The Good German

When asked to name his movie high­lights of 2006, The New York­er grinch Antho­ny Lane point­ed to a pri­vate screen­ing he’d host­ed of the 1950 clas­sic All About Eve. Towards the end, a friend asked, ​“What hap­pened?” ​“Well,” he replied, explain­ing the plot. ​“No,” his friend insist­ed, ​“I mean, what hap­pened to movies?”

They don’t make ​’em like they used to, right Antho­ny? Only, they do. In fact, if you’re Steven Soder­bergh you make ​’em exact­ly like they used to, right down to the vin­tage lens­es and the swipe cut edit­ing. So The Good Ger­man, a relent­less­ly old-fash­ioned noir thriller set in post-war Berlin, is a gim­mick? Well, kind of, but with one impor­tant qual­i­fi­ca­tion – it’s real­ly pret­ty good.

George Clooney is Jake Geis­mer, a world-weary war cor­re­spon­dent re-assigned to Berlin to cov­er the Pots­dam Peace Con­fer­ence of 1945. Here, Rus­sia, Britain and the US carved up the spoils of one war while fir­ing the first shots of another.

But when the author­i­ties turn a blind eye after the body of Cor­po­ral Tul­ly (Tobey Maguire), a black mar­ke­teer who also hap­pens to be involved with Jake’s ex-squeeze – the dan­ger­ous­ly beau­ti­ful Lena Brandt (Cate Blanchett) – turns up in the Russ­ian sec­tor, Geis­mer uncov­ers anoth­er sto­ry alto­geth­er: the dirty secrets behind America’s plans to win this new, cold war.

The Good Ger­man is a tech­ni­cal mar­vel, visu­al­ly and the­mat­i­cal­ly res­o­nant of the likes of Casablan­ca and The Third Man. All the usu­al noir clichés are present and cor­rect: the tough-talk­ing cyn­i­cism (says Tul­ly to a leg­less Jew, ​“Every­one in town has a hard luck sto­ry”); the seen-it-all-before bar­man (“That’s Berlin!”); and, most of all, the moral uncertainties.

The title itself is a mul­ti-lay­ered ref­er­ence to the hypocrisy of the occu­pa­tion. Berlin is a city of good bad guys and bad good guys: the ques­tion is not so much who among the Ger­mans deserves to be pun­ished, as who among the vic­tors deserves to choose.

Clooney and Maguire both play against type. Jake Geismer’s cock­sure con­fi­dence is grad­u­al­ly beat­en out of him as he fol­lows Lena fur­ther and fur­ther from the moral high ground. And as the kind of guy who’ll tell you how he loves his girl, but let you fuck her for the right price, Maguire couldn’t be fur­ther away from the ​‘great respon­si­bil­i­ty’ of Spider-Man.

But it’s Blanchett who real­ly impress­es. Not just an actress in a ​’40s cos­tume, she’s an appari­tion from an ear­li­er era, with a face to rival Bergman and Bacall. Soder­bergh doesn’t film her; he gapes in awe. The old-fash­ioned ethos does mean some clum­sy plot­ting, and Jake is too often the vic­tim rather than the agent of events, but these don’t detract from the fact that The Good Ger­man is a fine vintage.