of a filmmaker far more interested in his own handicraft — in the logistics of moving the camera among the characters with a dip and a glide — than in the audience for whom he’s ostensibly creating that work.
Manohla Dargis was a huge fan of Soderbergh's Traffic (her review was used for the Criterion DVD liner notes), so I'm surprised to see her rip into this one so thoroughly.
I'm kind of surprised that studios keep giving Soderbergh funding for his genre exercises.
Spies, Lies and Noir in Berlin
By MANOHLA DARGIS
In his genre pastiche “The Good German,” Steven Soderbergh has tried to resurrect the magic of classical Hollywood, principally by sucking out all the air, energy and pleasure from his own filmmaking. Based on the well-regarded Joseph Kanon novel, this film stars a distracted, emotionally detached George Clooney as Jake Geismer, an American journalist who, following World War II, returns to Germany to check out the doings at Potsdam and find his lost love, Lena, a frau who, as played by a vamping Cate Blanchett, recalls Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s postwar heroine Veronika Voss by way of Carol Burnett. [ouch!]
As it turns out, they don’t make them like they used to even when they try. Mr. Soderbergh has explained that with “The Good German” he was seeking to make a film that looked and sounded like an old studio picture, but without the old studio prohibitions. In the name of verisimilitude and creative freedom, his actors talk a blue streak in black-and-white images captured with period-era camera lenses. More lewdly, Tobey Maguire, who plays Tully, one of those smiling sadists of the type once played by Dan Duryea, helps the film earn its R rating by doing the kinds of things to Ms. Blanchett that audiences could only dream of doing to Ingrid Bergman. Here’s looking at you kid, flung over the bed and on your knees.
With one startling and critical difference, Paul Attanasio’s screenplay follows the general direction of Mr. Kanon’s novel, which, embroidered with historical detail, zeroes in on the mid-1940s moment when the United States and the Soviet Union were racing to scoop up German scientists in preparation for the long, cold war to follow. The novel stacks up the various acts of wartime violence — genocide, carpet bombing, postwar raping and pillaging committed by the respective German, American and Soviet players — as if they were poker chips. In this game of high-stakes moral relativism, the Germans clearly have amassed the most chips (six million and counting), though the thuggish Soviets and slick, smiling Americans are doing their best to catch up.
Mr. Attanasio, whose credits include “Quiz Show,” attempts to work all this murk and mess into a compressed screenplay that also leaves room for the stars. When not chasing after Lena, Jake races around the impressively dilapidated sets trying to put all the geopolitical pieces together. When an American soldier winds up dead in Potsdam, Jake thinks he has the makings of an ideal you-are-there story. His zigzag pursuit of his long-cooled love quickly dovetails with a boiling-hot story involving Nazi war crimes, the details of which are helpfully provided by assorted secondary types, including Beau Bridges as the American military officer running part of Berlin, Leland Orser as an American Jew hunting down Nazis and Ravil Isyanov as a watchful Soviet officer.
Despite Mr. Soderbergh’s attempt to mimic the classic studio style, notably through the deliberate editing patterns and fairly restrained camerawork, “The Good German” bears little resemblance to a Hollywood film of the period. Tonally his cinematography is particularly off-key, characterized by hot whites and inky blacks that can put faces into harsh light and swallow bodies whole; neither Ms. Blanchett nor Mr. Clooney is flattered by his attentions. Although he tosses in an occasional beauty shot, framing Jake against a mottled nighttime sky in one scene, the film’s high-contrast austerity owes more to the anti-aesthetic of the modern art house than it does to the back-lot Expressionism of Hollywood noirs or one of the filmmaker’s favorite touchstones, “The Third Man.”
In “Casablanca,” another of the golden oldies Mr. Soderbergh samples for “The Good German,” Humphrey Bogart cozies up to Bergman in flashback on a Parisian bed. The lovers remain dressed throughout their abbreviated affair, though one suggestively uncorked bottle of Champagne and several coy dissolves suggest realms of adult possibility. Yet while the language routinely waxes raw in “The Good German,” the most striking difference between it and a Hollywood film like “Casablanca” aren’t the expletives, the new film’s calculated cynicism or even that glimpse of bedroom coupling; it’s that the older film feels as if it was made for the satisfaction of the audience while the other feels as if it was made for that of the director alone.
In the film laboratory that is Mr. Soderbergh’s brain, ideas boil, steam and sputter. In 1989 he conquered Cannes and launched a thousand Harvey and Bob Weinstein stories with his independently financed sensation “Sex, Lies and Videotape,” quickly becoming a legend before his time. He subsequently flopped and floundered before he brought his independent ways to bear on the studio apparatus, a metamorphosis that involved turning a television actor into the sexiest man alive, repurposing the Rat Pack and winning an Oscar.
It has been a second act that, until recently, seemed as smart as the man living it but that has grown gradually more disjointed as Mr. Soderbergh’s penchant for experimentation has become an end in itself rather than a means to aesthetic liberation. That’s too bad for us, for him and for Hollywood, which frankly could use all the help it can get.
In a recent interview Mr. Soderbergh said that he would have been happy with a career like that of Michael Curtiz, a workhorse who spent decades churning out entertainments like “Casablanca” for Warner Brothers. The idea that the extremely self-motivated Mr. Soderbergh might be satisfied with a career like Curtiz’s is rich nonsense. Curtiz had next to no say on the personnel who worked on “Casablanca.” By contrast, for “The Good German” Mr. Soderbergh persuaded the same studio, now owned by a media conglomerate for which movies represent only a thin slice of the pie chart, to cough up millions for what is essentially a pet art project.
Increasingly, Mr. Soderbergh’s oscillation between glossy divertissements like the “Ocean’s” films and modest diversions like “Bubble” seems less like the natural workings of a restless imagination than a disengaged one. Even more than “Bubble” or “Ocean’s Twelve,” “The Good German” feels like the product of a filmmaker far more interested in his own handicraft — in the logistics of moving the camera among the characters with a dip and a glide — than in the audience for whom he’s ostensibly creating that work.
Manufactured for mass enjoyment, “Casablanca” runs wonderfully more than half a century after leaving the factory. It’s sentimental and contrived. It’s also the kind of well-wrought, pleasurable film that Mr. Soderbergh can do beautifully (see “Out of Sight”) and seems recently reluctant to pursue.
The extent of that disengagement is most evident in the new film’s wildly feel-bad denouement, in which the paradoxically good German of Mr. Kanon’s title, the one who looked away from atrocities, is transformed into a duplicitous Jew. The most charitable explanation for this offensive, historically spurious character is that Mr. Soderbergh and Mr. Attanasio, in trying to cram the novel’s nearly 500 pages into a 105-minute film, decided to conflate two different clichés into one.
Rather unfortunately, and perhaps with an eye to the present, they end up suggesting that in wartime everyone’s hands can become slicked with blood, even a Jew in Nazi Germany. Somewhere, Jack and Harry Warner, who stopped doing business with Nazi Germany before any other studio in Hollywood, are spinning. They aren’t the only ones.
By MANOHLA DARGIS
In his genre pastiche “The Good German,” Steven Soderbergh has tried to resurrect the magic of classical Hollywood, principally by sucking out all the air, energy and pleasure from his own filmmaking. Based on the well-regarded Joseph Kanon novel, this film stars a distracted, emotionally detached George Clooney as Jake Geismer, an American journalist who, following World War II, returns to Germany to check out the doings at Potsdam and find his lost love, Lena, a frau who, as played by a vamping Cate Blanchett, recalls Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s postwar heroine Veronika Voss by way of Carol Burnett. [ouch!]
As it turns out, they don’t make them like they used to even when they try. Mr. Soderbergh has explained that with “The Good German” he was seeking to make a film that looked and sounded like an old studio picture, but without the old studio prohibitions. In the name of verisimilitude and creative freedom, his actors talk a blue streak in black-and-white images captured with period-era camera lenses. More lewdly, Tobey Maguire, who plays Tully, one of those smiling sadists of the type once played by Dan Duryea, helps the film earn its R rating by doing the kinds of things to Ms. Blanchett that audiences could only dream of doing to Ingrid Bergman. Here’s looking at you kid, flung over the bed and on your knees.
With one startling and critical difference, Paul Attanasio’s screenplay follows the general direction of Mr. Kanon’s novel, which, embroidered with historical detail, zeroes in on the mid-1940s moment when the United States and the Soviet Union were racing to scoop up German scientists in preparation for the long, cold war to follow. The novel stacks up the various acts of wartime violence — genocide, carpet bombing, postwar raping and pillaging committed by the respective German, American and Soviet players — as if they were poker chips. In this game of high-stakes moral relativism, the Germans clearly have amassed the most chips (six million and counting), though the thuggish Soviets and slick, smiling Americans are doing their best to catch up.
Mr. Attanasio, whose credits include “Quiz Show,” attempts to work all this murk and mess into a compressed screenplay that also leaves room for the stars. When not chasing after Lena, Jake races around the impressively dilapidated sets trying to put all the geopolitical pieces together. When an American soldier winds up dead in Potsdam, Jake thinks he has the makings of an ideal you-are-there story. His zigzag pursuit of his long-cooled love quickly dovetails with a boiling-hot story involving Nazi war crimes, the details of which are helpfully provided by assorted secondary types, including Beau Bridges as the American military officer running part of Berlin, Leland Orser as an American Jew hunting down Nazis and Ravil Isyanov as a watchful Soviet officer.
Despite Mr. Soderbergh’s attempt to mimic the classic studio style, notably through the deliberate editing patterns and fairly restrained camerawork, “The Good German” bears little resemblance to a Hollywood film of the period. Tonally his cinematography is particularly off-key, characterized by hot whites and inky blacks that can put faces into harsh light and swallow bodies whole; neither Ms. Blanchett nor Mr. Clooney is flattered by his attentions. Although he tosses in an occasional beauty shot, framing Jake against a mottled nighttime sky in one scene, the film’s high-contrast austerity owes more to the anti-aesthetic of the modern art house than it does to the back-lot Expressionism of Hollywood noirs or one of the filmmaker’s favorite touchstones, “The Third Man.”
In “Casablanca,” another of the golden oldies Mr. Soderbergh samples for “The Good German,” Humphrey Bogart cozies up to Bergman in flashback on a Parisian bed. The lovers remain dressed throughout their abbreviated affair, though one suggestively uncorked bottle of Champagne and several coy dissolves suggest realms of adult possibility. Yet while the language routinely waxes raw in “The Good German,” the most striking difference between it and a Hollywood film like “Casablanca” aren’t the expletives, the new film’s calculated cynicism or even that glimpse of bedroom coupling; it’s that the older film feels as if it was made for the satisfaction of the audience while the other feels as if it was made for that of the director alone.
In the film laboratory that is Mr. Soderbergh’s brain, ideas boil, steam and sputter. In 1989 he conquered Cannes and launched a thousand Harvey and Bob Weinstein stories with his independently financed sensation “Sex, Lies and Videotape,” quickly becoming a legend before his time. He subsequently flopped and floundered before he brought his independent ways to bear on the studio apparatus, a metamorphosis that involved turning a television actor into the sexiest man alive, repurposing the Rat Pack and winning an Oscar.
It has been a second act that, until recently, seemed as smart as the man living it but that has grown gradually more disjointed as Mr. Soderbergh’s penchant for experimentation has become an end in itself rather than a means to aesthetic liberation. That’s too bad for us, for him and for Hollywood, which frankly could use all the help it can get.
In a recent interview Mr. Soderbergh said that he would have been happy with a career like that of Michael Curtiz, a workhorse who spent decades churning out entertainments like “Casablanca” for Warner Brothers. The idea that the extremely self-motivated Mr. Soderbergh might be satisfied with a career like Curtiz’s is rich nonsense. Curtiz had next to no say on the personnel who worked on “Casablanca.” By contrast, for “The Good German” Mr. Soderbergh persuaded the same studio, now owned by a media conglomerate for which movies represent only a thin slice of the pie chart, to cough up millions for what is essentially a pet art project.
Increasingly, Mr. Soderbergh’s oscillation between glossy divertissements like the “Ocean’s” films and modest diversions like “Bubble” seems less like the natural workings of a restless imagination than a disengaged one. Even more than “Bubble” or “Ocean’s Twelve,” “The Good German” feels like the product of a filmmaker far more interested in his own handicraft — in the logistics of moving the camera among the characters with a dip and a glide — than in the audience for whom he’s ostensibly creating that work.
Manufactured for mass enjoyment, “Casablanca” runs wonderfully more than half a century after leaving the factory. It’s sentimental and contrived. It’s also the kind of well-wrought, pleasurable film that Mr. Soderbergh can do beautifully (see “Out of Sight”) and seems recently reluctant to pursue.
The extent of that disengagement is most evident in the new film’s wildly feel-bad denouement, in which the paradoxically good German of Mr. Kanon’s title, the one who looked away from atrocities, is transformed into a duplicitous Jew. The most charitable explanation for this offensive, historically spurious character is that Mr. Soderbergh and Mr. Attanasio, in trying to cram the novel’s nearly 500 pages into a 105-minute film, decided to conflate two different clichés into one.
Rather unfortunately, and perhaps with an eye to the present, they end up suggesting that in wartime everyone’s hands can become slicked with blood, even a Jew in Nazi Germany. Somewhere, Jack and Harry Warner, who stopped doing business with Nazi Germany before any other studio in Hollywood, are spinning. They aren’t the only ones.
"...it is the weak who are cruel, and...gentleness is only to be expected from the strong." - Leo Reston
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
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The Good German
Mike Goodridge in Los Angeles
Screendaily
Dir: Steven Soderbergh. US. 2006.107mins.
Steven Soderbergh’s latest cinematic experiment is an homage to atmospheric wartime noir classics like The Third Man and Casablanca, attempting to reconjure the magic by recreating post-war Berlin on the backlot, shooting in black-and-white and encouraging the actors to give heightened theatrical performances a la Bogart or Dietrich. It’s a bold idea but a failure in the realisation, not necessarily because those 1940s movies are peerless, but because Soderbergh cannot generate suspense or romance from his mise en scene. It’s technically audacious, but ultimately dreary to watch.
The package here – Soderbergh and three of today’s most compelling film actors (Clooney, Blanchett, Maguire) – will intrigue audiences and box-office figures will be respectable. But reviews will be far from raves, word of mouth won’t be strong and mainstream moviegoers attracted by Clooney will be turned off by the black-and-white. In the final analysis, it’s nothing more than an expensive curio.
Soderbergh’s films are generally cerebral affairs which rarely inspire thrills in, or generate tears from, the audience (remember Solaris?). While his objective tone was appropriate for verite drama like Traffic or Bubble, it is not for a film emulating Casablanca or The Third Man. He understands the heightened theatricality of those films, but ignores the genuine feeling and emotion that was invested in them and which makes them resonate decades after they were made. The experiment is all too knowing and detached, without room for real emotion or real tragedy.
The setting of the film, written by Paul Attanasio from Joseph Kanon’s novel, is Berlin in 1945 during the Potsdam Peace Conference. Ironically, for the fact that he shot on the backlot, Soderbergh uses real footage of the devastated city shot by Billy Wilder for his wonderfully salty 1948 comedy A Foreign Affair.
Nor does he limit himself to 1940s sensibilities. The Good German is full of brazen sexuality, foul-mouthed dialogue and ugly violence....
....Ironically, A Foreign Affair is the film to which The Good German bears most similarities. Although that was a comedy, it perfectly captured the amorality of post-war Berlin and the social legacy of the Nazi regime, all embodied by Marlene Dietrich as the ultimate sexual opportunist. Blanchett does her best to ape Dietrich, but, accomplished actress though she is, she cannot bring any life or sex appeal to her gloomy character.
Clooney also struggles to produce his usual magnetism in a role which would have been perfect for Clark Gable or Dana Andrews. Maguire, meanwhile, steals the acting honours. Exploiting his youthful Peter Parker naivete to the hilt at first, he is all the more menacing when he turns pugnacious. Once he is dispatched to an early grave 20 minutes in, the film loses its energy.
Mike Goodridge in Los Angeles
Screendaily
Dir: Steven Soderbergh. US. 2006.107mins.
Steven Soderbergh’s latest cinematic experiment is an homage to atmospheric wartime noir classics like The Third Man and Casablanca, attempting to reconjure the magic by recreating post-war Berlin on the backlot, shooting in black-and-white and encouraging the actors to give heightened theatrical performances a la Bogart or Dietrich. It’s a bold idea but a failure in the realisation, not necessarily because those 1940s movies are peerless, but because Soderbergh cannot generate suspense or romance from his mise en scene. It’s technically audacious, but ultimately dreary to watch.
The package here – Soderbergh and three of today’s most compelling film actors (Clooney, Blanchett, Maguire) – will intrigue audiences and box-office figures will be respectable. But reviews will be far from raves, word of mouth won’t be strong and mainstream moviegoers attracted by Clooney will be turned off by the black-and-white. In the final analysis, it’s nothing more than an expensive curio.
Soderbergh’s films are generally cerebral affairs which rarely inspire thrills in, or generate tears from, the audience (remember Solaris?). While his objective tone was appropriate for verite drama like Traffic or Bubble, it is not for a film emulating Casablanca or The Third Man. He understands the heightened theatricality of those films, but ignores the genuine feeling and emotion that was invested in them and which makes them resonate decades after they were made. The experiment is all too knowing and detached, without room for real emotion or real tragedy.
The setting of the film, written by Paul Attanasio from Joseph Kanon’s novel, is Berlin in 1945 during the Potsdam Peace Conference. Ironically, for the fact that he shot on the backlot, Soderbergh uses real footage of the devastated city shot by Billy Wilder for his wonderfully salty 1948 comedy A Foreign Affair.
Nor does he limit himself to 1940s sensibilities. The Good German is full of brazen sexuality, foul-mouthed dialogue and ugly violence....
....Ironically, A Foreign Affair is the film to which The Good German bears most similarities. Although that was a comedy, it perfectly captured the amorality of post-war Berlin and the social legacy of the Nazi regime, all embodied by Marlene Dietrich as the ultimate sexual opportunist. Blanchett does her best to ape Dietrich, but, accomplished actress though she is, she cannot bring any life or sex appeal to her gloomy character.
Clooney also struggles to produce his usual magnetism in a role which would have been perfect for Clark Gable or Dana Andrews. Maguire, meanwhile, steals the acting honours. Exploiting his youthful Peter Parker naivete to the hilt at first, he is all the more menacing when he turns pugnacious. Once he is dispatched to an early grave 20 minutes in, the film loses its energy.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
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The Good German
By Kirk Honeycutt
Hollywood Reporter
When not making his Las Vegas heist movies, director Steven Soderbergh enjoys experimenting with film forms and genres. In "The Good German," he takes Joseph Kanon's best-selling novel of intrigue, set amid the devastation and corruption of post-World War II Berlin, then imposes on himself the style and restrictions of American studio filmmaking of that era. Thus, "German" is in black and white, shot on the backlot and in Southern California locations subbing for exotic locales with newsreel footage and rear-screen projection for exterior backgrounds, while stars George Clooney, Cate Blanchett and Toby Maguire emote in the foreground.
The visual style -- the camera setups, editing and scene-shifting wipes -- all scream Warner Bros. circa 1945, with an undisguised nod toward that studio's greatest wartime romance, "Casablanca," even to the point of echoing the final sequence at an airport, where two lovers say goodbye for the last time, though for decidedly different reasons.
A stunt? Yes, of course, but a good one and well executed. It also allows Soderbergh and writer Paul Attanasio, in a smart, well-paced adaptation, to explore a moral complexity that never found its way into movies of that era. In "German," a 1940s studio tale of honor and survival collides with the stark realities of hard choices made by people in the face of unimaginable horror. In the old studio versions, there was always a moral high ground; in "German," that position is very hard to locate.
The demographics for this film might skew a little older than 2006 Warners might like. It calls for at least an appreciation of the old style of filmmaking. The leads will help sell the film to younger audiences, but what viewers un-familiar with "Casablanca" or "Watch on the Rhine" will make of the old-fashioned techniques is hard to say. Warners should enjoy at least modest success, and given the rising star power of Clooney, Blanchett and Maguire, possibly a breakout hit.
When war correspondent Jake Geismar (Clooney) returns to Berlin, a city where he ran the Associated Press bureau before the war, he discovers dramatic changes. It's not just street after street of bombed-out buildings and barely inhabitable rubble. It's how the laws of the jungle have seized everyone, occupier and occupied.
Russian soldiers have raped their way across Berlin. Yank soldiers, tasting for the first time the forbidden fruit of unrestricted moral boundaries, eagerly deal in the black market and commit crimes with impunity.
Jake enthusiastically accepted the New Republic's offer to cover the Allies' Potsdam Conference so he might track down a former lover, Lena Brandt (Blanchett), a married woman he hired as a stringer before the war. Tully (Maguire), a venal soldier from the Army motor pool assigned to drive him, has deep connections in the black market. Consequently, Jake finds Lena much sooner than he anticipated. Imagine his shock though to learn that Lena is a prostitute and Tully her lover-pimp. We're a long way from the reunion of Ilsa and Rick in "Casablanca," aren't we?
What drives the melodrama is an intense manhunt for Lena's husband by U.S. and Soviet authorities. Neil Brandt was a mathematician who assisted a Nazi rocket scientist whom the American authorities are eager to spirit out of Berlin to work for the U.S. rocket program. Only Neil is privy to information regarding the scientist that would be most damning were it to come out in the press or a war crimes tribunal.
Lena insists Neil is dead. Indeed, he has left no trace. Yet Lena is in constant danger, and soon so is Jake. Tully meanwhile turns up dead in the Soviet sector with 100,000 German marks in his pocket.
Things go from bad to worse as Jake struggles to help Lena. Only Lena doesn't want his help. She keeps telling him she is not the woman he once knew. She is a survivor and has all the guilt, shame and dirty secrets that come with survival. Jake fails to listen -- to his own peril.
Thus, Jake, played with sturdy, masculine thickheadedness by Clooney, becomes our point of entry into the moral morass that is 1945 Berlin. Everyone is dirty. And, in the case of Army Colonel Muller (Beau Bridges) and Congressman Breimer (Jack Thompson), cheerfully so. They see the future, the Cold War, and have their eye on the prize -- ex-Nazi scientists and who cares about their crimes. Jake remains clueless until the end. After all, there must be such a thing as a good German, right?
Clooney adds to his increasingly prestigious rogues' gallery of film portraits as the one guy in this unsavory lot trying to stay clean. Blanchett gets everything right -- the accent, her German dialogue, the weary sexuality (deliberately reminiscent of Marlene Dietrich) and the amorality her character has embraced. Maguire is wonderful as a guileless young man for whom the war has unleashed hitherto unknown desires, excitement and greed.
The seamless mix of archival footage and sets is much superior to what was possible in 1945 Hollywood. The murky shadows and slightly smudged look of the cinematography -- by Soderbergh under the pseudonym Peter Andrews -- fit the old style, as well as the theme of darkness reaching out to blot the light. The editing -- also by Soderbergh under another pseudonym -- keeps things moving right along at a let's-get-to-the-point speed that even Jack Warner would have admired.
By Kirk Honeycutt
Hollywood Reporter
When not making his Las Vegas heist movies, director Steven Soderbergh enjoys experimenting with film forms and genres. In "The Good German," he takes Joseph Kanon's best-selling novel of intrigue, set amid the devastation and corruption of post-World War II Berlin, then imposes on himself the style and restrictions of American studio filmmaking of that era. Thus, "German" is in black and white, shot on the backlot and in Southern California locations subbing for exotic locales with newsreel footage and rear-screen projection for exterior backgrounds, while stars George Clooney, Cate Blanchett and Toby Maguire emote in the foreground.
The visual style -- the camera setups, editing and scene-shifting wipes -- all scream Warner Bros. circa 1945, with an undisguised nod toward that studio's greatest wartime romance, "Casablanca," even to the point of echoing the final sequence at an airport, where two lovers say goodbye for the last time, though for decidedly different reasons.
A stunt? Yes, of course, but a good one and well executed. It also allows Soderbergh and writer Paul Attanasio, in a smart, well-paced adaptation, to explore a moral complexity that never found its way into movies of that era. In "German," a 1940s studio tale of honor and survival collides with the stark realities of hard choices made by people in the face of unimaginable horror. In the old studio versions, there was always a moral high ground; in "German," that position is very hard to locate.
The demographics for this film might skew a little older than 2006 Warners might like. It calls for at least an appreciation of the old style of filmmaking. The leads will help sell the film to younger audiences, but what viewers un-familiar with "Casablanca" or "Watch on the Rhine" will make of the old-fashioned techniques is hard to say. Warners should enjoy at least modest success, and given the rising star power of Clooney, Blanchett and Maguire, possibly a breakout hit.
When war correspondent Jake Geismar (Clooney) returns to Berlin, a city where he ran the Associated Press bureau before the war, he discovers dramatic changes. It's not just street after street of bombed-out buildings and barely inhabitable rubble. It's how the laws of the jungle have seized everyone, occupier and occupied.
Russian soldiers have raped their way across Berlin. Yank soldiers, tasting for the first time the forbidden fruit of unrestricted moral boundaries, eagerly deal in the black market and commit crimes with impunity.
Jake enthusiastically accepted the New Republic's offer to cover the Allies' Potsdam Conference so he might track down a former lover, Lena Brandt (Blanchett), a married woman he hired as a stringer before the war. Tully (Maguire), a venal soldier from the Army motor pool assigned to drive him, has deep connections in the black market. Consequently, Jake finds Lena much sooner than he anticipated. Imagine his shock though to learn that Lena is a prostitute and Tully her lover-pimp. We're a long way from the reunion of Ilsa and Rick in "Casablanca," aren't we?
What drives the melodrama is an intense manhunt for Lena's husband by U.S. and Soviet authorities. Neil Brandt was a mathematician who assisted a Nazi rocket scientist whom the American authorities are eager to spirit out of Berlin to work for the U.S. rocket program. Only Neil is privy to information regarding the scientist that would be most damning were it to come out in the press or a war crimes tribunal.
Lena insists Neil is dead. Indeed, he has left no trace. Yet Lena is in constant danger, and soon so is Jake. Tully meanwhile turns up dead in the Soviet sector with 100,000 German marks in his pocket.
Things go from bad to worse as Jake struggles to help Lena. Only Lena doesn't want his help. She keeps telling him she is not the woman he once knew. She is a survivor and has all the guilt, shame and dirty secrets that come with survival. Jake fails to listen -- to his own peril.
Thus, Jake, played with sturdy, masculine thickheadedness by Clooney, becomes our point of entry into the moral morass that is 1945 Berlin. Everyone is dirty. And, in the case of Army Colonel Muller (Beau Bridges) and Congressman Breimer (Jack Thompson), cheerfully so. They see the future, the Cold War, and have their eye on the prize -- ex-Nazi scientists and who cares about their crimes. Jake remains clueless until the end. After all, there must be such a thing as a good German, right?
Clooney adds to his increasingly prestigious rogues' gallery of film portraits as the one guy in this unsavory lot trying to stay clean. Blanchett gets everything right -- the accent, her German dialogue, the weary sexuality (deliberately reminiscent of Marlene Dietrich) and the amorality her character has embraced. Maguire is wonderful as a guileless young man for whom the war has unleashed hitherto unknown desires, excitement and greed.
The seamless mix of archival footage and sets is much superior to what was possible in 1945 Hollywood. The murky shadows and slightly smudged look of the cinematography -- by Soderbergh under the pseudonym Peter Andrews -- fit the old style, as well as the theme of darkness reaching out to blot the light. The editing -- also by Soderbergh under another pseudonym -- keeps things moving right along at a let's-get-to-the-point speed that even Jack Warner would have admired.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
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The Good German
By TODD MCCARTHY
Variety
Steven Soderbergh tries to make one like they used to and comes up short with "The Good German." A post-World War II drama set amid the rubble of a bombed-out Berlin, this black-and-white backlot production endeavors to recapture the bitter romanticism of such '40s studio artifacts as "Casablanca" and "A Foreign Affair" while adding contemporary frankness. But doing what came naturally to Hollywood craftsmen 60 years ago is clearly harder than it appeared, as Soderbergh can't duplicate the look and feel of the old-fashioned entertainments he means to honor. Despite the starry cast, the public will steer clear, leaving the director's latest honorable but failed experiment to artfilm buffs.
Soderbergh has made much of how he used actual '40s lenses and just one camera, embraced studio-confined limitations and otherwise tried to direct much as Michael Curtiz would have done. But aficionados hoping to luxuriate in a full-blown simulation of Golden Era style will come away disappointed.
"The Good German" has little of the luster, sheen and pictorial nuance of a top-flight Hollywood picture of the old school. The contrasts are far too extreme; many compositions contain large areas of impenetrable black, and faces and other light objects are overexposed to the point of being washed out. Pic looks less like a 1942 Warner Bros. melodrama than a 1962 "Twilight Zone" episode intercut with background shots from Rossellini's "Germany Year Zero."
Based on an estimable 2001 novel by Joseph Kanon, Paul Attanasio's sturdy script could scarcely boast a time and place more ripe with international intrigue and world-weary cynicism. In July 1945, Truman, Churchill and Stalin are on their way to Potsdam, outside of Berlin, to carve up the broken remains of Europe, with results that would help establish the boundaries for the foreseeable East-West stand-off. But already, the deadly cat-and-mouse games that became the stuff of countless Cold War thrillers is being played out among the wartime allies in the four zones dividing Berlin.
Entering the fray is Jake Geismer (George Clooney), an American war correspondent returning to the capital for the first time since the late '30s. Startled at how completely the city has been destroyed -- a stark, 1.33 ratio docu opening credits sequence provides vivid first-hand evidence -- Jake is less concerned about his journalistic responsibilities than he is about finding Lena, the German woman he was forced to leave behind.
The movie's rhythms seem off from the outset. A long sequence of the young Corporal Tully (Tobey Maguire) driving Jake into town from the airport feels awkward; the vehicle doesn't appear to be moving at the correct rate compared with its docu backdrop, Maguire is too cranked up while Clooney is too subdued, and the characters do not establish a rapport. Right out of the box, pic puts the viewer at arm's length.
Tully narrates the film's first section, a responsibility later assumed by Jake and then Lena. Enthusiastically acted by Maguire, Tully could be the immature younger brother of William Holden's Sefton in "Stalag 17," an opportunistic black-marketer for whom his position in the motor pool creates no end of possibilities; he supplies American whisky to the head of the Russian sector, General Sikorsky (Ravil Isyanov, excellent), and doesn't hesitate to offer Jake an hour with his girlfriend, who is none other than Lena.
Lena (Cate Blanchett) becomes the most intriguing character in the picture, partly by default; Tully is found murdered 24 minutes in -- there's no way around revealing this development, as all else hinges on it -- and Jake remains an unnatural man of action. But the men merely put into relief the extent to which Lena's life is, in every possible way, in extremis. She suffered horribly during the war, is now a prostitute, her husband is apparently dead and all she wants is to get out of Germany.
With dead dark eyes, a dramatic slash of a mouth and a sullenness that encases whatever is left of her heart and soul, Lena is a vivid, if not exactly unique, creation, and Blanchett soon all but disappears into the forlorn, desperate character. She summons shades of Dietrich, to be sure, but brings Lena fully to life, at least to the extent she has life left in her.
After Tully's body, his uniform stuffed with money, is fished out of the river at Potsdam, the plot gears start turning in earnest, putting the film more squarely on the rails. Jake, under some suspicion himself, begins poking his nose into areas where it's not appreciated; he's warned off his investigation by the American military governor, Colonel Muller (Beau Bridges), while army attorney Bernie Teitel, an interesting character nicely underplayed by Leland Orser, provides Jake with useful information from the Russian police report.
Ultimately, however, all roads lead to Lena, who cagily plays a long game by holding her big cards very close to the vest. Despite her obstinacy, Jake romantically persists in trying to help her, only to be repeatedly beaten up for his trouble. Akin to Jack Nicholson's nosy Jake in "Chinatown," Clooney's nosy Jake is forced to wear a bandage on his ear for a good part of the time.
Looming behind the intricate personal dramas is the specter of momentous geopolitical and ethical issues, notably the behind-the-scenes struggle between the Yanks and Ruskies to snare the services of the top German scientists, moral and legal considerations be damned.
Clooney underplays in laconic fashion as he tries to round out a man whose seen-it-all attitude cloaks a romantic heart. But both he and Soderbergh seem afraid or unable to reveal the conviction for melodrama necessary to put across a story like this. For actor and director, the project seems like trying on a new coat, and it doesn't fit either of them. Final scene reps the film's one explicit homage to "Casablanca," an ill-advised move in that it forces the inevitable negative comparison.
Genuine pleasure is generated by Philip Messina's production design, which has made a convincing mess of numerous standing backlot street sets to convey a ruined Berlin; Louise Frogley's costume designs, which revel in the eclectic nature of what deprived people scraped together to wear and Thomas Newman's voluptuous score, which draws attention to itself at times, but nonetheless achieves discordant moods and levels of complexity rare in film music these days.
As for the lensing, Soderbergh, working under his nom de camera Peter Andrews, has become a handy and effective d.p. on his own films when working in color. But black-and-white is a different discipline. So even though the director had worked in the format once before, on his second picture, "Kafka," and Clooney had similarly shot "Good Night, and Good Luck" on color stock from which the hues were then drained out, it's a pity that, just this once, Soderbergh couldn't see clear to hiring an old pro who knew all the tricks and could have concentrated exclusively on this aspect of the picture.
By TODD MCCARTHY
Variety
Steven Soderbergh tries to make one like they used to and comes up short with "The Good German." A post-World War II drama set amid the rubble of a bombed-out Berlin, this black-and-white backlot production endeavors to recapture the bitter romanticism of such '40s studio artifacts as "Casablanca" and "A Foreign Affair" while adding contemporary frankness. But doing what came naturally to Hollywood craftsmen 60 years ago is clearly harder than it appeared, as Soderbergh can't duplicate the look and feel of the old-fashioned entertainments he means to honor. Despite the starry cast, the public will steer clear, leaving the director's latest honorable but failed experiment to artfilm buffs.
Soderbergh has made much of how he used actual '40s lenses and just one camera, embraced studio-confined limitations and otherwise tried to direct much as Michael Curtiz would have done. But aficionados hoping to luxuriate in a full-blown simulation of Golden Era style will come away disappointed.
"The Good German" has little of the luster, sheen and pictorial nuance of a top-flight Hollywood picture of the old school. The contrasts are far too extreme; many compositions contain large areas of impenetrable black, and faces and other light objects are overexposed to the point of being washed out. Pic looks less like a 1942 Warner Bros. melodrama than a 1962 "Twilight Zone" episode intercut with background shots from Rossellini's "Germany Year Zero."
Based on an estimable 2001 novel by Joseph Kanon, Paul Attanasio's sturdy script could scarcely boast a time and place more ripe with international intrigue and world-weary cynicism. In July 1945, Truman, Churchill and Stalin are on their way to Potsdam, outside of Berlin, to carve up the broken remains of Europe, with results that would help establish the boundaries for the foreseeable East-West stand-off. But already, the deadly cat-and-mouse games that became the stuff of countless Cold War thrillers is being played out among the wartime allies in the four zones dividing Berlin.
Entering the fray is Jake Geismer (George Clooney), an American war correspondent returning to the capital for the first time since the late '30s. Startled at how completely the city has been destroyed -- a stark, 1.33 ratio docu opening credits sequence provides vivid first-hand evidence -- Jake is less concerned about his journalistic responsibilities than he is about finding Lena, the German woman he was forced to leave behind.
The movie's rhythms seem off from the outset. A long sequence of the young Corporal Tully (Tobey Maguire) driving Jake into town from the airport feels awkward; the vehicle doesn't appear to be moving at the correct rate compared with its docu backdrop, Maguire is too cranked up while Clooney is too subdued, and the characters do not establish a rapport. Right out of the box, pic puts the viewer at arm's length.
Tully narrates the film's first section, a responsibility later assumed by Jake and then Lena. Enthusiastically acted by Maguire, Tully could be the immature younger brother of William Holden's Sefton in "Stalag 17," an opportunistic black-marketer for whom his position in the motor pool creates no end of possibilities; he supplies American whisky to the head of the Russian sector, General Sikorsky (Ravil Isyanov, excellent), and doesn't hesitate to offer Jake an hour with his girlfriend, who is none other than Lena.
Lena (Cate Blanchett) becomes the most intriguing character in the picture, partly by default; Tully is found murdered 24 minutes in -- there's no way around revealing this development, as all else hinges on it -- and Jake remains an unnatural man of action. But the men merely put into relief the extent to which Lena's life is, in every possible way, in extremis. She suffered horribly during the war, is now a prostitute, her husband is apparently dead and all she wants is to get out of Germany.
With dead dark eyes, a dramatic slash of a mouth and a sullenness that encases whatever is left of her heart and soul, Lena is a vivid, if not exactly unique, creation, and Blanchett soon all but disappears into the forlorn, desperate character. She summons shades of Dietrich, to be sure, but brings Lena fully to life, at least to the extent she has life left in her.
After Tully's body, his uniform stuffed with money, is fished out of the river at Potsdam, the plot gears start turning in earnest, putting the film more squarely on the rails. Jake, under some suspicion himself, begins poking his nose into areas where it's not appreciated; he's warned off his investigation by the American military governor, Colonel Muller (Beau Bridges), while army attorney Bernie Teitel, an interesting character nicely underplayed by Leland Orser, provides Jake with useful information from the Russian police report.
Ultimately, however, all roads lead to Lena, who cagily plays a long game by holding her big cards very close to the vest. Despite her obstinacy, Jake romantically persists in trying to help her, only to be repeatedly beaten up for his trouble. Akin to Jack Nicholson's nosy Jake in "Chinatown," Clooney's nosy Jake is forced to wear a bandage on his ear for a good part of the time.
Looming behind the intricate personal dramas is the specter of momentous geopolitical and ethical issues, notably the behind-the-scenes struggle between the Yanks and Ruskies to snare the services of the top German scientists, moral and legal considerations be damned.
Clooney underplays in laconic fashion as he tries to round out a man whose seen-it-all attitude cloaks a romantic heart. But both he and Soderbergh seem afraid or unable to reveal the conviction for melodrama necessary to put across a story like this. For actor and director, the project seems like trying on a new coat, and it doesn't fit either of them. Final scene reps the film's one explicit homage to "Casablanca," an ill-advised move in that it forces the inevitable negative comparison.
Genuine pleasure is generated by Philip Messina's production design, which has made a convincing mess of numerous standing backlot street sets to convey a ruined Berlin; Louise Frogley's costume designs, which revel in the eclectic nature of what deprived people scraped together to wear and Thomas Newman's voluptuous score, which draws attention to itself at times, but nonetheless achieves discordant moods and levels of complexity rare in film music these days.
As for the lensing, Soderbergh, working under his nom de camera Peter Andrews, has become a handy and effective d.p. on his own films when working in color. But black-and-white is a different discipline. So even though the director had worked in the format once before, on his second picture, "Kafka," and Clooney had similarly shot "Good Night, and Good Luck" on color stock from which the hues were then drained out, it's a pity that, just this once, Soderbergh couldn't see clear to hiring an old pro who knew all the tricks and could have concentrated exclusively on this aspect of the picture.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
A hateful */**** review from slant's Nick Schager!
Having previously preached affinity for the workmanlike career of John Huston, Steven Soderbergh now attempts to mimic old-school studio auteur Michael Curtiz with The Good German, a throwback to Casablanca shot as if it were a 1945 Warner Bros. picture. This means that Soderbergh's black-and-white cinematography is framed at the mid-century standard 1.66:1 aspect ratio and utilizes fixed focal-length lenses and incandescent lighting, all the action has been staged on backlots or L.A. locations, and Thomas Newman's sweeping score aims for Max Steiner grandeur. Technically, the director's latest cinematic experiment is some kind of minor triumph, authentically capturing the smoky, shadowy look and feel of the period's noir-ish melodramas. Yet there also isn't a moment when The Good German's artifice—so self-consciously "faithful" that it borders on stilted, suffocating parody—isn't as depressingly hollow as a spent bullet casing. Adapted from Joseph Kanon's novel, the retro film sets its mystery in post-WWII Berlin on the eve of the Potsdam convention and the U.S.'s atomic bomb attack on Japan, with war correspondent Jake Geismer (a vacant, out-of-place George Clooney) arriving in the rubble-strewn capital to cover the historic peace conference, but instead finding himself embroiled in intrigue after locating his former German mistress Lena Brandt (Cate Blanchett).
The Russians and Americans are commencing the Cold War by competing to find Lena's husband Emil (Christian Oliver), whose involvement in a German rocket program conducted at a concentration camp makes him vitally important to each country's escalating arms race. The who, what, where, when, and why of this instantly convoluted narrative, however, are completely inconsequential, as from the outset the story reveals itself to be nothing but an airless dramatic void that Soderbergh desperately tries to cover up with his superficially striking copycat mise-en-scène. Frank discussions of the Holocaust, the Allied Powers' self-interested profiteering from the Nazi's downfall, and the nature of culpability—as well as regular profanity and some brief nudity—all come off as rickety attempts to deconstruct the Production Code's whitewashed depictions of war, an endeavor that proves neither novel nor illuminating. Aside from the chuckles elicited by Tobey Maguire's foul-mouthed routine as an amoral motor pool roughneck and the luminously lit Cate Blanchett's German accent (think Marlene Dietrich as filtered through Count Dracula), the only other response induced by this glorified art school project-cum-nostalgia trip is overpowering indifference. It's a political tale with no significant contemporary reverberations, a turgid espionage-tinged romance with no soul, and a play-it-again aesthetic showpiece without a point.
Having previously preached affinity for the workmanlike career of John Huston, Steven Soderbergh now attempts to mimic old-school studio auteur Michael Curtiz with The Good German, a throwback to Casablanca shot as if it were a 1945 Warner Bros. picture. This means that Soderbergh's black-and-white cinematography is framed at the mid-century standard 1.66:1 aspect ratio and utilizes fixed focal-length lenses and incandescent lighting, all the action has been staged on backlots or L.A. locations, and Thomas Newman's sweeping score aims for Max Steiner grandeur. Technically, the director's latest cinematic experiment is some kind of minor triumph, authentically capturing the smoky, shadowy look and feel of the period's noir-ish melodramas. Yet there also isn't a moment when The Good German's artifice—so self-consciously "faithful" that it borders on stilted, suffocating parody—isn't as depressingly hollow as a spent bullet casing. Adapted from Joseph Kanon's novel, the retro film sets its mystery in post-WWII Berlin on the eve of the Potsdam convention and the U.S.'s atomic bomb attack on Japan, with war correspondent Jake Geismer (a vacant, out-of-place George Clooney) arriving in the rubble-strewn capital to cover the historic peace conference, but instead finding himself embroiled in intrigue after locating his former German mistress Lena Brandt (Cate Blanchett).
The Russians and Americans are commencing the Cold War by competing to find Lena's husband Emil (Christian Oliver), whose involvement in a German rocket program conducted at a concentration camp makes him vitally important to each country's escalating arms race. The who, what, where, when, and why of this instantly convoluted narrative, however, are completely inconsequential, as from the outset the story reveals itself to be nothing but an airless dramatic void that Soderbergh desperately tries to cover up with his superficially striking copycat mise-en-scène. Frank discussions of the Holocaust, the Allied Powers' self-interested profiteering from the Nazi's downfall, and the nature of culpability—as well as regular profanity and some brief nudity—all come off as rickety attempts to deconstruct the Production Code's whitewashed depictions of war, an endeavor that proves neither novel nor illuminating. Aside from the chuckles elicited by Tobey Maguire's foul-mouthed routine as an amoral motor pool roughneck and the luminously lit Cate Blanchett's German accent (think Marlene Dietrich as filtered through Count Dracula), the only other response induced by this glorified art school project-cum-nostalgia trip is overpowering indifference. It's a political tale with no significant contemporary reverberations, a turgid espionage-tinged romance with no soul, and a play-it-again aesthetic showpiece without a point.
"How's the despair?"
Before we get to another Peter Travers non-review, Mike D'Angelo gave 'The Good German' a 68. Pretty solid, huh? Read this review.
'The Good German' -- ***1/2
OK, it's more of an experiment than a movie. But why deny the magic? Director Steven Soderbergh hasn't merely made an espionage thriller set in post-World War II Berlin, he's shot it in black-and-white using only equipment available to Hollywood directors in the 1940s. That means fixed lenses (no zoom), boom mikes hanging over the actors' heads (no wireless) and hardly any computer graphics. Soderbergh couldn't bring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman back from the dead, but he did the next best thing. He hired George Clooney, who exudes a timeless star quality and plays it hard and achingly romantic as Jake Geismar, an Army war correspondent. Then there's Cate Blanchett, who plays it achingly bitter as Lena Branch, Jake's ex-lover, who will put a price on her body and her conscience to get out of Berlin.
Add Tobey Maguire to the mix as Tully, a motor-pool soldier with connections in the black market and a black heart that belies his baby face. No fair giving away too much about a movie that prizes its aura of mystery. But Paul Attanasio has adapted the novel by Joseph Kanon to evoke 1940s classics such as The Third Man and Casablanca with a skeptical modern squint. In short, the movie works on its own, with a gleam of seductive corruption that doesn't allow for a happy ending. The actors all come up aces, especially Blanchett, who catches the deadpan glamour of Marlene Dietrich and a deadly allure strong enough to lead men to their doom. Still, this is Soderbergh's show, and a haunting and hypnotic show it is. I'd also praise cinematographer Peter Andrews and editor Mary Ann Bernard, except those are just names Soderbergh made up to hide behind. No true student of cinema will want to miss his ride back to the future. It's pure moviegoing bliss.
'The Good German' -- ***1/2
OK, it's more of an experiment than a movie. But why deny the magic? Director Steven Soderbergh hasn't merely made an espionage thriller set in post-World War II Berlin, he's shot it in black-and-white using only equipment available to Hollywood directors in the 1940s. That means fixed lenses (no zoom), boom mikes hanging over the actors' heads (no wireless) and hardly any computer graphics. Soderbergh couldn't bring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman back from the dead, but he did the next best thing. He hired George Clooney, who exudes a timeless star quality and plays it hard and achingly romantic as Jake Geismar, an Army war correspondent. Then there's Cate Blanchett, who plays it achingly bitter as Lena Branch, Jake's ex-lover, who will put a price on her body and her conscience to get out of Berlin.
Add Tobey Maguire to the mix as Tully, a motor-pool soldier with connections in the black market and a black heart that belies his baby face. No fair giving away too much about a movie that prizes its aura of mystery. But Paul Attanasio has adapted the novel by Joseph Kanon to evoke 1940s classics such as The Third Man and Casablanca with a skeptical modern squint. In short, the movie works on its own, with a gleam of seductive corruption that doesn't allow for a happy ending. The actors all come up aces, especially Blanchett, who catches the deadpan glamour of Marlene Dietrich and a deadly allure strong enough to lead men to their doom. Still, this is Soderbergh's show, and a haunting and hypnotic show it is. I'd also praise cinematographer Peter Andrews and editor Mary Ann Bernard, except those are just names Soderbergh made up to hide behind. No true student of cinema will want to miss his ride back to the future. It's pure moviegoing bliss.
"How's the despair?"