Everything but Feeling

If any film can be said to illustrate the heavy filmmaking of 2006, then that film would have to be "The Good German," director Steven Soderbergh’s homage to old studio pictures of the 1940s.

Set in Berlin eight weeks after the end of World War II, "The Good German" has half the material for a good noir film, including turncoats, raincoats and a rat’s alleyway.

What it lacks is feeling.

Based on Joseph Kanon’s spy novel, "The Good German" gives top billing to George Clooney, here playing a reporter named Jake Geismar. But you needn’t believe the trailer, the real subject of the film is Berlin itself. Cut into fourths by the Americans, French, British, and Russian armies, the city is a poisoned spoil of war. Bombed into the stone age, German survivors wander in the rubble, from time to time peering out from windows that are as black as knocked-out teeth.

Six months ago, Berliners were brutes. Now they’re prey, suffering the postwar arrival of U.S. servicemen on the take, stone-faced Russians, gaunt prostitutes and Nazi war criminals, among them the rocket scientists drafted into the American and Soviet space programs. In short, Soderbergh is interested in the bread line and the black market and nothing in between. Part of the film’s message is to implicate everyone in the war’s sinning. There may be no good Germans, but there are no good allies, either.

In the middle of it all is Geismar. Sent to Berlin by The New Republic to cover the Potsdam Conference, Geismar’s the honest and naive American male of a Graham Greene novel. His noble mindedness will only sour as "The Good German" progresses. Worse, it will nearly get him killed. Stepping off the tarmac, Geismar is promptly robbed by his driver, a grinning sadist named Tully (Tobey Maguire). By chance, Tully’s girlfriend, a frau named Lena, is Geismar’s long-cooled love.

She’s played by a black-haired, vampire-white Cate Blanchett. Her job, aside from looking dead-eyed, is to channel the low vibrato of Marlene Dietrich’s ghost. Before the war, Lena worked as Geismar’s stringer. When he left, she stayed, on account of her husband, an officer in the SS, who may have had a hand in the development of the V2 rocket. Like some sour retelling of the Bogart-Bergman romance in "Casablanca," Geismar and Lena never hit it off. "You can never really get out of Berlin," she says, slinking off into the Berlin sewer.

For his part, neither can Soderbergh. What follows is a succession of double-crossings, backstabbings and a body that washes up in the Potsdam River. Like a number of young(ish) Hollywood directors today, Soderbergh is a student of film history, and "The Good German" plays like a grad student’s thesis on films of the 1940s. A quotation from Carol Reed’s "The Third Man" follows a quotation of Billy Wilder, and so on. Aided by a small arsenal of old-time techniques like fixed focal length lenses, lighting for black-and-white images and stage English, Soderbergh has captured the look of those golden oldies, if not their feel. Did Michael Curtiz, journeyman director of "Casablanca," yearn for the rough trade the way Soderbergh does? If so, we can be glad of such things as the Hays film code.

For all his aspirations, Soderbergh has no feeling for the city. Even with his use of stock Soviet footage, he films Berlin like the moody ad for a fashion magazine, self-consciously dingy. Clooney’s Geismar may be sickened by the U.S. intelligence courtship of Nazi (soon to be NASA) rocket scientists at war’s end. But "The Good German" is full of its own plundering, a sifting through the ruin and misery of Europe in 1945 for a tough’s sense of atmosphere. Soderbergh could have picked the Brooklyn Naval Yards of Los Angeles in the ‘30s for that, and left the death camps alone.

In its own way, "The Good German" is as slick and affectless as "Ocean’s Eleven" and "Ocean’s Twelve" that the talented director of "Out of Sight" and "Erin Brokovich" has, in recent years, contented himself to make. For such an admirer of the director’s craft — the way to frame a shot and stage a scene — Soderbergh fails the first test of filmmaking. You have to mean it.

"The Good German" is rated R for violence, language and sexual content.

It is coming to The Movie House in Millerton, soon.