The best part about The Good German is how it looked. A murder mystery set in 1945 post-war Berlin, it attempts to emulate a film noir style but doesn't quite succeed. The problem is that Soderbergh doesn't know film well enough, and doesn't get the specifics right. I liked how he made the film look, with his stark black and white photography and slightly blurred images, but film noir didn't look like that. While film back then was never quite as crisp as the HD cameras we have now, it was certainly more crisp than the TV-style images inhabiting this movie. And the heavy black and whites with minimal gray midtones was too stark for 40's noir; it felt more in line with the worse film grain from the mid-30's. Additionally, while noirs are supposed to have confusing, labyrinthine plots, this one is a bit excessive. At the end of the movie, I really had no idea what had happened, which is never a good thing. I understood more about The Big Sleep. It seemed as if there were a bunch of innuendos and assumptions that the characters went with that I never got, which left me in the dark for most of the movie. Also, there were so many "references" or "homages" to Casablanca, not just in shots, but in entire plot constructions, that it just felt like theft to me.On the other side of the stick, the cinematography was amazing. The lighting and composition in so many scenes were spot-on and looked like actual 1940's film noir. The consistently bleak mood and dark underbelly of surviving in such a ravaged situation fit nicely in the noir genre. While the swearing and sex were not exactly staples of film noir, their inclusion in the movie made it feel more crude and more vulgar, which I believe is how film noir felt in the 40's. The acting was amazing by all parties. Tobey Maguire unnerved me, Cate Blanchett was equally stunning and deceptive, and George Clooney, it seemed, really would stop at nothing to get to the truth. Unfortunately, this movie is not a film noir, for a great many reasons, and despite all its efforts, it is merely an unsuccessful attempt at one. Not really recommended, but A for effort.
IMDb link: http://imdb.com/title/tt0452624/