Straight to DVD

The Good German

I have a habit of trusting that directors I like will make films I like, regardless of reviews. Steven Soderbergh earned a place on that list with the run he went on between 1998 and 2000: the brilliant Out of Sight and The Limey, followed by the more commercial but still pretty darn good Erin Brockovich and Traffic. So when the word on his most recent film without the word Ocean's in the title, The Good German, wasn't so great, I put it in my queue anyway. It's not only Soderbergh, I reasoned, but it also stars two actors Whitney and I both like (George Clooney and Cate Blanchett) and emulates a film genre—the wartime noir—of which I'm particularly fond. There had to be something here to enjoy, right?

But I was disappointed to find that the rumors were true. The Good German is not a good movie.

Clooney stars as Jake Geismer, an American journalist returning to Germany just after World War II to cover the Potsdam peace conference. He quickly encounters the inevitable crime and corruption of a military occupation, much of it engineered by the American soldiers stationed there, including his own driver, the cheerfully soulless Corporal Patrick Tully (Tobey Maguire). When Jake discovers that Tully is engaged in dangerous dealings with German prostitute Lena Brandt (Cate Blanchett), who happens to be an old flame of Jake?s, he is determined to get Lena out of trouble and out of Germany. But the Russian and the American governments' interests in Lena's supposedly deceased husband stands in the way.

Soderbergh shot this film as it would have been made in the 1940s—black-and-white film, harsh incandescent lighting, old lenses, etc. And it looks great, plus it features a clever reference to wartime and postwar gems like Casablanca and The Third Man, oh, every ten frames or so.

But it's almost as if everyone was working so hard to make a perfect '40s-noir replica that they forgot to make it good. The plot is predictable; a Sophie's Choice–esque revelation from Lena near the end can be seen coming a mile away. And sadly, there's almost no chemistry between Clooney and Blanchett, who sometimes don't even seem like they're even in the same movie. He works hard to show how desperately he loves Lena, but you can see the effort.

For her part, Blanchett does a flawless turn on a Marlene Dietrich type—but she's so far into jaded ennui from the start (I half-expected her to break into "I'm Tired" from Blazing Saddles) that it's never clear why Jake, Tully, or anyone else would be particularly hung up on this woman. So I never cared about the romance, and I never cared about the plot. That didn't leave much, and I spent most of the middle of The Good German trying not to fall asleep.

I'll still give Soderbergh's next outing a chance (it appears to be a pair of films starring Benicio del Toro as Ché Guevara, and how can I resist that?), but I can't help noticing that he hasn't made a film I've truly enjoyed since Traffic. I think I may have to put him on queue probation.