Movie Review: The Good German - More Cotten, Less Bogart

As a noir enthusiast and Soderbergh fan, I was really excited about The Good German. Steven Soderbergh is one of those directors whose failures (some of them at least) are often more interesting than the successful efforts of other people. So this homage was a must-watch as far as I was concerned.

The movie’s cast certainly didn’t do it any disservice in my eyes. Although I’d never thought of Cate Blanchett, much as I love her, in terms of Ingrid Bergman or Marlene Dietrich, once I saw the stills and trailer the comparisons became absolutely understandable. As more than one dazzled reviewer has noted, she has a face that is perfectly structured to take maximum advantage of shadows and light. Tobey Maguire did throw me for a second, especially after I saw that over the top reaction shot in the bar in one of the clips but I think he acquitted himself rather well. George Clooney, of course, has been hailed as a Hollywood throwback so often (Clark Gable, Cary Grant, to name a few) that I was by now conditioned to swallow the tie to Humphrey Bogart without a blink.

In the weeks leading up to the release, however, my alarm bells were set off as more and more people began to bandy about one name: Casablanca. The reason is simple – you can talk ‘homage’ till you’re blue in the face but when you tackle a movie that has reached an unassailable iconic status (such as Casablanca), you have to step very carefully indeed if you don’t want to get pilloried from the get-go. And then of course, the infamous poster came out.

It was an excellent one and generated a lot of interest thanks to its obvious inspiration. It was a slicker, more dramatic version of Casablanca’s. Unfortunately, from that moment on, The Good German might just as well have been a remake. In fact, it wasn’t until I began research for this piece that I found out that Soderbergh even looked at other films prior to making his movie.

Yet, I was still excited when I sat down to watch.

Halfway through The Good German, however, something was just not working for me. It wasn’t the black and white, which I found marvelous, or the outdated techniques employed by Soderbergh, which I loved right down to the juxtaposition of the actors in front of a “moving screen” every time they jumped into a car. And I didn’t find, as some reviewers moaned, the story too complex for my feeble intelligence. Neither was I thrown by hearing cuss words or by watching Spider-Man as a sociopath. I could even get over my annoyance at seeing Clooney go down every five minutes to absolutely anybody who swung a fist.

Article Author: Amrita Rajan

Amrita Rajan keeps an eye on the world from NYC.

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