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The Good German (2006)

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Synopsis

A US war correspondent travels to Berlin in 1945 to cover a peace conference, only to discover corruption at every turn.

Movie review

From Time Out London

Steven Soderbergh habitually tests and transcends the generic boundaries of mainstream American filmmaking. This foray into the literal/metaphorical wreckage of post-war Berlin is a strong, mostly successful example of his canny audacity at work on a large-scale but relatively low-budget ($32 million) project.

Arriving to cover the Postdam Conference, whereby Truman, Churchill and Stalin will decide the future of Germany, war correspondent Jake Geismer (George Clooney) is assigned as his driver one Corporal Tully (Tobey Maguire), a black-marketeering opportunist. If Tully has a soft spot – unlikely! – it’s for Lena (Cate Blanchett), with whom Jake once fell in love during a spell in pre-war Berlin. A tricky situation – dangerous too: the discovery of an American corpse in the Soviet zone may not seem to bother the US or Soviet authorities, but for Jake the investigative trail leads towards a dark moral abyss.

If the use of black-and-white images evocative of classics like ‘Casablanca’, ‘The Third Man’ and ‘A Foreign Affair’ is most immediately striking – shot by the director himself, the film looks terrific – more important finally is the bleak account of the consequences of years of unimaginable fear, treachery, hardship, carnage and cruelty. This and the Allies’ overriding concern with negotiating the balance of political, economic and military power in a newly nuclear world, Paul Attanasio’s sometimes overly complex script suggests, mean that the old values simply no longer pertain.

A grim conclusion, and Soderbergh never shies away from the corrosive horror of the tale; it does mean, however, that the film lacks characters who might engage our sympathies; Blanchett, particularly, doing a Mitteleuropeanische femme fatale familiar from movies rather than life, makes for some dramatic flatness. Still, why emphasise flaws in a film of such overall ambition and expertise?

Author: Geoff Andrew 2007-03-06 10:23:57

Time Out London Issue 1907: March 7-13 2007

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User reviews of this film

John T. Cullen, author of Intersect: Danger 0743309138 said...

Posted on Jun 29 2007 04:36 I enjoyed the movie very much. The verisimilitude is excellent, although one error I noticed is the references to sectors and zones. Berlin was divided into four occupation sectors, while Germany was divided into zones of occupation. It would be incorrect to refer to the American Zone or the Russian Zone inside Berlin. That aside, the verisimilitude and atmosphere were breathtakingly realistic. My father was a member of the MG (Military Government) and I remember he commented about the rubble everywhere. The Russian archive film is great. The plot was fine as far as I was concerned. I delighted at the nods to Casablanca and The Third Man. I was stationed in West Germany during the 1970s, visited Berlin, and found the film brought back a lot of feelings. You had to be there. By the way, I think the line "You can never get out of Berlin" (qv) hearkens back to The Third Man. The thing to realize is that Berlin, with its four sectors, was buried hundreds of miles deep inside the Russian Zone--leading to the Berlin Airlift and the confrontation under Kennedy.

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