Film

Nothing says it’s the end of the year like Nazis marching across our screens, and Vicente Amorim’s tale of a good German making bad choices manages to goose-step into theaters just in time to make the 2008 cut. Whether this adaptation of C.P. Taylor’s oft-revived play adds anything to the glut of movies featuring gray uniforms and gaunt Holocaust prisoners, however, is debatable. We know that John Halder (Mortensen), a university professor, will be tempted to compromise his morals when the S.S. brass asks him to write a paper on euthanasia. Once Halder ends up becoming the Schutzstaffel’s token egghead, it’s also obvious that his decision will have dire consequences. Denial can’t erase the writing on the walls (“Juden!”) or a decent person’s unintentional contribution to history.

Despite its rather highbrow pedigree, Good’s journey along its predetermined path from book burnings to concentration camps reeks of middlebrow button-pushing, which the cast’s clipped British accents do nothing to dispel. (Kudos to Mortensen, however, for adopting the plummy tone for consistency’s sake; the committed actor probably could have done it in flawless German had he wanted to.) The film doesn’t make light of this 20th-century atrocity, but it doesn’t do much to lend it heaviness or horror, either; it simply seems concerned with gold statuettes.