Shades of GR

[David Morris]

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema/

Everybody knows that Berlin, in the immediate wake of the Second World
War, was a city in fragments. It was split into four zones—the
American, the British, the French, and the Russian—but the divisions
ran deeper than that. The German capital was at once a ruin, a prize,
and a land of opportunity, although what you made of it depended on
whether you were Truman, Stalin, Churchill, a black marketeer, a
hooker, or a mother of small children, scrabbling for coal in the
street.

This is the stage for Steven Soderbergh's "The Good German," which is
set in Berlin in the late summer of 1945. George Clooney plays Jake
Geismer, a reporter with The New Republic. As a member of the press
corps, he has a rank and a uniform, and I intend no slur upon that
publication when I say that he must be the spiffiest example of the
human male ever to emerge from its bureau. Geismer, who has flown in
to cover the Potsdam Conference, is given a driver named Tully (Tobey
Maguire) for the duration of his stay. We are meant to take this kid
for a rube, although whenever a character refers to his mother's apple
pie, as Tully does in the first fifteen minutes, you can be sure that
something spicy is hiding under the crust. And so it proves: Tully—a
thief and a bully, despite his youth—lifts Geismer's wallet and heads
back to a gloomy apartment for a burst of rough sex with his
girlfriend.

She is Lena Brandt (Cate Blanchett), who, before the war, it turns
out, used to be a stringer and a bedmate for none other than Geismer.
Before that, to judge by her spectral skin and ink-dark lips, she was
also a close friend of Dr. Caligari. Her husband worked for a rocketry
expert on Germany's V-2 program; were he still alive (and suspicions
linger) he would be of consuming interest both to war-crimes
investigators—because the Germans built the V-2 using disposable slave
labor—and to American weapons designers. All of which means that Lena
is, in every way, a wanted woman, and the movie spinning around her
wants to be many things: an anguished romance, a murder mystery (a
waterlogged corpse is discovered at Potsdam), and a dose of nasty film
noir.