Review: The Good German

SLAY IT AGAIN, SAM

The spirit of ‘Casablanca’ is snuffed out in a modernist makeover that’s nonetheless hard to entirely dismiss.

OCT 25, 2007 – IF YOU’VE EVER WONDERED how Casablanca would have turned out had Ingrid Bergman been violated doggy-style and if Humphrey Bogart had said “fuckâ€? a lot, you owe it to yourself to experience Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German – except that it’s not just Casablanca that’s being channelled here. Sure, Soderbergh recycles that business about transit papers, as also the last scene showing the heroine and the hero exchanging goodbye notes near a plane waiting to take off – but there’s also the ghost of another Bogart hovering around this picture, the noir Bogart who unerringly played the cynical (yet inherently good-natured) private-eye. And as such, throughout the film, I was torn between admiration (for what Soderbergh has sought to accomplish with this overlap) and frustration (er, but why exactly?).

In the summer of 1945 – “Only Japan continues to fight,â€? a super tells us – Jake Geismer (George Clooney), a reporter with The New Republic, returns to Berlin to cover the Potsdam Conference. He instantly runs into old flame Lena Brandt (Cate Blanchett, struggling with an accent that comes off like Marlene Dietrich mimicking Greta Garbo in a Mel Brooks spoof), who is now sort-of seeing – and also sort-of being pimped-out by – Tully (Tobey Maguire, hilariously miscast). And the trio negotiates the murky realities of a postwar universe while trying to… well, don’t ask me. It’s not that the plot is indecipherable – it’s nothing that someone with patience (and, perhaps, an access to subtitles) couldn’t get a handle on – so much as the characters being so disagreeable and distant that you don’t particularly care to follow them through their narrative arcs.

Is this a romance? Is it a murder mystery? Is it homage? (It does seem so when Geismer is an American “foreign correspondentâ€? in Europe almost about the same time that Hitchcock made a film about one, or when Geismer goes snooping around and gets his ear slashed in a jokey nod to Chinatown.) Or is The Good German a commentary about the movies of the period, about how the likes of Casablanca are simply whitewashed hooey? You could certainly make a case for the latter, as this film – shot entirely in black-and-white – systematically transforms the characters we know and love into ones that we don’t want to know and cannot love. Isn’t it likely, Soderbergh seems to ask, that Bergman’s Ilsa would have, at some point, been compelled to use her beauty as currency, the way Lena does here?

But then, no one watches Casablanca expecting it to be a towering beacon of neorealism. There’s a reason the black-and-white cinematography serves it so well, and it’s that its romanticised moral universe is so clearly aligned: the people themselves are black and white. (Sure, Bogart takes a stab at shades of grey, but, really, who is he kidding?) So, thinking along these lines, if Soderbergh really wanted to update Casablanca, shouldn’t he have shot his film in colour? Wouldn’t The Good German have been better served by the browns of rotting decay and the lurid reds of prostitution? (The one thing the cinematography does highlight here is that Clooney would have been as huge a star then as now. Does this man photograph badly from any angle?) That Soderbergh has crafted something that lends itself to impassioned deconstruction is all very good, but sometimes – as Casablanca shows – it’s just nice to kick back and enjoy a good story well told.

Copyright ©2007 The New Indian Express

Posted in: Cinema: English