Review of The Good German (2006) by Karl S — 28 Sep 2008

In a movie in which German-American occupiers--Schaeffer, Muller, Breimer--want the Jews (Blanchett, presumably Clooney, the DA) to shut up and get out of the way to let the proper American future of ICBMs arrive, Blanchett's final confession of her particular crime feels like a let down: she is responsible for the deaths of only 12 of her fellow Jews? So what? This 'so what?' comprises the core of the major reviews.

The Village Voice, the Guardian, NY Times all complain that Soderbergh's homage to 40s Hollywood technique and style misses the mark by being all surfaces, inauthentic passion, by only gesturing at rather than resurrecting the nostalgic--and, it should have been said, self-righteous--gravitas of Casablanca.

But it's clear to me that Soderbergh's point was to do just that: to miss the mark, and, with that refusal to do it 'right,' retroactively to cause Casablanca and even The Third Man to lose their spirit.

The Good German is at once profoundly cinematic and a profound refusal of the capacity of cinema to do anything but represent. Its refusal to grant human decency or discover a persistent moral center would have been a crime in Casablanca; it might have been a failure during the reconstruction period that produced The Third Man; but 60 years on, in the midst of continuing American Exceptionalism, as a response to Operation Paperclip--the American rescue of Nazi scientists that is Soderbergh's historical core--the refusal of a moral center may be the only just response.

The crime simply cannot be overcome except, perhaps, by refusing--as Soderbergh did by using only 1940s film equipment--postwar American technological mastery itself, tainted as it is with Nazi science.