The Good German

While in Potsdam covering the post-war conference in 1946, American journalist Capt. Jacob Geismar (Clooney) is drawn into the murder of his driver and sometime black market profiteer Patrick Tully (Maguire). As he digs deeper, Geismar follows the clues to the door of his former mistress Lena Brandt (Blanchett) and a war crime cover-up unfolds. The Good German is more than a homage to the film noir of the '40s, it's not even a reinvention or an update - it is film noir. All the elements you want are here: Clooney doubles as the nonplussed P.I, Blanchett's ice-cold femme fatale stare is both scary as hell and a turn-on, old-fashioned wipes, monochrome, stark photography, dark shadows and the hard-boiled dialogue (in fact, if Maguire wasn't such a foul mouth, we could easily forget that it's 2007) are all present and correct. Although he does make the odd nod to Casablanca and The Third Man, Soderbergh wanted his film to stand on its own. It does for a long time but The Good German falls at the last hurdle as the director and his writer Paul Attanasio (adapting Jospeh Kanon's novel) are too deliberate in capturing the essence of film noir, and, as a result, we don't care a hell of a lot about the underwritten characters. The film suffers most when Clooney simply fails to convince as a Bogart-esque character.