Achtung baby

Here's looking at you, kid: George Clooney and Cate Blanchett summon up the spirit of film noir in the Steven Soderbergh film The Good German. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Everything in The Good German looks like something else. In an old-fashioned mystery, that’s usually a good idea, as disguised faces and loyalties — the vague sense of things out of whack — are the whole point. But director Steven Soderbergh is practising another kind of trickery, too. He has made a film that is eerily, adroitly identical to the kind of they-don’t-make-’em-like-they-used-to classics that Warner Brothers produced in the 1940s.

Printed in high-contrast black and white, The Good German is an homage to Notorious-Casablanca-The Third Man-etc., a movie where shadows are ominous silhouettes and method acting hasn’t been invented yet. The story of former lovers reunited in 1945 Berlin is executed with great precision down to the smallest lens flare, but who cares? This meticulous recreation might be fascinating for film fetishists, but for the rest of us, it’s like being cornered at a party by the hectoring, pompous editor of an obscure cinema magazine with a circulation of 300. That probably happens to me more than it does to you.

George Clooney is Jake Geismer, an American journalist formerly based in Berlin who returns for the Potsdam peace conference. The bombed city is carved into occupied zones, a nice land for grazing if you’re a bully or a hustler, like Geismer’s driver, Pte. Tully (a volatile Tobey Maguire, nicely playing against type). Tully, a mean bootlegger, has a little lady he’s trying to get out of Berlin when he’s not beating her up. But Lena Brandt (Cate Blanchett), a prostitute in black lipstick and pupil-free black contacts, seems to have about as much get-up-and-go in her as a pebble. If she had transit papers, she would probably just roll them into a cigarette and smoke away her freedom, looking very beautiful while doing so. Blanchett, breathing deep and hard like Marlene Dietrich but with none of her pulse, is weirdly somnambulant; there’s not a drop of heroine moxie or femme fatale vampiness in her.

Still, her drowsy look works for Jake, who was her lover before the war (she was his stringer) and wouldn’t mind being her lover again, except that Lena is too busy working her way out of a convoluted mystery. She is the wife of a dead — or is he? — scientist who is the last living witness to atrocities committed at a slave labour camp where Germans were building V-2 rockets. It’s not just Jake who wants a piece of Lena — Russians, Germans and Americans could all make good use of the unblinking sylph. Some want her husband to testify at Nuremberg, and other higher-ups want him to move to upstate New York and build bombers for the U.S. government, war crimes be damned.

George Clooney plays American journalist Jake Geismer, who reconnects with his former lover, Lena Brandt (Cate Blanchett). (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Soderbergh is working from a script by Paul Attanasio, based on the historical thriller by Joseph Kanon, but there is no zip, no urgency in this adaptation. Part of the problem may be that the noir language in play constantly asks us to compare The Good German with the films it wants to be, and that’s some competitive company. The final scene takes place on the tarmac in the rain, plane propellers whirring, Lena’s hat tilted just so, her pencil skirt painfully elegant. But in Casablanca, the actors, for all their now-retro stiffness, felt utterly enthralled. They would have ripped off each other’s clothes if they could have travelled ahead to a time when it was possible.

But here we are, free to get naked, and we’re backward glancing with Clooney and Blanchett, both good actors reduced to asexual mannequins placed here and there in the immaculate cinematic world Soderbergh constructed on the backlots of Hollywood. This is the final film from the company that Soderbergh and Clooney formed together in 2000, and it feels like Soderbergh may be aping their most successful project, the Clooney-directed Good Night, and Good Luck. That black and white film also worshipped style, but it was concise, and trucked along with a sense of purpose. In contrast, The Good German is limp; Thomas Newman’s forceful, immediate score, a nod to Max Steiner, is the most alive thing in it. Even the film’s political thrust — the pull between nationalism and selfhood, morality and survival — comes to seem like an afterthought, and that’s a chilling observation when the subject at hand is the Holocaust.

As the perfectly 1940s credits came up at the end (after the words “The End,” of course),  I was reminded of Gus Van Sant’s mimetic 1998 frame-by-frame remake of Psycho, an exercise that probably felt to him like a chance to limber up, to figure out how his heroes did their thing; for everyone else — sheer tedium. Like that film, The Good German becomes, in the end, an homage not to a great moment in cinema, but to the director’s skills. The film is a glorious, empty structure, too distant from the story and too distracted by the grandeur of cinema to mean anything. We already know that Steven Soderbergh (Sex Lies and Videotape, Out of Sight, Traffic) is great; we need him to be present.

The Good German opens Dec. 15.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external sites - links will open in new window.