GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 12/13/06)

Based on a novel by Joseph Kanon, who's developed a solid rep as a thinking man's historical thriller author, The Good German is set in the days immediately after the Allied victory in Europe in WWII. The movie is staged around the Potsdam conference, the Churchill-Truman-Stalin summit outside Berlin wherein former Axis territories were carved up by the West and Russia. Flying in with some military brass to write about the event is Jake Geismer (George Clooney), an American who had spent some time in Berlin years before, and whose past meets up with him soon after his return.

It's not a pleasant meeting: the woman, or I should say The Woman, he left behind in Germany, Lena (Cate Blanchett), is now hooking among the occupied ruins. To make matters worse, her major client, and the guy she's hoping will get her the hell out of Germany, is Jake's driver, Tully (Tobey Maguire, giving the movie's liveliest performance), a venal schemer for whom the term "sniveling shit" is a trifle too kind. Clooney's Geismer looks like the face of world-weary disillusionment from the moment he steps off the plane, and as The Good German escalates into a byzantine tale of murder, politics, horrible secrets, and high-level double-dealing, things only get worse for him.

Director Steven Soderbergh, working with screenwriter Paul Attanasio, created the movie in the style of a Warner Bros. war pic of the '40s. German is in black and white; its camera movements are all of the panning and dollying sort (no Steadicam); shots from the inside of cars have rear-projection backgrounds; the lighting is chiaroscuro/expressionist; and so on. The directorial referent is Michael Curtiz, and the specific film reference is Casablanca. The movie contains an out-and-out Casablanca pastiche, a shot-by-shot re-creation of a crucial scene in the film, placed in exactly the corresponding point in The Good German's. I call it a pastiche rather than an homage because, although it's impeccably crafted, it functions as a refutation of Casablanca rather than a tribute. As one central character in German makes an appalling confession, the film is telling us that here is the real deal about how people behave in war, as opposed to the Bogie-and-Bergman-peddled sentimental codswallop about nobility/heroism/sacrifice/what-have-you. One can practically see Soderbergh and Attanasio wagging their fingers at you. The trouble is, everyone with an IQ of three digits already understands that Casablanca is a load of sentimental codswallop, and love the film both because and in spite of that fact, if they love the film at all. As for the poor saps who believe that Casablanca is somehow a reflection of, or is even slightly rooted in, reality, well, they're not likely to be inclined to swallow this ten-gallon bottle of castor oil. Also, given that there are two perfectly good post-WWII films directly from the postwar period that are as clear-eyed as German aspires to be — 1948's Billy Wilder-directed A Foreign Affair and, more to the point, 1949's Carol Reed-directed The Third Man — it seems even more disingenuous for Soderbergh to have picked Casablanca as a stylistic model. I hold Soderbergh in high esteem, but as handsome a technical achievement as it is, The Good German plays to me as a failed experiment.

— Glenn Kenny