Courting the Lost World of ‘Casablanca’

Steven Soderbergh, the “perpetual wunderkind,” is always up to something. News of the director’s exploits trickles in year after year: He’s firing up a 1960s Rat Pack heist caper with George Clooney! He’s assembled Michelangelo Antonioni and Wong Karwai to make erotic short films! He’s remaking a science fiction parable by Andrei Tarkovsky! He’s revolutionizing distribution by releasing “Bubble” to theaters and DVD simultaneously!The director’s latest endeavor, “The Good German,” is another experiment. Set in the shadow-strafed palimpsest of postwar Berlin, it’s a tale of deceit and doomed romance that wants to live and breathe the 1940s. Mr. Soderbergh interprets the term “period movie”to include the filmmaking itself, using black-andwhite, a single camera for each shot instead of several, and even a constrained selection of vintage lenses.The story, like the setting and technique, looks backward, courting the cult of “Casablanca” and savoring the moral rot of 1940s film noir. In July 1945, after the Nazi surrender, American journalist Jake Geismer (Mr. Clooney) arrives in Berlin on assignment for the New Republic to cover the Potsdam peace conference. It’s a return in more ways than one: Before the war he used to live there and had a German mistress, Lena (Cate Blanchett), who was married.Years later, Jake finds Lena is still alive (and darkly glamorous), but she’s turning tricks to eke out a living and her husband seems to be missing. When Jake chances upon an American soldier’s corpse in the Russian sector of the city, he decides to investigate the city’s morally treacherous international intrigues. In doing so, he starts to plumb the dark secrets of Lena’s own knotty personal history.Jake doesn’t like what he learns about Lena or the Allied governments’ shenanigans. The high fidelity of “The Good German” holds here by fleshing out details usually left shrouded in wartime romanticism. Lena is first glimpsed in a compromising position that Bogart could only have imagined (in a scene that opens, disconcertingly, with an old-fashioned screen-wipe). Meanwhile, the Americans and the Soviets compete to bag Lena’s missing husband, a rocket scientist, at any cost, thus entering the early frost of the Cold War.From early on there’s more to Berlin than meets the eye: Tully (Tobey Maguire), the fresh-faced soldier who drives Jake from the airport, tries to pimp Lena out to him. As Jake gumshoes his way through saloons, gutted stairwells, and military offices, the oddly charmless Mr. Clooney begins to sound like a needling prosecutor in his questions and accusations. Ms. Blanchett’s husky-accented Lena registers as a static mystery, a phantom warning Jake away from yet more terrible truths.Mr. Soderbergh has created a peculiarly arid film, coolly snuffing out the urge to entertain that animated even lowly classic studio product. His conundrum seems to be that of an ardent cinephile and technician. He wants to recreate a lost moment of cinematic professionalism, but the harder he tries, the more synthetic it feels. Updates and flourishes, like a roiling crowd scene or moonlight streaming through ripped-open walls, are deadened by this worked-over feel.The demonic exception to this is Mr. Maguire’s Tully. This vicious bully’s few scenes shock with suddenly unsuppressed malice. His hair-trigger id opens up with the bottomless potential of nastier film noirs, but wholly unglamorized. (There’s also a bit of a treat in seeing a baby face turned rotten, like Elijah Wood’s psychopath in “Sin City.”)To Jake, who still carries a torch for Lena, Tully is probably the worst-case nightmare for what could happen to his former lover, depicted with a callousness that a film made in the 1940s might not easily have allowed. Which returns us to the question of Mr. Soderbergh’s audience. Part of the demographic seems unlikely, if not downright fictional; the director seems to want to reach people who know “Casablanca” or its contemporaries enough to care about this movie’s efforts, but in their heart of hearts want to see their romantic illusions debunked.Even that implies a bit more energy than this film possesses. But visually, Mr. Soderbergh does succeed in achieving a meaningful postnoir look. Blowing out the ends of the spectrum, blacks look like wet ink, while Ms. Blanchett’s face often stings with kabuki white. It’s the occasional harsh white flare-outs that lay bare these images more than film noir’s morally complicating shadows.Following the logic of that scheme yields more than does following Jake around on his investigations. The overexposure illustrates the dangers of uncovering all aspects of the mutually incriminating environment of postwar Berlin that arose after the most clear-cut of conflicts. That’s the constant threat of a special prosecutor (Bernie Teitel) whose records of the Nazi era later prove a linchpin to the plot: Does Jake really want to know everything?“The Good German” emerges as a technical accomplishment more than anything else, a fond but brittle nostalgia piece. Mr. Soderbergh’s frequent demonstrations of nerdy cinephilia in interviews (and here) suggest a poor cousin to Peter Bogdanovich, a filmmaker whose love of craft and history has also translated to scrupulous but mixed work. But finally one can’t help but recall James Spader’s video-wielding voyeur in Mr. Soderbergh’s debut, “sex, lies, and videotape.” The character used his camera as a convenient buffer against expressing flat-out emotion, just as the talented director’s work can feel cool in both senses of the word.

Courting the Lost World of ‘Casablanca’

Courting the Lost World of ‘Casablanca’

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