The Good German (2006)
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
An American journalist arrives in Berlin just after the end of World War Two. He becomes involved in a murder mystery surrounding a dead GI who washes up at a lakeside mansion during the Potsdam negotiations between the Allied powers. Soon his investigation connects with his search for his married pre-war German lover.
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What critics compared The Good German to
He may seem wised-up, but he's as callow as the Joseph Cotten character in "The Third Man," which was set in labyrinthine postwar Vienna.
By contrast, Soderbergh's reality is old movies -- some of us can sympathize with that -- and so he filters this tale of murder, naïveté, and betrayal through "The Third Man" and Billy Wilder's "A Foreign Affair."
Based on Joseph Kanon's novel , The Good German echoes the setting of The Third Man and the central relationship of Casablanca.
George Clooney and Cate Blanchett bring star glamor to bombed-out 1945 Berlin, and stock footage of the destroyed city blends in nicely to create a film that wants to exist in an ahistorical space somewhere between The Third Man, Judgment at Nuremberg, and Casablanca.
You can ignore the behind-the-scenes technicalities and enjoy the movie on face value: as a moderately entertaining nod to “Casablanca” and “The Third Man.”
It doesn't take a USC cinema scholar to observe that "German" is big, fat, wet kiss to filmdom of the 1940s; more specifically to such immortal pictures as "Casablanca" and "The Third Man." Soderbergh pushes "German" to not only emulate the mood of these classics, but the actual cinematic style as well.
But this isn’t some fetishistic museum exhibit, à la Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German ; the technique is thoroughly modern.
He has alternated parts in projects like "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" "Intolerable Cruelty," and the three "Ocean's" movies with "The Perfect Storm," "Good Night, and Good Luck," "Syriana," "The Good German," and the 2007 film we're discussing here, "Michael Clayton," which may his best starring vehicle to date.
Big question: After last winter’s box office bomb “The Good German” and this summer’s unnecessary sequel “Ocean’s Thirteen,” can Clooney regain the momentum he earned with 2005’s one-two punch of “Good Night, and Good Luck” and “Syriana”?
In Syriana and Good Night and Good Luck (and to some extent The Good German) audiences have become familiar with this particular Clooney type – an isolated man on the edge of a moral and personal abyss.
Of the lot Syriana , The Good German , Good Night, and Good Luck Michael Clayton is the best of the bunch.
That attitude gives Maguire the opportunity to play a little meaner and wilder, reminiscent of his underrated work in Spider-Man 3 and The Good German (as a far less villainous character than he plays in either of those).
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Soderbergh has balanced his ability to make commercial hits ( Ocean's Eleven, Erin Brockovich) with his desire to do more personal, innovative and political films – such as Traffic, The Good German or Schizopolis.
He remakes (Solaris, The Good German) and makes mistakes (Ocean's Twelve, Schizopolis) and, as often as not, he shoots beguiling, flawed cinematic experiments that blur the line between fact and fiction.
His persistent ennui has led him to all manner of narrative experiments, benighted projects like "Schizopolis" and "The Good German" that were doubtless more involving for him to make than for audiences to experience.