The Good German.

"Sumptuous, clever and cold, The Good German is Steven Soderbergh's most ambitious leap back into the movie past he adoringly honored with the light and lovely studio capers Out of Sight and Ocean's 11," writes Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly. "Soderbergh offers us a sentimental treat with a brazen reference to the world's most beloved (if hardly its best) World War II movie, Casablanca. It doesn't work - not even when he undercuts the reference - because we're never convinced of the love story in the first place."

Before going further with all this (what follows, after all, are more variations on disappointment), Annie Frisbie's got a fascinating excerpt at Zoom In from an interview with archival researcher Kenn Rabin which appears in Sheila Curran Bernard's Documentary Storytelling, to be published in February: "The original plan for the film was that every shot would be digitally placed over archival footage. So that literally, the film would be 'shot' in 1945 Berlin; the actors would be green-screened over archival." This turned out, of course, not to be feasible.

Updated through 12/21.

Ok, back to the reviews. Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: "Even more than Bubble or Ocean's Twelve, The Good German feels like the product of a filmmaker far more interested in his own handicraft - in the logistics of moving the camera among the characters with a dip and a glide - than in the audience for whom he's ostensibly creating that work." Also in the New York Times: In Soderbergh's audio slide show, there's a terrific shot of the reconstruction of Casablanca's most famous scene, with George Clooney and Cate Blanchett standing in for Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman - and Soderbergh in a baseball cap, as if he were some kid who's stopped to peer into a glass case before wandering on through the exhibition.

Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat: "In addition to the failure of its basic concept, the movie gets weighted down by too much upfront discussion of guilt and innocence and ambiguous moral decisions: It's as though Stanley Kramer had been brought in to shoot extra scenes of thematic explication for a Warner Brothers crowdpleaser."

Vadim Rizov at the Reeler: "Seemingly made with the intent of annoying every possible demographic (people who hate old movies, people who love old movies, people who hate modern violence and profanity, people who hate earnest drama, etc), the film grafts historical Holocaust content onto the (attempted) look and feel of a 40s noir. The results don't work at all, but you can't fault Soderbergh for trying."

Michael Koresky at indieWIRE: "The past (movie and otherwise) doesn't come to life here; the film remains haplessly sealed off, an object way out of reach.... Considering the amount of visual referents at play here, and the lack of any sort of internal identity, The Good German ends up exemplifying Soderbergh's career-long penchant for jumping from one style to another: it's the perfect aesthetic for an anonymous filmmaker."

"For a while, especially while [Tobey] Maguire is in the picture, The Good German feels like it might succeed - not as film-geek experiment but as ageless thriller," writes J�rgen Fauth. "But just when the film should begin to click, Soderbergh abandons the real concerns of any era of filmmaking - telling a compelling story - for an empty exercise in stylishness."

Salon's Stephanie Zacharek suggests, "Maybe Soderbergh and [screenwriter Paul] Attanasio are both attracted to and repulsed by wartime mythology, which renders them unable to deal with it in any honest, meaningful way."

Steve Erickson, writing for Gay City News, likes it a bit more than most: "Like many period pieces, it often feels like a costume party; unlike most, it honors the historical and cinematic past decently."

"The suggestion that Clooney is the new Bogie isn't itself overly presumptuous, but the debonair performer earns that status through original roles, rather than trite self-referential homage," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press.

Carina Chocano, writing in the Los Angeles Times, also sees the film "mired in its obsession with its own style."

In the Nation, Stuart Klawans suggests that the film might be enjoyed in any month but December.

But Robert Cashill may have the last word: "Stephen Soderbergh and George Clooney have Ocean's 13 coming out next summer. Tobey Maguire suits up as Spider-Man for the third time in May. And freshly minted Golden Globe nominee Cate Blanchett has the riveting Notes on a Scandal due in just two weeks. Which is to say that The Good German will pass quickly from all their resumes." Why? Because the film "is little more than a series of drab pictorial effects."

Updates, 12/20: Matt Zoller Seitz finds that The Good German "turns out to be a rare case where a restless auteur doesn't confound unimaginative critics (which I think Brian De Palma did this year with The Black Dahlia) but instead reinforces their worst-case suspicions about his weaknesses." The film is "shallow, aloof, disorganized and (most surprisingly) technically sloppy. It is mostly definitely an exercise - not a movie, but a notion of a movie."

Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical: "When Scorsese or Tarantino or Godard reference an earlier film, they do so out of a deep-rooted passion, and that passion comes through in their work. For Soderbergh, it's more calculated, as if it were a business decision."

"German is the good-er of the Goods," claims Cheryl Eddy in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. The other Good, of course, is The Good Shepherd.

Update, 12/21: Michael Guill�n: "First, my druthers would be that all the money spent into replicating a film noir movie be put into restoring some film noir classics. Period."

Posted by dwhudson at December 16, 2006 4:00 PM