Within the Context of No Context (Page 2)

With apologies to Steven Soderbergh, who has never wanted to play Baby Bear to anyone's Papa and Mama, I will say that coincidence has made him do just that, now that he shares the release calendar with Lynch and Zwick. His new film, The Good German, is like Inland Empire in being a self-conscious parade of old movie tropes. It is like Blood Diamond in having a movielike fable to tell: a moral tale about war and corruption (with a little sex). Not too hot and not too cold: In its fusion of style and substance, Soderbergh's film goes down just right.

In any month but December, you might not ask, because you could enjoy The Good German simply as a jeu d'esprit. It is a slightly exaggerated re-creation of a 1940s studio-made film, shot on soundstages and back lots using old-fashioned lenses and boom mikes, camera tracks and rear projection. The image is black and white; the lighting, chiaroscuro; the performance style, extroverted; the musical score, through-composed. I get the feeling that Soderbergh had been nursing a directorial urge, a desire to make his own version of Casablanca or The Third Man, and found a narrative appropriate to that purpose in a recent novel by Joseph Kanon: a book that is no better (and no worse) than the average literary fodder for 1940s movies, and that has the advantage of being set in the ruins of Berlin, after the Allied victory but before the Japanese surrender.

Here, then, are the world-weary not-so-wise guy (George Clooney), the damaged dame out of the past (Cate Blanchett), the sharp operator (Tobey Maguire), the savvy foreign officer (Ravil Isyanov) and even the sidekick bartender (Tony Curran), all caught up in a murder mystery, a political intrigue, a romance gone bad. If you want to take pleasure in these characters as stock figures, stylishly realized, then there's much to like in The Good German, from Blanchett's throaty languor (as she knowingly evokes Marlene Dietrich) and Clooney's haplessness (so different from his usual swagger) to the fleet pace of Paul Attanasio's screenplay, which allows these people to figure one another out just a beat before you manage to.

But The Good German has in fact come out in December, when producers and distributors try to appeal to Oscar voters, or at least grown-ups; and this context creates problems. It might remind you that elements of this story--the Holocaust, say--are more than the occasion for a jeu d'esprit. You may notice that Soderbergh, for all his intelligence, hasn't gotten beneath the surface of his stock figures, into the lived experience that might underlie them. And when you realize that the intimate drama of The Good German has no necessary connection with its world-historical themes, you may feel as if you've slipped back into Blood Diamond, with a black-and-white Leo and Jennifer.

I come at last to a holiday release that has no cinema--The History Boys--and discover it's the most satisfying of the present lot. About Nicholas Hytner's direction, I can say only that it keeps the actors in the frame and misuses just one of them. (Clive Merrison is the victim, in the role of a comical headmaster. He's encouraged to be such a gargoyle that the movie could turn to stone around him.) Whatever style you find in The History Boys comes solely from screenwriter Alan Bennett (adapting his own play) and from poetry anthologies, which are the chief resource for the characters' chattering, flighty, competitive dialogue.

Richard Griffiths leads the ensemble cast as the head chatterer: a waddling, walrusy old teacher in a boys' secondary school in Yorkshire, who amuses his pupils with games, songs and wistful gropes. His antagonist (Stephen Campbell Moore) is a slim young part-timer, equally gay and closeted, who's been hired to prepare the best students for entrance exams at Oxford and Cambridge. A handful of these multiethnic middle-class lads have a chance to step up in the world. Is that what education is for?

The new man talks as if knowledge is just flash; the old one insists it has meaning. (Here, too, the Holocaust comes in for discussion, as a reality not to be trifled with.) Had David Hare written The History Boys, that would have been the whole movie: a canned debate between postmodernism and tradition. So thank God for Alan Bennett. He knows there's a school corridor where the two sides can meet, in disappointment and longing, and smile over secrets that were never much concealed.

You should watch Griffiths and Moore do that. There's real style in their acting. The substance is a joy.

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