The Good German, originally uploaded by amnesic_kid

There is something that doesn’t work here.

This ought to be a great movie. Three very good actors - George Clooney, Cate Blanchett and Tobey Maguire - an excellent director in Steven Soderbergh, and the whole idea is very good. Berlin in July 1945, a destroyed people, ruins, black market. Trying to discover the mystery of what Clooney’s former stringer and lover did during the Nazi period.

It’s shot in black and white, which keeps the feeling of the period, but also, as in “Good Night and Good Luck”, to make it possible to clip in actual footage from the time. That part works well. The new footage fits in with the older material. But that isn’t enough to carry it.

There is every opportunity here for a new “Third Man”, but it fails completely. Something is missing, the whole thing is listless. At times it seems like Soderbergh decided to make a parody of a B movie, but even as parody it doesn’t work. Half way through we were waiting for the end so we could turn the thing off.

One plot element really didn’t make sense to me. At one point Tobey Maguire, an enlisted man, brutally attacks George Clooney, a journalist who to make things easier for all concerned, has been put into a US Army Captain’s uniform. I just can’t believe that an enlisted man would attack an officer that way. It would mean instant court martial, probably years in the stockade. The character has obviously totally flipped out, but the motivation for such a drastic act is just not established.

One interesting touch, probably a key element of the book that has been mishandled here, is that even before the war is over, American leaders are gearing up to hate the Russians and to embrace former Nazis. A reflection of the Cold War to come.