THE GOOD GERMAN – What Went Wrong?

Play it again, Soderbergh.

The Good German, Steven Soderbergh, Director, 2008

Hook: Soderbergh/Clooney try to recapture the aura of Casablanca in a Third Man setting. Except Clooney is no Bogart, Blanchett (though good) no Bergman, and this movie is no classic.

LINE: “You can never really get out of Berlin.”

SINKER: The moral (existential) ambiguity of post war films has dissipated. This film is reaching for something in audiences that is no longer there. 

JOHN: I love the old cars, floodlit settings, film swipes and other period film techniques. And some actors— Tobey Maguire and Cate Blanchett—were made for black and white. But the Holocaust card has been played once too often and there is no chemistry between Clooney (looking a little here like Jay Leno) and any of the other actors. They beat him up, and you’ll feel like beating him up too. We’re even down in the sewers of Berlin (not Vienna) but where is Harry Lime when you need him? The trouble with an homage to great movies is we realize just how insipid this wannabe is by comparison. Did they really think they could get away with the Casablanca ending? The intermixing of actual news footage is flawless, but the use of voice over to reveal key plot points is really lame. 

GO GO (2 GOS out of four) 

SPANKY: You could drive a fighter plane off of Blanchette’s high cheek bones, and when she says, “I’m frightened,” Marlene Dietrich lives. The Wernher von Braun sub-plot is intellectually interesting, but we made the decision to give this war criminal employment and he landed us on the moon. I’m not sure most of the audience wants to reconsider that. And this is the problem, I feel, Sonderbergh can recreate the look of a period film but (for better or worse) audiences have moved on, and the emotion we might have felt in the forties about what the world had gone through is gone. It takes a great film to bring all that back, and fortunately we have Casablanca, The Third Man, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Thank God they’re now on DVD. We don’t need this one. 

TWO PAWS DOWN (1 BARK out of four)