>>REVIEW
THE GOOD GERMAN
STARRING George Clooney, Cate Blanchett and Tobey Maguire
DIRECTED BY Steven Soderbergh
Opens Friday, January 19
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Steven Soderbergh could be the last real American auteur. Sure, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg have enough creative clout to make whatever movie they want, but when all is said and done, they are still slaves to the populist movie machine.
As a director, Soderbergh does what he wants and it’s evident in his back catalogue. He is a wildly inventive filmmaker who shoots idiosyncratic curiosities like Schizopolis, Full Frontal and Bubble on the cheap. Then he turns around and does big-budget remakes of Traffic, Ocean’s Eleven and Solaris. The kicker is that they are all equally effective. And while every one of his films bears an indelible stamp of quality, Soderbergh’s cinematic exploits can’t be pigeonholed. That trend continues with The Good German.
The fifth Soderbergh flick to star aging hottie George Clooney, The Good German sets its scene in Berlin at the tail end of the Second World War. Clooney plays military journalist Captain Jake Geissmer who is sent to cover the Potsdam conference. There he reunites with Lena (Cate Blanchett), the woman he had an affair with years before. She’s trying to leave Germany with her war profiteer boyfriend Tully (Tobey Maguire), until a murder turns everyone’s lives upside down. Jake soon figures there is more to his assignment than meets the eye and plays amateur sleuth to make sense of it all.
Shot in stunningly crisp black and white by Soderbergh (under his alias Peter Andrews), The Good German has the look of all the classic films it emulates. A taut amalgam of Chinatown, Casablanca and The Third Man, Soderbergh is almost too effective in recreating the look of mid-’40s cinema. From the use of the vintage Warner Bros. logo and the perfect choice of font for the titles to the incorporation of vintage stock footage and Thomas Newman’s bombastic score, The Good German looks like it could have come from Hollywood’s studio era.
What gives the film away is the performances. Clooney and Blanchett make for a fantastic modern-day Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, but both actors give such a measured and layered performance that you could never mistake it for ’40s melodrama. As the mystery unfolds they never pull away from their characters to artificially amp up the suspense.
Maguire, Beau Bridges and Leland Orser are also excellent in supporting roles, but the real star of The Good German is the film itself. Although it’s based on the novel by Joseph Kanon, Soderbergh’s vision is so singular it’s hard to attribute it to anyone else. And yet, the film is never showy. Where a high-octane hack like Michael Bay puts his stamp on a film at all costs, Soderbergh is simply content to tell the story the best way he can. The Good German is another jewel in the Soderbergh crown and proof that he is one of the finest filmmakers working today. |
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