he Good German opens with one of the most surreal moments in movies this year: jumpy documentary footage of demolished post-war Europe follows a credit for George Clooney. For a moment, I thought someone had remade The Sorrow and the Pity, but the truth is far less interesting. At least such a film would have been revisionist history; the Holocaust never had star power.

Instead of a remake, we get a synthesis—by way of Casablanca, The Third Man relocates to 1945 Germany, with a quick stop in Morocco to pick up Marlene Dietrich. Clooney plays Jake Geismar, an American war correspondent who has returned to occupied Berlin to cover the Potsdam conference. There Jake learns that his former flame, German widow Lena Brandt (Cate Blanchett), has taken to prostitution to fund her oddly urgent escape from Berlin, and that his driver, apple-pie-loving black marketeer Tully (Tobey Maguire), has lifted his wallet and his identity. The film moves back and forth between the Russian and American zones, taking note of wrecked buildings, a teeming black market, and a myriad of dark secrets. One corpse turns up in a river, another turns out to be alive, and both bodies reveal the simmering tensions that will eventually emerge as the Cold War. By movie’s end, we know, Jake and Lena will have reignited their old fling and Jake will have facilitated Lena’s escape. But from what exactly, we wonder, is she escaping? The movie isn’t sure, and neither are we.

There isn’t much at stake here for director Steven Soderbergh, who long ago earned his spot on the A-list. He’s one of few filmmakers working today who can lay claim to both critical (sex, lies, and videotape, The Limey) and Oscar (Erin Brockovich, Traffic) credibility. Since the mid ‘90s, he’s been remarkably prolific, displaying so large a commitment to his craft as to shoot, edit, and co-write his films in addition to directing (the credits to his movies abound with pseudonyms like Mary Ann Bernard and Peter Andrews). If he has yet to produce anything approaching greatness, it isn’t for lack of trying. Soderbergh has been so successful that he’s been able to finance failed experiments like Full Frontal, Solaris, and now The Good German—which arrives as an example of what happens when a director has the confidence and power to realize even the slightest of his ideas: “What if I made a movie with equipment and techniques that were only available in 1945?” So we get a shimmering parade of film-buff cleverness: process shots, back projection, three-point lighting, and silvery black-and-white. Even the performances are pitched at heightened pre-Method levels—I kept hoping a young Brando would show up and spill some sweat on the stiff proceedings.


The cast is game; George Clooney has long nurtured the persona of an old Hollywood icon, and here he’s given a whiskey tumbler and a strip of airfield with which to imitate Bogart. But it’s a nothing part, for Jake spends most of his time running from one shadowy informant to another, collecting scraps of information to unravel the film’s convoluted mysteries. We get it—he’s a reporter—but in Casablanca Bogie runs a bar, and he’s given more to do than order shipments of bourbon. For her part, Cate Blanchett seems to have flown in from another, better film, managing a blend of Bergman and Dietrich that—like her Oscar-honored Hepburn impression in The Aviator—finds firm ground between homage and quiet innovation. She’s one of few actors today that really could have been a star back in the forties; her distinctive, wide-open face—all mouth and cheekbones—belongs in black-and-white, and she glides across the ruined attics and alleyways of The Good German with effortless, intimidating grace. Unfortunately, the film is more interested in its own flash and sizzle, and Blanchett is undermined time and again by the tired script and the gimmicky camerawork. When Clooney spots her in a smoky bar, for instance, her face is hidden by showy shadows, and later, when she starts unwinding a quiet tale of the horrors she suffered in the Russian invasion, Soderbergh cuts to a grainy flashback. Did he really have to show us what she was describing? Can’t he trust our imaginations to do the work?

And here we arrive at the real problem: this isn’t 1945, it’s 2006, and movies aren’t what they once were. The Third Man and Casablanca are models of narrative simplicity, even when their subjects are knotted and complex. These gems cruise along at a swift pace, each scene unfolding confidently, with nothing necessary left out and nothing unnecessary included. The Good German, however, lurches along in fits and starts, each scene dressed up in shadows and sent out to die. Pieces of relevant information are dangled about and left hanging. Characters are introduced and forgotten; others show up out of nowhere. At one point, two-thirds of the way in, the name of a German scientist is dramatically uttered for the first time. Everyone onscreen is shocked, but everyone in the audience is shrugging. Who is this guy and if he’s important, why weren’t we told about him earlier? Whatever happened to the well-constructed studio picture? As for quotable dialogue, I couldn’t remember a line.

The Good German isn’t just empty technique—it makes a few well-intentioned stabs at political relevance, but the ideas about ethical compromise during wartime seem thin and tacked-on. This Berlin feels too much like a Hollywood construction, full of fashionable sarcasm and carefully placed piles of brick. Clooney and Blanchett may look like a better match than Bogart and Bergman, but there’s no hint of history between them, no spark of attraction. In the film’s closing scenes, Blanchett is given a final revelation of moral compromise, but the moment fails because what precedes is as weightless as the smoke from Clooney’s cigarette. The problem with this odd, forgettable movie isn’t that it fails to reach its goals, but rather, that it reaches every single one. And none of them are worth the effort.

The Good German is currently playing in limited release.