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Another quality collaboration between director Steven Soderbergh and star George Clooney following the Oceans Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen flicks plus Out of Sight and the less than stellar scifi outing Solaris. This 2006 movie was a very high profile ‘quality’ production shot in black and white with archival footage providing very realistic sets into which the cast were green screened but it only got one Oscar nomination, Thomas Newman for original score. Though Newman did win, so there’s that.
The Good German is set at the time of the Potsdam Conference, between the German and Japanese surrenders at the end of WWII, where Truman, Churchill and Stalin met to divvy up the post-war map. Clooney plays Jake Geismer, a military journalist, in fractionated Berlin to cover the conference; pre-war he’d been the Berlin office head for Associated Press.
Lena Brandt, played by a very dark-haired Cate Blanchett, was Geismer’s stringer and lover in those days, despite being married. Now she lives with a real American army rat called Tully (Tobey Maguire), allowing him to pimp her out and treat her like shite in order to survive. And in a strange coincidence Tully, who nominally works in the motor pool when he isn’t profiteering in the black market, is assigned as Geismer’s driver.
Brandt’s husband Emil (Christian Oliver) supposedly dies a year or two before though other than Jake no one seems to believe it. And everybody in positions of power want to get their hands on Emil. Even his wife wants little more than to get out of Germany as long as she can get Emil to safe (i.e., American) hands as part of the trade. TPTB don’t care about her but for sure are not willing to see the husband, who was the right hand of the scientist at the heart of the Nazi rocket program, captured by another power. This puts Geismer into danger since he, of course, cannot resist trying to save the one woman he apparently ever loved.
For me Good German was Soderbergh and Clooney making another throwback flick. Where the Oceans trilogy recaptured the Rat Pack magic and formalized Clooney as the (non-singing) Sinatra of the new millenium, here they went, reasonably successfully, for the Howard Hawks and Cary Grant mantles.
The script by Paul Attanasio, from Joseph Kanon’s novel, was also quality stuff, not surprising since Attanasio also wrote Donnie Brasco and Quiz Show and was showrunner of one of my favorite TV series, Homicide: Life on the Streets. Although the politics were surely revisionist, the plot, pacing and dialog were reminiscent of some of the best ’40s war noir efforts like The 39 Steps and Notorious.
recommended
