Herald rating: * *
Self-consciously clever but utterly unengaging, this artfully antique black-and-Swhite drama by the versatile Soderbergh is fatally handicapped by a lack of chemistry between its two leads.
It is also hampered by a story that doesn't amount to a hill of beans. The airfield farewell is meant to recall
Casablanca, but the comparison does Soderbergh no favours. Casablanca's goodbye is one of cinema's most agelessly romantic gestures, but that of The Good German contains a revelation that deflates the mystery - and the viewer.
The film is set in postwar Berlin with the Allies about to divide the city and set the scene for the Cold War. War correspondent Jake Geismer (Clooney) arrives. He's meant to be looking for stories but he's actually looking for Lena (Blanchett), the German colleague he loved and left behind. The obstacles to his capturing the past are manifold: Tully (Maguire), a cynical army driver whose black-market manipulations soon cost him his life; Russians and Americans who are kidnapping and luring German physicists to come over to their side; and a Nazi prosecutor (Teitel) and military governor (Bridges) with agendas of their own.
Soderbergh has made much of how he made a 40s film by using vintage lenses and boom mikes, chiaroscuro lighting and expressionistic angles, but the effect is compromised by a modern attitude to profanity and nudity and a script (by Paul Attanasio adapting Joseph Kanon's 2001 novel) that prizes big speeches above narrative coherence.
What is intended as a homage, or at least a genre exercise, is a clumsy melange of styles and allusions that soon becomes tiresome. The reliable Blanchett makes a great fist of the German accent but in the end it's hard to see what Lena and Jake ever had going.
Clooney's performance is meant to be understated, but his character is devoid of emotion. Maguire's opportunistic Tully is the best thing in the movie and when he dies, barely 20 minutes in, the life drains out of the whole enterprise.
Cast: George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Tobey Maguire, Beau Bridges, Bernie Teitel
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Running time: 107 mins
Rating: M, violence, offensive language, sex scenes
Screening: Berkeley, Rialto, SkyCity Verdict: Disappointing 40s-style mystery thriller set in postwar Berlin is a pastiche with no chemistry.
