"the good german"

I watched “The Good German” for the first – and second – times. I have a lot to say about the film… I loved it. Definitely give it a 9 out of 10. The black & white, film noir, throwback style is probably one of the main reasons I really enjoyed it, because I love classic films and films of that genre. I love that time period too – on a superficial level; the look, the clothes, the shoes, the style (I even wore a dress and these cute new heels that I’ve been avoiding wearing to work because they’re kinda tall today because I was so inspired!). I also thought it was a well-crafted and well-told story. It kept me interested and curious the whole time watching it, at points on the edge of my seat, and it moved at a great pace. And I thought it was – for the most part – very well acted. After I watched the film the first time, I read all the user reviews here (I think), on IMDB and I re-read some critics’ reviews and interviews with Cate and watched a couple on YouTube also before I watched it again.

Cate called the film a “hybrid” and I think that’s the perfect word for it. I haven’t really read or heard Soderbergh’s intent but I got the feeling that he wasn’t really trying to make an homage but rather trying to make a film with the look, feel, style & technology of a 1940s film noir – but as if it could have been made today, without the restrictions of the Hayes code and 1940s mores. For that reason, I didn’t find the juxtaposition of the classic look/feel and the swearing/sex jarring. He took the romanticism of the style, took the filters off the lens (so to speak) and added the realistic grit. The first time Tully said “f**k,” it took me out of the story a little – but then I quickly got over that. Even though movies from that time period didn’t have these things, people obviously swore and had sex in real life (obviously – ha) but they weren’t allowed in film because of the Hayes code. Along those same lines, back then you couldn’t have told this story on film either, in America/Hollywood anyway. It’s too real and too raw. Take a film like “Casablanca” for example – since these two films have been so often compared. While it doesn’t have a happy ending, it still glosses over a lot of what it must have really been like to have gone through that time period and those situations. It’s been awhile since I’ve seen “Casablanca,” so forgive me if I’m being inaccurate – but even when they’re discussing the war and the Nazis & even the fact that Laszlo escaped from a concentration camp, there’s still little mention of the realism of all of that – the death, the horror. Not only would that level of realism not have made for a successful mainstream film in America at the time, but you also have to take into consideration that the war was still so fresh – I think it would take years before people would get the full effect of what actually went down. Especially in terms of looking through the eyes of the defeated as this film does. Imagine a 1940s, Hollywood film using Germans even remotely viewed as supportive to the Nazis as sympathetic characters. That never would have been allowed, and if it was, I’m sure they would have had to have been murdered in the end.

There are other foreign films from that time period that do deal more with the harsh realism. For example, many films in the Italian Neo-Realist genre - Rossellini films like Open City and Germany Year Zero and De Sica’s Umberto D and Two Women. Actually, “The Good German” reminded me a little of what I remember from seeing these films (which was years ago in college).

I loved the back and forth between new footage and actual archival footage – I found it seamless, sometimes you couldn’t tell the difference. The “wipe” transitions bothered me a bit at first (as someone in the film & video field, I hate wipes, much prefer dissolves) but it did fit the style and eventually I found them seamless too. Something else that worked really well – so well I didn’t even really notice it on my first viewing – was the change in narrative/point of view throughout the film. We started with Tully’s perspective, then switched to Jake’s right before Tully dies and at the end we switch to Lena’s before she reveals that Emil is alive. I think that was an extremely effective use of voice over.

The acting… Oh, Toby McGuire. I know a lot of people hate him in the role, and I’m not really the exception. He wasn’t completely altogether terrible – he did represent the All-American, apple-pie-eating kid turned Berlin-big-shot – but he stuck out like a sore thumb. Maybe it’s because he’s too familiar to us as an audience as Spiderman. I do think that his character has been misread by a lot of reviewers as someone who was supposed to be a tough guy. I think Tully was actually supposed to be a kid who wasn’t at all tough, but found he could play tough because of the way Berlin was and the circumstances of the war. He was a wannabe, and I thought Toby did okay with that. You could sense a little fear in his eyes when he was offering General Sikorsky the deal of Emil in exchange for 200,000 marks and the general came to the other side of the desk and pushed his feet down. Deep down he was a coward trying to play with the big boys. His treatment of Lena is one example. The way he talks about her to Jake and then casually offers, “Want an hour with her?” and the fact that he mispronounces her name goes with his disrespect for her. And then of course there’s the scene when he punches her. (His scenes with Cate are ones where Toby seems particularly out of place – probably because comparing Cate’s acting to his is like comparing apples to bicycles – not even close enough to say ‘bananas.’ This scene is a perfect example, Toby comes off as trying a bit too hard, whereas Cate – when she’s punched you can feel it in your own gut). I also didn’t find it egregious when Tully beat up Jake. Jake had been drinking, was thrown for a loop by seeing Lena – and Tully sucker punched him and then beat him up with a stick. That showed more of what a true coward Tully was – who beats up an unarmed person with a weapon like that? The amount of times Clooney got beat up as a whole didn’t bother me either. He was a journalist, not trained to fight. I actually found that more realistic than if he had won every fight. It also showed his perseverance to help Lena and solve what was happening, again all very journalistic. I really liked Clooney in this, I’ve liked him in every film I’ve seen him in that I can recall. He’s always seemed like sort of a throwback actor to me anyway. I think he’s the closest thing we have to a modern day Cary Grant – he has the charisma and the acting chops to back it up. And in this role as Jake he fit that character – an idealist who wants the good to win out, who wants to help Lena, save her from the horror she’s seen and whatever it is she’s done, solve the mystery and have all wrongs righted in the end. But despite that, he was still ‘George Clooney’ to me. Sometimes I talk to characters out loud if I’m watching a movie by myself at home… And I found myself saying “Watch out George!” not “Watch out Jake!”

But Cate WAS Lena. Unlike Clooney and especially McGuire, Cate just melted into the genre and the role. It was as if she was a contemporary of Marlene Dietrich and Ingrid Bergman – she was perfect. It’s that incredible innate talent she has to just become someone else so effortlessly. Watching her, she’s obviously Cate but you forget you’re watching Cate and instead you’re watching the character – she inhabits each role so completely. It’s not just the looks and the voice and the mannerisms – it’s the soul. Somehow she manages to make it so if you look in her eyes you believe you’re getting a glimpse at the character’s inner person, not her own. The first time we meet Lena (I don’t really consider that to be the sex scene – when I first watched it, I didn’t even think that was Cate, I had to rewind – and we don’t even see her face) that silhouette of her walking out of the darkness and into the pool of light – just gorgeous. I’ve read in a few places now people calling the photography of Cate to be unflattering in this film – I actually thought just the opposite. I thought she looked beautiful in the film, breathtakingly so at times. And that voice – like velvet over gravel.

The first time Lena and Jake see each other was another scene, similar to Lena’s introduction, that really stuck out in my mind. I thought there was a good chemistry between the two. It was very well conveyed that they had been involved in a passionate love affair once (in the silent looks and unspoken moments) but were now two different people (in the actual words they spoke). Jake hadn’t changed much, but unfortunately Lena had been forced to. After he finds her again in the place she’s living, she says to him something like, “I think if you'd stayed Jacob, nothing would be any different.” It’s a statement sort of like a double-edged sword. On one hand it’s almost an insult about the fact that he did leave – not just Berlin, but her. On the other hand, it’s almost like she’s trying to assuage any guilt he may have for leaving – that even if he had stayed he couldn’t have prevented what happened to her. He begs her to let him help her – he’s still such an idealist who wants to ‘fix’ everything – not just for Lena, he wants the mystery to be solved and for good to triumph evil. But as he’s learning, it’s not so black and white. As an audience member I must admit, I did want Lena to break down a little and let Jake in, let him try to take some of the burden of what she was trying to do with Emil – but that wouldn’t have been realistic and in line with her character.

There was one scene that confused me a bit though, even after two viewings – when Jake goes back to the apartment and demands Lena tell him the truth and mentions that Bernie is on his way. She does tell Jake the truth then – about Dora, not about Emil being alive. But I still don’t fully understand why she was so concerned about Bernie coming? Why didn’t she just tell them both everything right then and there? She was going to tell Bernie later anyway… The only thing I can think of is that she wanted to do it on her own terms – as she mentions later to Bernie, she wants to help her husband but she also wants to leave Berlin without him. Maybe she felt like if she revealed everything then, that she wouldn’t have been able to both help Emil and leave him.

Another shot that I found absolutely gorgeous was the one of the clouds in the sky through the roofless building after Jake confronts Lena and she pulls the gun on him. At this point it switches to her narrative and she asks, “Why didn't Jake follow me, why didn't he try” – that left me asking, did she want him to follow her? She then says, “I knew what I had become” and “The only way out of Berlin to me was to do one thing good, one thing noble - a wife should help her husband.” I thought this took a little bit of the enigma out of her character. Now we know why she’s gone to such lengths to protect and help a husband she doesn’t love. She thinks helping him at risk of sacrificing herself will be a bit towards her own redemption. One of my favorite shots of the whole film was the kiss between Jake and Lena. Their faces in silhouette, closing in and blocking out the light – it reminded me of one of my favorite on screen kisses – the one between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman at the end of “Notorious.”

When Lena got shot, my hand covered my mouth and I sat on the edge of my seat after she tried to grab the soldier’s leg and he aimed again at her, right at her head. Lena is sort of supposed to be the “femme fatale” in this film noir – the woman who brings down the hero, Jake. However, a difference in this film to other film noirs – Lena doesn’t mislead Jake into helping her. In fact, she denies his help when he offers it. Instead it’s Jake who misleads himself about her and puts his own neck on the line to save hers. And Cate’s portrayal helps you understand why. Even though she’s such a hardened, icy character throughout the film, she gives you a glimpse of the woman she once was that Jake fell for in the first place. You can’t help but feel for her for all that she’s been through and want things to turn out alright for her.

I thought the chase scene through the crowd was very well done, and I really thought when Lena fell onto her dead husband that both had died and that was the end. I was glad it wasn’t.

When I finished watching the film the first time around I was left wondering – who was “The Good German?” The obvious answer would be Emil – Lena verbatim called him such. But I feel it’s more ambiguous than that. I think the whole film raised questions of morality and left many unanswered – just like in real life. Three times in the film, characters raise the question about the German people versus the Nazis. Tully asks Jake in the car about putting the whole country on trial and says, “Just because you’re a German doesn’t make you a Nazi.” A sentiment you get the feeling that Jake doesn’t necessarily believe at the time (he tells Tully that everyone knew what Hitler was doing but didn’t lift a finger), but he echoes it later to Bernie when he sees all the case files, asking if he’s putting the whole country on trial. And at another point, the congressman also says something about how if they prosecute a whole people because of a few bad apples, it becomes revenge. That’s, in effect, what happened after WWII though. Even if they weren’t put on trial and charged, every German citizen was punished for the actions of Hitler and the Nazis. Punished in terms of the fact that their country had been torn apart, literally and figuratively. And also, with stereotypes – if you were German, you must be a Nazi and Hitler supporter. Even Jake believes this to a degree at first – he also believes the Americans are the absolute “good guys.” But throughout the film, his whole idea of good and evil gets knocked on its side. In the beginning of the film he never would have helped Emil Brandt. He also never would have believed that Americans were hypocrites, protecting some Nazis and covering up their past so the United States could use their scientific knowledge to try to win the next big war.

And what about Lena? She tells Jake that the fact, “I survived,” is her criminal past. But we don’t understand what exactly that meant until the end, when she reveals that she turned twelve people over to the Gestapo to save herself. Is this horrifying? Yes, of course – but is it unforgivable? I’m not sure. Cate has mentioned on occasion that she doesn’t know how she herself would react if she was in a certain character’s shoes (I think she was talking about “Notes on a Scandal” perhaps?) and I feel this to be very true. We all like to think that we would never do something like that, that we would be more noble – but would we? And it isn’t revealed what kind of situation Lena was in when she turned the people over, was she in some sort of horrifying torturous scenario? She had obviously been made to witness some unimaginable things…Being raped, killing the rapist, watching her family be taken away to be murdered, knowing her husband was somehow involved in the murders of the slave laborers…and who knows what else. She tells Tully when talking about Emil in the beginning, “One more dead or undead.” And later, in her voiceover, she says that men always want you to cry in their arms, but she had no more tears – perhaps she had been so desensitized that it made it easier to turn the people over. I’m not saying any of that excuses the actions, but in my mind it makes it different than other crimes (I feel very similarly about Phillipa’s crime in “Heaven” which I’ve recently seen but want to watch again before I review!).

Lena also is obviously tortured by what she did. I got the feeling – after watching the whole film and going back over it in my mind – that she hated herself so much for what she had done that she couldn’t allow anyone else to love her either. That’s why she fights so hard at first to make Jake leave her alone. She tells him she’s a Nazi Jew and asks him what it feels like to know he’d made love to a Nazi. She describes her rape and the killing of the rapist with such a detached, cold way – even calling it a ‘joke’ of sorts. Even though she hasn’t been ‘in love’ with her husband for years, she has a love for him and truly believes that he is a “good German” who wants to try to somehow avenge the murder of thousands by telling the truth about their murderers. She has convinced herself that helping Emil with this endeavor is the only way she can get any kind of redemption and any sort of peace in her soul – the only way she can “leave Berlin” both literally and figuratively. It’s only towards the end, when she feels like this goal will be accomplished, that she finally lets herself feel a little bit of compassion from Jake. When she goes to his room thinking he’s just another “John” and it turns out to be him. At first, you get the feeling he almost did it to hurt her, because ever since they had found each other again all she had done was shut him out. But then he comes around and tells her she doesn’t have to go through with it – only she says she wants it. She allows Jake to kiss her and be with her again, if only for a moment rekindling a little of the lost past between them. She hopes again at the end, that maybe they can continue on like nothing ever happened, when they go to get on the plane. But then Jake confronts her and she finally reveals to him the terrible secret that she couldn’t say before. I felt bad at that moment that Jake just left her – was he supposed to go with her before she’d told him? However, I suppose realistically they couldn’t continue, they had changed too much. I sort of feel though that Lena finally admitting out loud to someone what she had done might be the first step in her coming to terms with it and working through her guilt. And she understood that Jake would leave her, she sort of gave him “permission” to with the kiss and taking the umbrella.

I know a lot of people have compared “The Good German” to “Casablanca” – I can definitely see moments where Soderbergh was paying tribute. The obvious final scene of course. But I also thought the scene with Jake at the bar, drinking and talking to Danny about Lena, remind me of the scene with Bogie and Sam – the “of all the gin joints in all the towns, in all the world, she walks in to mine” scene. But I think the world was much more black and white then. “Casablanca” and other films of the 40s were being made at just that moment when everything was turning so much more gray. “The Good German” really shows all those shades of gray and leaves so many open questions left unanswered.