The Good Shepard and the Bad German
Last year at Thanksgiving my brother threw us all for a loop by giving us an unexpected twist on his traditional soup course. In the past he had wowed and scorched taste buds with fiery bowls of things like curried pumpkin soup but last year he gave us a creamy bowl of chestnut soup. My nephew took a couple spoons of it and wounded his crestfallen pops saying the soup was “subtle.” DJ will recover someday and remember that there is nothing wrong with subtlety. The soup was a rich mix of flavors that melted on the tongue and was incredibly satisfying and yummy. Any one of the ingredients could have overpowered the effect but instead they were there in a perfect blend - subtle and balanced.
The Good Shepard is a sort of chestnut soup movie. It is subtle - some people might say slow but I wouldn’t. It has some of the best actors in the biz delivering their lines way below the radar so that glances and innuendo and repetition of dialog keeps at you with rich little surprises. “What’s your weakness?” A line that is repeated in this film almost as many times as “Look into your heart.” is in Miller’s Crossing. And each time it is delivered in Eric Roth’s great script it has a new resonance. Much like Miller’s Crossing the look here is gorgeous wash of deep browns and lush settings. The power plays that go on in this spy film are not happening at a breakneck Bourne-pace but as a methodically crafted tempo in the halls of Ivy League colleges and secret meeting grounds of the Skull and Bones parties at Deer Island. This is one of those films where Damon could have gone at one of his always just slightly-off accents, De Niro could have phoned in a Jack Byrnes or worse still a Paul Vitti bluster, and even Joe Pesci (in a great cameo) could have reached into his well-used bag of tricks, - but no. De Niro has done an amazing job here with the actors, the look and the story. But I got to warn you it’s subtle. It’s not going to make you jump but it might stick with you as a fine memory.
On the other hand The Good German has an equally strong mix of talent and it goes wrong at almost every step. Soderburgh has been going on and on about using forties cameras and film stocks to recreate the look of films of that era - working with the impossible challenge of the technology - but unfortunately with none of the artistry. If you’ve seen any of the films that this movie leans on so heavily (Casablanca, The Third Man) you will remember how deep their range of tones were from black to grey to white. Here, there is none of that. Far too many shots are so far overblown in their exposure they look like bad digital images. There is no depth to the dark city nights and so creeping around Berlin has no real threat. And none of the actors (talented though they might be) seem right. Not Maguire as the violent scheming Milo Minderbinder-like grifter or Clooney as the love-struck patsy. And even Thomas Newman decided it was time to pull out all the orchestral stops so that in every scene the score swells and calls attention to itself when it shouldn’t. And maybe that’s the heart of what is wrong with this film it feels like it every aspect of it wants to stand out on its own and not really mix into the whole big picture.
The two films are interesting companion pieces - two very different approaches to looking at America going in and out of World War II getting ready to carve up the post-war world, but somewhere along the way all the talent that Hollywood could muster created one Ocean’s Eleven and one Ocean’s Twelve during the same holiday season.
