erichkaroly Review of Good

Good (2008)

Who is "good" in GOOD, THE GOOD GERMAN, SCHINDLER'S LIST?

[7/10 · 25 April 2020]

I once met a survivor of Mengele at a grade school she'd come to talk to. She told us that the Allied Forces were so shocked and angered by what they found at the camps, that they arranged to force the townspeople in the neighboring town to line up on the streets and really look at the condition of the newly freed prisoners of the camp, whom they brought willingly into the town, presumably after some aid had been given them. (We were all too riveted to interrupt with practical questions like that.) At some point in this gruesome parade, a townswoman broke rank and approached her. With a dumbfounded look, she expressed her shock that "even the old and frail!" were subjected to this misery. Of course the villagers had to know a great deal about what was going on. The prisoners worked the camp, but still there were jobs that local townsmen had to be brought in to do. But - "even the old and frail!...I never could believe that!" And so the townswoman asked her, "How old are you? You must be at least 70!" "But I am only 14." And with that reveal, the fuller understanding of what "ordinary" Germans had allowed, abetted, promulgated began to come clear. Which was of course exactly the purpose of this exercise, as it was also the reason the US government sent in George Stevens, John Ford, and Samuel Fuller to document the liberation of the camps. From the beginning, it was understood that there would be deniers over time, whether out of malice or ignorance or dumbfounded disbelief. ... Good is an adaptation of a play that tracks the consequences of an "ordinary" person's choices to allow, then abet, and finally, effectively promulgate evil in Nazi Germany. It's not much of an adaptation, and I expect it works better as a play - I suspect it would be devastating as a play, with the right actors. The morality speeches, the sense of a series of scenes to indicate passage of time, the use of magic realism in the form of a recurring musical motif - all work better in the concentrated glare of lights onto a proscenium. In a film shot on location, their power is diffused. Neither a true screen adaptation, nor a film of the play, neither medium's advantages are used to bring something to the written word on the page. But good actors we have, and the great moral question of the 20th century - how could a civilized society allow this to happen? In the novel The Good German, the central question hovers over the titular character, a Werner von Braun type scientist who was, at the very least, aware of misery created in the wake of his research for the Nazis - was he "swept along" by the tide?...a tide, we forget, that began with ripples...was he a "good man" who made too many compromises before he realized the consequences?...did he deserve to be essentially rescued from the trials of post-war Germany, to be brought to work for the US government?...or, was he not so complicit as to embody evil to some degree in himself...? The title of the novel is clearly meant to be taken as a question. Soderbergh in his film dramatization left out the question mark, and thereby everything that made the novel interesting. He strangely made him into all but a saint, the glory of the story in his 'escape' through the Americans is the film's climax. Well, I like every other film Soderbergh makes - a lot - and even his failures I am glad to see. He always tries something interesting - this one was shot as a kind of film noir suspense tale. Did he read the book? Who wrote this? That's all fodder for other discussion. But... ...The Good German makes for an interesting foil for Good. In the former, the question of who is "good" is answered in black and white terms - literally film-wise, come to think of it. Here is a good German scientist, we are told, who never really meant to harm anyone, and thank goodness we get him out of that awful place. The suspense is in his rescue. In the latter film, Good, our main player is a literary professor who once espoused euthanasia in a novel - you can see why the Nazis latch on to this, the idea is to use him as a spokesperson to bring credibility to what becomes the early ripples of removing "undesirables". Our "ordinary man in an extraordinary situation" here is played rather clueless by the excellent Viggo Mortensen, as a character constantly buffeted about by life's events, with family, at work, and now by society/government itself. He resembles in this regard another fictional scientist in, yes of all people, David Schwimmer's Dr Ross Geller - who, luckily for Geller and appropriately for a 90s sitcom, never has to face consequences of his inaction affecting much beyond his small personal circle. Viggo's Dr Halder does not get off so easily. Neither with the turn of events, nor with questions of his complicity. The play, or teleplay (I haven't read the stage original yet), lays out its argument very effectively. Step by step, Halder makes choices that he tells himself and others are not real choices, to go along, get along, and finally to protect himself and his family. But the playwright does not let him completely off the hook. Time and again he gets warnings of where his actions are leading - and - particularly in the character of his close friend, a Jewish psychiatrist, he is told more than once in no uncertain terms just how awful his betrayal of principles is turning out. Not much of a spoiler to say where this is obviously all leading, but unlike Spielberg's true-life Schindler, Halder does not make the full moral leap back to "goodness" until it is too late. Schindler's List climaxes with the awful realization of the explicitly morally ambiguous protagonist that "good" is really all that matters, that he "could have done so much more". If you believe in a moral arch to the universe, a Force, a God (Good) Principle - then this is how said universe teaches us, through pain, to reach for our better selves. We learn the easy way or the hard way. "Sorrow has its rewards. It never leaves us where it found us." Halder gets his lesson in one of the hardest ways. He gets off scot free while those around him pay the price. And he is not "un-good" enough to take any satisfaction out of it, let alone the pleasure of the truly evil. We - audience - get these plays and movies and various arts and crafts, and we get to choose whether to learn from them or make similar mistakes in the future. Or in the present.