Every time I go to a Steven Soderberg movie, I’m reminded of the scene from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back where Matt Damon explains that you do the pop movie, so you can fund your indie movie, which you might be able to shoe horn in before you do your payback movie. Soderberg ping pongs back and forth between these types of projects more than any other current director I can think of.
The Good German is the Artsy Soderberg in high form. He makes sure that you know it is important because he uses all the traits of classic Hollywood to present this tale. Just in case you might not appreciate the film references, Soderberg films this in black and white, so you know it is more serious that Ocean’s 12 or 14 or 23.
I think it is supposed to be ironic. It’s hard to tell. The plot is so convoluted that even after multiple viewings I was still confused about why people were double and triple and quadruple-crossing each other. Part of that might be because each time I watched it, I lost interest in it more quickly.
George Clooney plays Captain Jack Gusman, who is returning to a post-war Germany to cover the Potsdam Conference for a magazine. He is assigned a motor pool driver (Tobey Maguire) who is running a number of short cons, black market deal and pimping out women. One of the women that Maguire is running is Cate Blanchett, a weary German who was George Clooney’s mistress during the war.
Maguire gets murdered but the Americans and Russians and the few politically powerful Germans are too busy trying to smuggle, betray, help and prosecute each other to notice or really care. Only Clooney can save the day, solve the murder and maybe even uncover who the real war criminals are.
There are a lot of problems with this movie. The plot spends a lot of time referencing much better World War II and Post world war movies like Casablanca and The Third Man without having absorbed what makes those movies so great. There is plenty of clever and snappy dialogue, which is good because almost all the leads seem very bored with the roles they are playing.
Blanchett is trying to be Marlene Deitrich, but while she swirls in and out of the inky shadows, she fails to project any of Deitrich’s sexual fierceness. Clooney doesn’t seem to be having any fun in his role as the virtuous chump schlepping through the ruins of Germany to be shocked that Americans wanted to keep German rocket scientists out of the hands of the Russians. The only person having fun in his role seems to be Maguire, who seems to like playing the creepy and sadistic Tully.
So who is the good German of the title? Who knows? It looks like it is supposed to be one more piece of irony, but it would take more effort that it is worth to figure it out.