The Good German (2006)

This movie is a complete distortion of an excellent book, which I happened to read when I was in Berlin. Characters are combined, distorted and outright eliminated. Sure, it's filmed in film noir style. Big deal. Without character motivation, consistency and background, this film is a total waste. The acting was wooden, the music was melodramatic, the dialog was lame, and the plot was utterly incomprehensible as filmed. I urge anyone who has some interest in reading a great mystery that was researched thoroughly and written in a suspenseful way to get a copy and check it out. I loved this book - I hated the movie.

Give it a miss.

Fmovies: The veneer of neo-noir techniques and B&W cinematography can't conceal the numerous shortcomings of "The Good German". The film resembles a formulaic retread with none of its characters particularly sympathetic or likable - and worse yet, their intrigues make little sense. Tobey Maguire does a nice turn against type as a venal opportunist, but everybody else plows through the script like robot actors supplied by Central Casting.

The plot is full of deceits and betrayals which attempt to elevate the proceedings into the genre of dark thriller. A femme fatale and tainted romance are stirred into the conspiracies, until the story eventually culminates in the standard breathless pursuit of the movie's stock villain. Despite all the scheming and double-dealing, the characters and their narrative arcs seem stale and conventional, as if seen a thousand times previously. Soderbergh has the ability to produce challenging and original films, but he frequently turns out bland uninspiring concoctions - and this is one of his worst.

Absolutely wretched and self consciously arty this lame exercise in vanity tries to recreate the feeling of great 40's films but with supposedly modern dialogue. Apparently this means the actors swear every other word, which doesn't make it contemporary just dull and lacking in imagination. Cate Blanchett is okay although she has certainly been better elsewhere, but George Clooney is arch and affected while Tobey Maguire, usually a fine actor when properly cast is completely miscast, out of his depth and awful. Some of the cinematography is striking but that's hardly enough to make this turgid, poorly directed misfire worth sitting through.A dog from the word go!

The Good German fmovies. Soderbergh continues to experiment, but as with Solaris, it just doesn't pay off.

Its clear that from the off that Soderbergh has set himself a strict mandate for this film, make it as much like a forties movie as possible. The music, the acting style, the lighting, the process shots and background paintings all give it a great look and feel.

However, everything is so low key and downbeat that it fails to deliver any suspense or menace. What is essentially a modern thriller dressed as classic noir just isn't thrilling. The plot twist and turns but the drama is never heightened, the pace never seems to increase, it just plods along to its conclusion.

Apart from the sex and swearing, the actors seem straight jacketed into their roles by the 40's styling seemingly because the script lacks any of the dry wit and charm you'd find in a genuine movie of this era. George Clooney for example has every little to do, his character has none of the snappy dialog you'd expect, given his Marlowe-esquire role in the plot. Soderbergh compounds matters by drawing an unfortunate comparison with Bogart. Though generally the acting was of the high quality you'd expect from such a sterling cast, it's difficult to empathise with their characters plights given the lack of suspense or melodrama.

Overall the experiment fails to deliver anything other than a beautifully shot but unengaging film.

Very disappointing.

I'm not sure about the answer to my question. With its stylistic nods to 40's noir thrillers like "Notorious", "The Third Man", "Gilda" and at the end, "Casablanca", "The Good German" aims high but ultimately falls flat under the weight of an incomprehensible plot peopled by too many characters. Moreover, none of said characters evinces any sympathy so that as the body-count mounts up towards the end and even as Clooney and Blanchett remain standing to take their relationship who knows where, ultimately you don't really care either way, distracted as you are by the various cinematic reference points - I even detected an in-joke at the expense of "The Pianist". The film is beautifully shot with many attractive framing and tracking shots in luminous monochrome, but the acting quality is distinctly mixed, with Clooney never quite achieving Joseph Cotten standards as he takes hits from almost everyone in sight and Blanchett struggling to emote beyond her sub-Deitrich accent. Tobey Maguire seems to me altogether too typecast in his winsome underdog parts ("Spider Man", "Sea Biscuit") to wholly convince as Clooney's somewhat callous, duplicitous driver who gets in too deep and you don't believe Blanchett's even thinly-veiled attraction to him either. I did enjoy the nostalgic tricks employed by Soderburgh, for example the left to right dissolves between scenes and the musical motifs which accompany the various characters but there are also too many shots of Clooney walking off-shot, or tossing away a cigarette or worst just gazing into space. All told, you'd be better off renting out one of the source movies mentioned above to see how it should be done.

This movie is an homage not only to the vocabulary of film noir , but also to its social and political genesis. Film Noir developed after World War II and was an outgrowth of both the cynicism that was generated by WW II because it turned out to need another war to be the war to end all wars.... and because of the enormous evil that World War II revealed in contradistinction to the sunny idealism of the American Project.

Film Noir of the 40's and 50's was a reaction to WW II, but those films themselves were always crime stories about naive men dragged into terrible circumstances through the lure of seductive, dangerous women. But they were never about the war itself or anything to do with the war itself. WWII movies were patriotic paeans to heroism like 30 Seconds over Tokyo or the common man like A Walk in the Sun or home front heroism like Mrs. Mininver. Indeed only Casablanca itself, as exemplified early on by Rick's character was suffused with some of the cynicism that we see in film noir, but the reason Casablance is beloved is because the cynicism melts away in the the understanding that there is something greater than one's own preservation.

What is wonderful about the Good German is that it is a Film Noir film about the War itself and also about war in general...then and now. The film and its concerns are not dated or meaningless, but very much of the moment.

The film also pays visual homage to other movies of the era, from the warm hearted cynicism of Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair with Jean Arthur as the parochial Congressperson (like in this film) and Marlene Dietrich as the dangerous vamp with a dark past. Roberto Rossellini's Germany:Year Zero, shot in postwar Berlin, shows how fear, deprivation and terror destroy the soul as ell as the body.

The Congressman is not just a boob but a participant in the propagation of evil and the Good American General of Beau Bridges is anything but good. Indeed, as we know now Americans protected Nazis who could help us in terms of confronting the next evil--Communism and Russia. And the story they tell about the V-2 rocket is true. The Germans and Werner van Braun used up the lives and caused the deaths of Jewish and other POW's slave labor to create and launch them and we, in terms of the American occupation and the incipient CIA aka the OSS, helped mass murderers to safety.

Even the lawyer Teitel, the man researching the Nuremberg Trials, whose sole purpose is to pursue Justice, can be compromised. Tobey Maguire was chosen to play the vicious, venal Tully because to most American audiences he, as Peter Parker, typifies the best of America. He is meant to be jarring to the audience. Lena, indeed is the vamp, but unlike old film noir like Out of the Past, she doesn't lead Jake on, Jake misleads himself about her. She is just a desperate woman struggling to survive.

Some would say this is a movie about moral ambiguities, but I think it's not that ambiguous. The filmmakers have cast judgment on some of our post war behavior and found it wanting.

The only romanticism in this movie is in the style, a valentine to the look of old movies; there is no romanticism in its view of America at war.