The Good German

Despite its noir detail, Soderbergh's latest feels like a beer ad, writes Donald Clarke

WILL SOMEBODY please tell Steven Soderbergh to stop fannying about and make a proper film. It is six years since the talented young director re-established himself with Traffic, but, in that time, he has seen fit to deliver remakes, sequels, unsuccessful experiments and, now, a puzzlingly elaborate pastiche. These movies are pretty enough. We did not, however, allow him back into the pantheon to fling so many empty calories at us.

It is close to impossible to write about The Good German without making mention of Todd Haynes's magnificent Far From Heaven. That strange entity, which Soderbergh co-produced, used the conventions of the 1950s melodrama to tell a tale those earlier films could not quite have addressed. The Good German, even more pernickety in its choice of archaic lenses and obsolete effects, seeks to emulate the great noir dramas of the 1940s.

Focusing on skulduggery among the occupying forces in post-war Berlin, the picture, all compromise and corruption, is particularly in love with The Third Man and Casablanca. George Clooney - a little too healthy to be mistaken for Bogart - plays a services journalist in town to cover the Potsdam Conference. Within a day of his arrival, all kinds of monochrome unpleasantness have sought him out. His driver (a shady Tobey Maguire) is found floating in the river. Meanwhile, a former colleague and lover (Cate Blanchett), now an occasional prostitute, is attracting the interest of Russian and American spooks.

The woman's husband was, it seems, once the secretary of a prominent German rocket scientist and may have information that would compromise the boffin's flight to the USA.

Sad to relate, the rigour brought to the presentation - back projections, theatrical wipes - does little to distract attention from the clumsiness of the storytelling. Some murk is necessary in noir, but audiences are here asked to fill in more blanks than are strictly necessary. Without the buttress of a decent structure, the film gradually collapses into a heap of arch mannerisms and pointless exercises in facsimile.

Whereas Far From Heaven took its familiar templates and applied them to a story with startling emotional purchase, The Good German is so thin and unengaging it ends up looking like one of those Holsten Pils commercials that - taking their cue from Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid - dovetailed classic films with skilful lampoons.

Mind you, Cate Blanchett's absurd vamp act might be a little too comical even for a beer commercial. She vahnts to zuck your blut, I think.