ShareThisBy JOHN HAYES
Friday, February 09, 2007
When the Allies converged at Berlin, the Cold War began with the Russians and Americans covertly racing to recruit German rocket scientists, who were quietly pardoned of war crimes and put to work building missiles for the country that acquired them.
Joseph Kanon's 2002 novel "The Good German" wraps that scenario in a fictional romantic murder mystery focused on a subordinate member of the V2 team _ a "good German" _ trying to provide war-crimes evidence against his famous, and valuable, former bosses.
Steven Soderbergh's film fires a missile into the book, maintaining the title and intellectual terrain while merging and expanding characters and plot line and creating a dark black-and-white noir film that mimics the postwar movies of the era.
At a December press conference at the glitzy Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, the filmmaker and his top stars, George Clooney and Cate Blanchett, fielded questions about "The Good German."
With a T-shirt and jeans concealing a back brace he's worn since his fall in a "Syriana" torture scene, Oscar-winner Clooney was upbeat about the $32 million film project his production company initiated by optioning Kanon's book.
"It's fun to work on these things," he said, speaking from a center seat at a long table surrounded by critics. "We don't do them thinking it's going to be a giant box-office hit. We do them because we think we might be able to spend this time pushing (a film) that we think is interesting. You want to aim a little higher than the low bar."
Having intentionally tweaked the Bush administration with the messages behind his recent films "Good Night, and Good Luck" and "Syriana," Clooney said "The Good German's" depiction of a military occupation wasn't intended to parallel modern times. He was more concerned with the parallels to old movies.
"Steven gave us a couple of films to look at just to give us the rhythm," he said. "We watched films like 'Humoresque' (1946), and 'Out of the Past' (1947). I know those old films backwards and forwards."
And he had fun, sort of, with the closing scene's homage to a classic.
"Listen, it's never fun to be shooting at night in the rain," he said. "But it's always fun to do that _ the plane and Cate, the whole thing. Those are the kinds of nights when you drive home with the sun coming up and you think, you don't get to do that very often in your life."
Aussie actor Blanchett carries the grace and composure of a Dietrich even in unscripted off-camera moments. She says her role as Lana, the fallen love interest of Clooney's postwar journalist, was different than any she's ever played.
"It wasn't just connecting to a character in the way one usually connects," she said. "You have to connect to the style ... the way it was lit and emotional atmospheric texture of every frame. In a modern film, there's a sense that you have to hit your mark and the camera finds your performance. But in this, you had to find the camera."
Blanchett said the classic film library that Soderbergh gave his actors helped, but she really found her character in the pages of "A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City, a Diary."
"It was written anonymously by a journalist who stylized her experience as a German woman in Berlin when the Russians came in," she said. "The experience of being victorious one day and vilified the next. The daily rapes that went on, often hourly, and the suicides and lack of hygiene, morality and dignity, and also the relationship between men and women. The (women) felt the German men just sat back and let it happen. (The film) felt incredibly modern all of a sudden."
To get a postwar feel, Soderbergh interspersed archival footage, used period lenses and lighting styles, and ran the sound through the central speaker channel, all to reinforce screenwriter Paul Attanasio's slightly stilted, overly dramatic, 1940s-style dialogue. The result is a movie that plays like a postwar murder-mystery thriller that occasionally breaks out of Hayes Code morality restrictions with graphic sex, violence and language.
"There were a lot of things you couldn't do, but (filmmakers of the day) were very creative," said Soderbergh. "They could skirt it up to the point of implication, but couldn't show it."
Soderbergh shows it with a vengeance. While "The Good German" emulates the style of the black-and-white era while taking contemporary liberties, he says the decision to forgo color wasn't made until he read the final treatment.
"We worked on the script for a long time, like four years," he said. "I wanted it to be harsher (than the book), tougher and darker. I wanted it to be more nightmarish."
Above all else, he says, "The Good German" is about blind spots.
"Blind spots on a personal level, blind spots on an ideological level," he said. "In the second jeep scene with Tully (Tobey Maguire), Jake (Clooney) lays out the entire movie. He predicts everything that will happen. He tells Tully, 'Your fraulein knew (about the Nazi death camps), they all knew. But they'll probably leave her alone unless there's some special reason not to.' After he meets Lena (Blanchett), he forgets that he knows what he knows. That's why Lena is such a femme fatale in the movie _ I wanted the blind spot to be big."
(John Hayes can be reached at jhayes(at)post-gazette.com.)
