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George Clooney gives the impression of a man who would prefer to
have been born into another time and milieu. Maybe it's his villas
on Lake Como, surely the quintessence of faded, old Europa splendor.
Or perhaps it's his consecutive appearances in two black-and-white
movies, one ("Good Night, and Good Luck") evoking the smoky glamour
of New York City in the 1950s, the other ("The Good German")
capturing the ashen shell of post-World War II Berlin.
The American military journalist that Clooney plays in "The Good
German" also is reaching for another moment in time. Formerly an
Associated Press war correspondent stationed in Berlin, Jake Geismer
has returned to the city to cover the Potsdam Conference for the New
Republic. While there, he hopes to connect with his former stringer
Lena (Cate Blanchett, channeling Garbo in a drowsy funk), a German
with whom he had an affair.
When Jake stumbles upon Lena, he discovers that she has descended
into prostitution and that his assigned driver, Tully (a bracingly
explosive Tobey Maguire), is her boyfriend and sometimes pimp. An
Army private with the all-American veneer of Andy Hardy and
hair-trigger viciousness of Little Caesar, Tully is a one-man
whirligig of ugly Americanism, exploiting his driver's gig to
shuttle booze and other desirables on the black market.
Jake has barely set his bags down in Tully's car when this young
operator lifts his wallet and shifts into the higher gear of human
trafficking. The sale he hopes to broker with the resident Russian
military commander is of a German named Emile Brandt, a former
weapons-manufacturer secretary who is being hotly pursued by
American Nazi hunters and also has a unique connection to Lena.
Adapted with a steely wit by Paul Attanasio from a novel by Joseph
Kanon, "The Good German" is Steven Soderbergh's game attempt to
reinvigorate the dense intrigue of classic wartime thrillers like
"The Third Man" with a contemporary, neo-noir edge.
In Soderbergh's revisionist spin, the hard-bitten narrator's voice
usually reserved for the probing protagonist is initially awarded to
the bad seed, Tully. The choice is reflective of the film's sobering
cynicism: This is a postwar Berlin in which anti-Semitism is just as
likely to spring from the mouth of an American liberator as it is
from a German fraulein. But it is also a ruse, a kind of
first-person decoy, since the voice's owner drops from sight a third
of the way in.
The loss is felt deeply, since Maguire really goes the distance with
the character, giving him a punchy brutality that is the film's
primary spark plug. The remainder is an intelligent if somewhat
flaccid cat-and-mouse in which Jake dodges blows while searching for
the elusive Brandt and abets the depressive Lena in her effort to
get out of Berlin.
Thomas Newman's beautifully melancholy score contributes greatly to
the film's woozy ambiance, as does Soderbergh's artfully artificial,
B-picture cinematography (under the alias Peter Andrews). Soderbergh
ends with a visual quote from the famous climax of "Casablanca,"
whose fog-shrouded optimism seems like so much wishful thinking amid
the inescapable despair of "The Good German."
© Jan Stuart, Newsday |
