Kathmandu:

Orson Welles once said of movie making, “This is the biggest electric train set a boy ever had.” And Steven Soderbergh plays electric train with The Good German and comes up with the brilliant film that would have been Oscar nominated if the critics weren’t so darned conscious of the 40’s style that Soderbergh uses to tell his dark story about wars aftermath.

Watch this.

Says Glenn Kenny, Premiere Magazine’s critic, “Director Steven Soderbergh, working with screenwriter Paul Attanasio, created the movie in the style of a Warner Bros’ war pic of the ‘40s. The Good German is in black and white”

Says critic Fred Topel, “Director Steven Soderbergh decided to make The Good German a throwback to the style of 1940s Hollywood. This means the actors had to adjust their modern sensibilities to the way actors acted back then.”

Adds Jeff Shannon, “Steven Soderbergh’s affectionate, knowing tribute to the black-and-white melodramas of Hollywood’s golden age may lack the emotional depth and romantic passion of Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca — the 1946 classic it intentionally emulates — but as Soderbergh approximates Curtiz’s studio style, he delivers a shimmering, shadowy reminder that movies can be enjoyed for the sheer pleasure of their craftsmanship.”

All this concentration on stylistics removed The Good German away from an Oscar nomination, be it only for Best Actress for Cate Blanchett who, ‘channels’ Marlene Deitriech

in her role as a beautiful woman driven to the depths of degradation by the war.

George Clooney plays Captain Jake Geismer as the moral compass of the film when he arrives in a battle torn Berlin and is surrounded by shady characters such as his driver played brilliantly and evilly by Tobey Maguire, his old flame now a prostitute (Blanchett) and a number of other degraded characters who are by no means The Good German.

Soderbergh and screenwriter Attanasio paid tribute to the old film Casablanca going as far as a shot-by-shot re-creation of a crucial scene in the film, placed in exactly the corresponding point in The Good German as it was in the 40’s Michael Curtiz Casablanca.

The plot based on novelist Joseph Kanon’s book is best summed up by Glenn Kenny who says, “The movie is staged around the Potsdam conference, the Churchill-Truman-Stalin summit outside Berlin wherein former Axis territories were carved up by the West and Russia. Flying in with some military brass to write about the event is Jake Geismer (Clooney), an American who had spent some time in Berlin years before, and whose past meets up with him soon after his return.

“It’s not a pleasant meeting: the woman, or I should say The Woman, he left behind in Germany, Lena (Blanchett), is now hooking among the occupied ruins. To make matters worse, her major client, and the guy she’s hoping will get her the hell out of Germany, is Jake’s driver, Tully (Maguire, giving the movie’s liveliest performance), a venal schemer for whom the term ‘sniveling shit’ is a trifle too kind. Clooney’s Geismer looks like the face of world-weary disillusionment from the moment he steps off the plane, and as The Good German escalates into a Byzantine tale of murder, politics, horrible secrets, and high-level double-dealing, things only get worse for him.”

The tagline of the movie is brilliant, “If war is hell then what comes after”.