OVP: The Good German (2006)

Film: The Good German (2006)
Stars: George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Tobey Maguire, Beau Bridges
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Score)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Every few years, some filmmaker thinks they can do it.  Perhaps watching from their screening room in Bel-Air, they chance upon Michael Curtiz's 1942 classic, and think, without any sense of hubris, "I bet I could make Casablanca."  That clearly was the case with Steven Soderbergh circa 2006, and as a recent Oscar winner who basically had a blank check from the studio, he had better resources than most do in such circumstances.  He stacked up two then-recent Oscar winners as his leads (Cate Blanchett & George Clooney), and even put it in black-and-white for a nice touch.  But here's the thing about Casablanca-while there are countless great wartime romances out there, there's a reason that Casablanca is the best.  It's literally a perfect movie, 102 flawless minutes of cinema that happened, based on every legend of the film, nearly by accident.  Trying to recreate something so grand, arguably the greatest movie of all-time, is a recipe for disaster.  And to be sure, The Good German is definitely a disaster.

(Spoilers Ahead) Here's the deal-the plot of The Good German is so confusing, that it might be the first time ever that I have seen a Wikipedia explanation of the film told outside of chronology and with spoilers in early paragraphs because otherwise it won't make sense while describing it.  Of course, while you're watching it for the first time, it then doesn't make sense but I'll try summarize it here.  Essentially, we have Jake (Clooney), who initially seems like a side character-a reporter coming to Germany after World War II, and we see the story from the perspective of Tully (Maguire), his abusive, petulant driver who is profiting off of the war and having sex with a local woman we assume to be a prostitute named Lena (Blanchett).  As the film progresses, though, Tully is murdered in what was clearly meant to be a red herring (Maguire would've been a pretty big actor at the time to have randomly vanished so soon in the movie), and we focus on Jake & Lena, who had a relationship prior to the war.  Lena's husband is a former SS Officer who is trying to out his former commander, a commander who was in charge of a concentration camp that tortured people...but because of his rocketing know-how, the Americans still want him to be on their side, and have to kill Lena's husband to keep him from testifying, since obviously the Americans can't hire a guy who ran a concentration camp.  The film ends with Lena's husband dead and the Americans getting what they want through his commander, but not before Jake learns the truth about Lena (who escapes): in order to stay alive, she essentially sold out Jews to the Gestapo, despite being Jewish herself.  The film ends with her, headed off into a plane alone, and him leaving her behind.

The artwork for the film and the ending are definitely the biggest homages to Casablanca.  The ending could almost work if we'd had more hints about Lena, or if what came before it had been any good.  After all, in the end of Casablanca (another spoiler alert if you haven't seen it, but hopefully if you've seen The Good German you've seen Casablanca), Rick does the noble thing by letting Ilsa leave with her husband, as her husband can do the most good by going to Lisbon.  In The Good German, Jake lets Lena get away after they've essentially sentenced her husband to death, and he lets her go despite her being a criminal; Emil is Victor Laszlo, the man with the true conscience, but instead of growing one as the film progresses, Jake is seduced by love rather than ennobled by it.  It's a clever perversion of the Hollywood ending of Casablanca, and it's a finale that should work for the movie.

But it doesn't, because The Good German is such a mess.  The script is all-over-the-place.  Honestly-there are too many under-developed characters, and the whole red herring aspect of Tobey Maguire dying a fourth of the way through the film (and then it not really mattering that he was dead) is bizarre.  It doesn't help matters that Maguire is terrible with this part, badly miscast even though, quite frankly, I don't know who would have been good in such a weirdly written part.  Clooney & Blanchett at least have plausible characters, but neither adds anything of note or intrigue here-they read their stylized dialogue with detached irony.  In some ways Clooney would play a similar character the following year to raves; arguably the best role of Clooney's film career is Michael Clayton, and Jake is not dissimilar to Michael's warped, but tried, sense of morality.  But Clayton made sense in his film, and Clooney never makes sense of his Jake.  This is a movie that tries to be grounded and yet pay homage and yet kind of make fun of films like Casablanca all in the same breath, and it never works.  The best part of the movie other than the leads look great (both actors photograph well in black-and-white, though the cinematography is punchy-too reliant on heavy shadow when light might make it more intriguing, always a Soderbergh sin behind the camera) is Beau Bridges in a small part as a morally-bankrupt colonel.  His character at least feels fleshed-out, even if he's given nothing to do.

Before we leave, I have to admit I don't get the score at all, the film's only AMPAS-approved element.  I know Oscar has a crush on Thomas Newman, and occasionally I do too, but this isn't one of his best, and it's a weirdly sporadic score.  Much like the movie, it shows up in a big way in scenes that should play small, and yet in scenes where the light hum of a string or bassoon might work, it's absent.  Newman's nomination here was surely part of their gut reaction need to nominate him every chance they get, but not only did they bestow "Oscar nominee" on a bad movie, there's also nothing notable about what Newman is doing here. It's not even that pretty, and it doesn't feel necessary at all.