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Bookmark this pageGood (2008)
Director: Vicente Amorim
Movie review
From Time Out London
Exploring the grey areas of complicity with the crimes of Nazi Germany is in vogue at the minute: after ‘Valkyrie’ and ‘The Reader’, this adaptation of CP Taylor’s 1981 play also concerns itself with the limits of responsibility and the middle ground between right and wrong. Viggo Mortensen is John Halder, a mild-mannered academic who begins the film in 1933 as an apolitical family man harried by an ill mother and a fragile wife and ends it several years later wandering around a death camp in SS gear, amazed at what’s going on.
Along the way, he lends his ideas on compassionate euthanasia to the government’s cause, his friendship with a Jewish psychiatrist (Jason Isaacs) is tested and he leaves his wife for a less complicated student (Jodie Whittaker) whose nonchalance at his politics extends to giving him a blow job when he’s suited and booted in SS uniform.
Most of the film isn’t so crude. By all accounts, Taylor’s play was a more experimental piece than this film, in which the production values, like the acting, veer between the acceptable and the stodgy and in which expressive moments, such as Halder’s neurotic musical visions, jar given the mostly straight approach to storytelling. Yet, despite its flaws, the film retains a theoretical power to which Mortensen’s performance is well attuned. The script is good at positing a credible idea of why someone like Halder might turn to the Nazis – pragmatism, moral weakness, personal crisis, flattery – and sensitive in exploring the personal ramifications of that decision, if, as the film argues, you can call it that.
Author: Dave Calhoun
Time Out London Issue 2017, 16-22 April 2009
User reviews of this film
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- Robert Thornton said...
- Posted on Dec 16 2010 22:08 This film left me with no feelings towards the Nazi regime at all. Mortensen seemed liked a comic figure swept along by the tide with his weak screen performance matching his character. I just had no feelings for him or his family. It has all been done before, "The boy in striped pyjamas" as an example had much more impact.
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- towers said...
- Posted on Nov 12 2009 21:44 brilliant, very powerful
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- J Preston said...
- Posted on Apr 20 2009 20:58 Forget The Reader, this is a really intelligent movie about the Nazi era, which really leaves you thinking: what would you have done? Viggo's finest role.
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- Edy said...
- Posted on Apr 15 2009 22:31 Good film with very interesting storyline, good delivery from Viggo.
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- Edouard Dalmos said...
- Posted on Apr 15 2009 22:03 This is probably the smartest "Nazi film" I've ever seen.
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Cast & crew
Director: Vicente Amorim
Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Jodie Whittaker, Jason Isaacs
Rated: 15
Duration: 91 mins
UK Release: Apr 17 2009
US Release: Dec 31 2008
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