This week I plan on completing a Steven Soderbergh Marathon, which I will call The Soderbergh Series, of watching and reviewing six of his films that I’ve always wanted to see but never have.  This is an effort for me to increase my already lacking knowledge of film and also to possibly introduce others to some films that Soderbergh may have done that does start with the word Ocean in the title.  Today’s Soderbergh Series has me watch me watching The Good German.

Jacob Geismar [George Clooney] returns to Berlin after the war is over during the Potsdam negotiations between all the allied forces.  He comes back in contact with Lena Brandt [Cate Blanchett], a German Jew who he knew before the war, as he tries to make sense of an American soldier Tully’s [Tobey Maguire] murder and get Lena out of Berlin and away from her mysterious dark past.

Once again Soderbergh seems to always be reaching into his bag of fresh and new ideas of how to take something old and make it feel fresh again.  The plot, look, feel, sound and acting all made into exactly what Soderbergh wanted; a 1940s noir film.  I dare not pretend to be an authority on the subject on films from the 40s, being a man who for the first time only this year got around to watching Casablanca.  However, with the look in Bogart’s eyes as he watched Bergman enter the bar fresh in my mind I can say without a shadow of a doubt that Soderbergh definitely succeeded in his task.

While the film does seem to draw on a lot of the nostalgia factor for film aficionados making us look back to the times of movies like Casablanca and Chinatown with the noir detective style story telling going on throughout the film at some points I began to feel like it wasn’t enough to just feel like I once did many moons ago.  Therein lies the film’s only fault, in that it depended too much on this nostalgia for it to be enjoyed.  While I did enjoy Jacob taking us through this mystery of whodunit moving from lead to lead and following random guy to random guy we anyone in the audience are left wondering if there’s more for us than just this memory of this stereotypical post WWII film and the truth is that there isn’t.

The acting in the film is almost perfect.  I found myself slightly distracted by Tobey Maguire’s character’s incessant need to feel like he’s a man and not a boy.  However, the truth of the matter is that everything in this film, inclusive of the distracting acting, all fits perfectly into this neat and tidy box of what a true 40s film is like.  The highlight for me has to be Lena, played by Cate Blanchett, playing the German Jew who survived the war.  Lena is no higher on the social ladder than a prostitute and is secretly attempting to do this one good deed before she leaves Berlin for good to try and somehow repent for all the bad things she had to do during the war to survive.  The film explores her character the most and that may be why I enjoyed her role the most in the film.

In the end if you are one of those people out there who like to shout at your TV sets on Saturday nights while you flick past HBO and Showtime about how “they don’t make it like they used to” then this movie is especially for you.  And if you’re someone who’s always wanted to try and give the older films a try but never found the time, or the gumption, then definitely give this one a whirl.

IMDB says 6.1/10

Rotten Tomatoes says 32%

I say 8.5/10