Like the high-school sophomore who decides it'd be cool to walk around every day wearing a fedora and suspenders, Steven Soderbergh's The Good German, set in the picturesque rubble of postwar Berlin, takes inordinate pride in its affection for the archaic. It's unclear just which Hollywood classic Soderbergh means to mimic:Casablanca (reunion of estranged lovers; runway finale) and The Third Man (black market profiteering; sewer hideout) are the titles most frequently cited, but the narrative, in which a weary war correspondent (George Clooney) pursues an enigmatic beauty (Cate Blanchett) even as he investigates her connection to weapons of mass destruction, recalls Hitchcock's Notorious. Then again, there's also Tully (Tobey Maguire), a motor-pool miscreant whose aw-shucks demeanor — he's Peter Parker in combat fatigues — masks a degree of amoral viciousness that would have sent the Hays-protected audiences of the late '40s into cardiac arrest. No less than Far From Heaven, The Good German laces dreamy nostalgia with a contemporary cyanide kick.
Soderbergh has been here before; Kafka (1991) took its visual cues from German expressionism. But his dedication to golden-era syntax goes well beyond the use of black-and-white film stock. Restricting himself to outmoded lenses with a fixed focal length, eschewing any technique that wasn't available to filmmakers of the era, he does for postwar Hollywood what Guy Maddin has done for silent cinema — and, like Maddin, he risks alienating everyone who isn't a diehard movie buff. For all its melodramatic trappings, The Good German remains an exercise in aesthetics, beautiful but just a tad bloodless; only Maguire's arrestingly nasty performance skirts affectation. (Blanchett, encouraged by the Oscar she received for her superficial Katharine Hepburn impression, does Dietrich Lite.) But not every work of art need be deeply moving. If Soderbergh's touch here is clinical and remote, his eye compensates with caresses of its own. There's plenty of love in evidence, but it's directed at the medium, not the characters. — Mike D'Angelo
