'The Good German': Frozen in the '40s

Of "The Good German," it can be said that the operation was a brilliant success, even if the patient is not merely dead but most sincerely dead.

The movie, in other words, lies there as if on a slab in a morgue, while you admire the corpse for its beauty. And it is beautiful, in its high-end craft, its stubborn insistence on re-creating a lost cinematic look and feel, and in following that impulse to its own self-destructive end.

Steven Soderbergh's idea was to take a recent thriller set in the 1940s and make it as a '40s picture. Not sort of like a '40s picture, not a '40s revised or retro, or a '40s improved or revisited, but an actual1940s picture, to the last atom, to every phony trope and awkwardness. He has gone so far, production materials announce, as to film it the appropriate aspect ratio for the '40s, to forbid the use of zoom lenses or body microphones. He uses "wipes" between scenes, fills it with overblown music and never goes near slow-motion or CGI. And so you get a movie that resembles no other in many years; I felt like I was lying on the linoleum floor of the family room in a suburban split-level in 1962, watching it on television, interrupted by commercials now and then for Robert Hall suits, Hamm's the Beer Refreshing and Muntz TVs, worrying about flunking algebra.

But the one thing about old movies Soderbergh fails to replicate is their crackle. Those films, almost to a one, boasted snap and pop as well. Their relentless narrative force -- whether the antecedent is "The Third Man" or "Casablanca" (both of which he quotes in "The Good German") or any of lesser, now-forgotten routine studio releases -- was the essence of the "old-fashionedness," not their aspect ratio. Instead, so burnished and perfect, the movie feels weirdly frozen in amber. It's dull. It has no spice, no good sequences, no chases, none of the zing of the first ones.

Derived from Joseph Kanon's best-selling 2001 novel set in the Berlin of July 1945 in and around the Potsdam Conference, it's a little bit of cynical realpolitik carried out in the wreckage of the Reich. George Clooney plays Jake, a war correspondent and former Berlin AP bureau chief, now a two-fisted New Republic columnist. He arrives in the scrap of ruin that is Berlin ostensibly to cover the conference, at which conquered Europe will be carved up by the Allied powers (bye-bye, Poland), but really to find his old squeeze, a stringer who worked for him (in more ways than one) before the war. Imagine his surprise when it turns out that the woman, Lena (Cate Blanchett), has gone from the world's second oldest profession to its first and is the kept gal of his driver, a snippy, conniving PFC named Tully, played in whiny singsong by Tobey Maguire. Hmm, Spider-Man and Katharine Hepburn? I don't think so.

Hard as that coupling is to believe, it's soon enough moot when the kid is killed, seemingly at the Potsdam estate, by a Russian .32 in the back; since he had black-market dealings with the Soviets, and was dredged from the river carrying a small fortune, it just seems he got in over his head.

But Jake isn't convinced. He thinks it has to do with Lena's husband, who may or may not be dead, and who was the protege of a German scientist in the V-2 program, currently being hunted by both the Americans and the Russians for his ballistic missile know-how. Meanwhile, various factions -- a prosecutor hunting for Nazi war criminals (Lena's hubby may be one of these), a congressman, an avuncular American military officer and finally the inevitable bald Russkie NKVD general -- keep trying to influence, dissuade, use, annoy, and in some cases beat him up.

Of the old-movie tropes, the one that's most harmful to the film is Thomas Newman's score. No doubt that it's tonally correct to the period, but while the screen shape and the expressive black-and-white cinematography seem genuine devices, the overblown music pushes the film toward parody. That blast at the arrival of every melodramatic plot point almost seems comical.

Then there are cliches used with gay abandon. Hmm, remember the one where the good guy's about to be shot, but all of a sudden the gun just stops working? Funny, in real life they almost never break like that, but in those old movies and in this new one, the gun goes click instead of bang at the most helpful times. And the insignificance of beatings: Another old movie trope is that someone could get his skull beaten to jelly, arise smiling and go about his business with a little trickle of blood on the corner of his mouth. Clooney's Jake gets more hits than a cue ball and just keeps on coming.

Then there are the off-key performances. Maguire, as I have said, is squeaky, Clooney is stiff, and Blanchett is completely out of whack with the two of them, overplaying her German accent and Marlene Dietrich eye shadow to grotesque effect. She reminded me of Cloris Leachman as Frau Blucher in "Young Frankenstein."

All of this goes -- not very far. Certainly Soderbergh never gets the dazzling thrust of the great "Third Man," even as he references it so frankly in the image of a fugitive hiding underground in a dramatically lit tunnel. His nightclub sequences, a la "Casablanca," get the smoke right, but they seem more out of a road show version of "Cabaret." The finale, which plays out in the rain as a piston-engine transport revs up to take the fleeing lovers to safety ("Casablanca" again), becomes almost comical with its placement of two spotlights whose crossing beams rise behind the C-47 idling on the tarmac. It's so Rick-and-Elsa, except played for irony as it turns out one of them is definitely not your noble tarnished angel of the Warners epic.

Finally, it's sad to report that the movie sees its issues with the utter moral clarity of half a century's hindsight, as it comes to condemn American moral relativists who took in Nazi war criminals who were actual rocket scientists. Unlike, say, "Saving Private Ryan" or "Flags of Our Fathers," which saw that generation as great, this one judges it harshly and cheaply without having risked a thing. James Agee talked derisively about the heroism of Hollywood pilots performing their derring-do "a yard above the ground." That's the altitude reading on "The Good German," too.

The Good German (110 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for nudity, sexual content, profanity and violence.