Retro Film Review: The Good German (2006)

Career of Steven Soderbergh in early 21st Century gave impression quite unexpected for a filmmaker who had been the darling of critics and the "artistically" oriented segment of the audience. His commercial films were far more memorable and successful than those in which he used greater creative freedom to experiment with breaking Hollywood conventions. One of the latter cases was The Good German, 2006 period spy thriller conceived as a tribute to the works of Classic Hollywood.

The plot of the film, based on the eponymous novel by Joseph Kanon, takes place in July 1945 in Berlin, shortly after the city was captured by the Red Army, thus ending World War II in Europe. While Stalin, Churchill and Truman in nearby Potsdam are arranging the final reckoning with Japan, American journalist Jake Geismer (played by George Clooney) arrives to cover the conference, but becomes far more interested in Lena Brandt (Blanchett), Jewish woman who had worked for his Berlin bureau before the war and with whom he had a passionate romance. It turns out that Brandt now earns a living as a prostitute, being the girlfriend of Sergeant Tully (played by Tobey Maguire), a young US Army soldier trying to enrich himself on city thriving black market. Tully being assigned as Geismer's official driver is the least of Geismer’s problems, as it turns out that he and Lena are entangled in a dangerous game involving Soviets, former Nazi scientists, war crime suspects and unscrupulous US intelligence agents.

It would take a long time to list all the films that, in one way or another get inspiration form Curtiz's Casablanca, probably the most famous of all films from Hollywood's Golden Age. However, few of them advertise this that as torroughly as as Soderbergh's The Good German. Soderbergh was not satisfied with just haviing the content, characters and atmosphere similar to Curtiz's classic, but actually produced the film using techniques identical to the 1940s. So the film is shot in black and white, with studio sets instead of authentic locations, and Thomas Newman's music tries to resemble Max Steiner's music as much as possible.

While this approach initially looks interesting, at least for film buffs, very soon it turns out that it is nothing more than an experiment, i.e. that the form was far more important to Soderbergh than the weak content. The inevitable comparisons with Casablanca are even more devastating for The Good German, given that Clooney doesn't have a sliver of the charisma of Humphrey Bogart, and that Tobey Maguire was tragically miscast in his role. Even more irritating is the much darker and more depressing atmosphere of the film, which is more appropriate for The Third Man, another great film from the same era, but quite different from the canons of Classic Hollywood.

Soderbergh further compromised his idea by subjecting the audience to profanity, explicit violence and sex - content that was, due to MPAA Production Code, impossible to imagine of 1940s big screens, which shatters illusion that this is a Hollywood classic. Due to the obviously artificial environment in which the characters move, the illusion that this is an authentic portrayal of 1940s Berlin is also removed. So it can be said that The Good German has failed conceptually.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment of The Good German comes with the realisation that Hollywood is no longer capable of making great films like it once could, despite all the technical resources, and even filmmakers who were supposed to have talents necessary for that.

RATING: 2/10 (-)

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