Soderbergh's Good German Recalls Casablanca

When I screened Steven Soderbergh's The Good German for my UCLA class last night, the reaction was mixed. You'd think an older audience would enjoy a film that conjures up the look and feel of a 40s movie like Casablanca.

According to writer Paul Attanasio (Quiz Show, Donnie Brasco), the plot, based on Joseph Kanon's novel, is reminiscent of Casablanca's love triangle about a man (George Clooney as a journalist returning to post-War Berlin) who reconnects with a lost love (Cate Blanchett as a German who hooks to survive) from his past who is protecting her husband (an SS scientist sought after by both the Americans and the Russians). The movie takes place at that pivotal time at the start of the Cold War when America dropped the Big Bomb on Japan. The filmmaking prowess is staggering—the high-contrast black and white photography, the complex mise-en-scene, the evocation of another era of filmmaking. (The film recalls both The Third Man and Chinatown.) But Soderbergh and Attanasio are messing with our heads. This movie asks: how fake and complacent and escapist was the original Casablanca? (One of our favorite movies of all time.) They layer in content from World War II that would never have passed studio muster at the time—concentration camps, complicity with Nazis, American military corruption, etc.

As Attanasio labored over the script for five years, Soderbergh threw things at him: like, make the female lead a prostitute, and, try telling the movie from multiple points-of-view. Tobey Maguire, who had turned down everything in sight until he read this script, was eager to play a foul-mouthed lout of a soldier who slaps around his hooker girlfriend. Early on, The Good German shocks us with a sex scene between Maguire and Blanchett that signals: hold on, this is not your ordinary movie.

And Clooney, while he's as handsome as ever, continues to resist playing a conventionally active hero. His lovelorn journalist keeps getting beat up and doesn't know what's going on. The actors had to figure out how to perform in a 40s pre-Method declarative style while fighting their instincts on how to be natural and believable, Attanasio said. Soderbergh is challenging audiences to question their expectations. Will they get a white knight hero who saves the day? A fallen woman who finds redemption? A little romance? Check it out.

To his credit, Soderbergh convinced everyone to shoot the film for no money. That's because The Good German is as experimental in its way as Soderbergh's Schizopolis, Kafka, Solaris, Full Frontal or The Limey. It will keep cinephiles like Dave Kehr and David Bordwell in clover for years as they deconstruct Soderbergh's exploration of the language of cinema. What's real? What's fake? What's genre? (This is film noir. Or is it?) What's point-of-view? What's a movie star? What do audiences want from a movie?

It is fascinating to be made aware of the effect of an echoey boom mike, a bombastic old-fashioned orchestral score (by Thomas Newman), a depth of field not seen for fifty years, or deep shadows carved on a beautiful woman's face. Some of the shots are simply stunning. The question of whether audiences will embrace a movie that does not draw them into complicity with its characters will be answered on December 15.

Comments

[mitkid]

Dave Kehr had an excellent article in the Sunday New York Times that adds to your blog entry, I for one am looking forward to seeing the movie when it comes out.

[Sergio]

As a lover of those great 40's and 50's Warner Bros films (even the B movies) I was really hyped up to The Good German. However, I must admit it was a HUGE disappointment for me. It was like buying a copy of a Steinway piano. On the surface it looks like the real thing, until you start playing and all the keys are off-tune. It played like a half-hearted attempt to re-create those films. If you're going to do it, then go full out all the way. For example, take the dialouge. I have NO problem with profanity but in Good German it was very totally distracting. I thought at times I was listening to Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross.

I found the film sluggishly paced and rather dull. It didn't have the "snap" and pace of those old Warner films. Toby Maguire was woefully miscast in the part and I found his character so abrasive and annoying that he turned me off from the start and set the whole film out of wack. Blanchett just didn't have the glamourous looks and style that those actresses of the period did or maybe it was that huge nose of hers that I kept focusing on (Sorry about it) Also I found her attempt at a German accent distracting. She sounded more to me like she was trying to an impression of Greta Garbo.

Clooney really didn't have much to do and I never felt that there had any real relationship between him and Blanchett. I kept thinking what Bogart would have done with a part like that. Anyone looking for romance is going to be sorly disappointmented. The whole "Casablanca" ending didn't work. When a similiar trick was done in Woody Allen's Play It Again, Sam it's obivious it's played for laughs. But in German, is it supposed to be loving hommage or wicked satire?

Finally, the music is just AWFUL! It's nothing like the lush romantic music that Max Steiner or Korngold wrote for those Warner films. Thomas Newman's score is completely tonaly wrong, overblown and brings too much attention to itself.

Well that's it. I wasn't too harsh was I?

[Anne Thompson]

I think Soderbergh is deconstructing the 40s war movie and challenging audiences to recognize what they expect from film, and how it manipulates them. I don't think this is an hommage at all, au contraire, it's a destruction. It's almost as though he's making the film, half a century later, that is the film WB should have made if they weren't part of the Hollywood war propaganda machine. He's playing intellectual games. I am always provoked and delighted to jump in there with him, good NYU Cinema Studies graduate that I am. But does this movie work for an audience? It certainly didn't for mine.

[Sergio]

Anne, your comments about The Good German reminds me so much of another film I'm not a particular fan of, Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye. I know there are those who consider it a brilliant re-imagining, a "destruction" if you will, of the traditional private eye thriller. Unfortunately for me (and some others), it makes me want to run out the room screaming bloody murder.

[Chris]

"The Good German," to my mind, is not so much a deconstruction of 40s film -- in the manner of previously-referenced "The Long Goodbye," which brilliantly tore down many romantic old conventions -- as it is an honest attempt to tell a more honest type of 40s film, one that wasn't hidebound by restrictions of the studio and contemporary culture.

I found the film truly remarkable, one of Soderbergh's best, and I am honestly surprised by and have to take issue with all the crying over Soderbergh's supposed attempt to ruin "Casablanca" for us. With the exception of a few scenes, this film isn't even really meant to evoke that hammy piece of work, but instead the much more cynical "Third Man," and it does so quite well, I think. I would propose there's nothing wrong with, and in fact something quite brilliant about, looking at old and familiar subject matter with old and familiar tools but using an entirely modern point of view.

This is a better film, by far, than "Casablanca" -- there, I've said it.