Director Steven Soderbergh's recent films usually fall neatly into one of two categories — mainstream money-makers (Erin Brockovich, Ocean's Eleven/Twelve/Thirteen, et al) or experimental button-pushers (Schizopolis, Bubble) — but The Good German seems to hover in some uneasy limbo between them (although it leans towards the latter). Soderbergh indulges his inner rebel and his traditionalist side all at once here, meticulously co-opting the filmic language of 1940s Hollywood to create a somewhat self-conscious but beautifully crafted homage/deconstruction of classic postwar movies.
Soderbergh sets his film in 1945, with WWII recently over (all except for the shouting), in a bombed-out Berlin closely mirroring the postwar Vienna of The Third Man (the movie The Good German most resembles) — a once grand city carved up by the victorious Allies into various zones of influence, all of them hopelessly shady, and none shadier than the areas in which these zones intersect. Into this unknowable environment comes American war correspondent Jake Geismer (George Clooney), who immediately finds himself embroiled in an extremely sticky web of secrets, lies, corruption and extravagant coincidences, much of it revolving around a former flame turned streetwalker (Cate Blanchett).
From its crisp black-and-white photography to its musical score (alternately lushly romantic and grand in ways that movie soundtracks don't allow themselves to be these days), to an ending straight out of Casablanca, The Good German nails the look and feel of those motion pictures of yore. There's something a bit grating about such extreme artifice (Soderbergh also shot and edited the project, pseudonymously, and he's clearly in film-geek heaven here), but the movie is more than just a stylistic experiment.
There's food for thought here (as the title suggests, the film keeps circling around the difficulty of determining whose hands are clean), and what we get is an appropriately convoluted portrait of a morally dubious universe where there is no right or wrong — only those who survive and those who don't.
The Good German (R) Stars George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Tobey Maguire, Beau Bridges and Tony Curran. Opens Jan. 19 at Regal Hollywood 20 in Sarasota. 3.5 stars —Lance Goldenberg
This article appears in Jan 17-23, 2007.
