Good
UK (/Germany/Hungary) 2008
Starring : Viggo Mortensen, Jason Isaacs
Director : Vicente Amorim
IT'S taken nearly three decades for C P Taylor's award-winning 1981 play Good to reach the screen, and it's unfortunate for all concerned that it does so with memories of two thematically similar, considerably superior movies so fresh in the memory. Like Paul Verhoeven's Black Book (2005), Good is the story of a Nazi-era relationship so unlikely that it sounds like the set-up for a particularly tasteless joke: the Dutch picture was a sensitive love-story between an undercover Jewish resistance-fighter and a Gestapo chief; this time the central figures are are Jewish doctor, Maurice (Isaacs) and his best friend, John (Mortensen), an academic who, largely as a result of circumstances, ends up a member of the SS. One who takes part – in full uniform, albeit somewhat passively – in the kristallnacht atrocity of 1938.
A self-effacing intellectual, John's theories about euthanasia are enthusiastically embraced by his nation's new rulers – the Nazi hierarchy seeking philosophical backup for their murderous ambitions. His ascent through the party ranks – initially an opponent of their politics, he becomes a purely "honorary" member ("consultant in … humanity"), then finds himself compromised into ever more active engagement with National Socialism – is a kind of bumbling innocent's progress, this bespectacled, softly-spoken Candide figure only very belatedly realising the full horrors of the Final Solution.
In this regard, Good is in some ways a more adult-oriented version of Mark Herman's Boy in the Striped Pyjamas from last year, in which the audience is always three or four steps ahead of the "innocent" protagonist. But while this blinkered confusion is explicable – natural, indeed – with regard to a child like Pyjamas' central figure, it's a rather different situation when the film is built around an intelligent, cultured, engaged individual like Good's John.
As the story unfolds, his tale (based, according to the end credits, upon the cases of "three prominent National Socialists") feels more like a contrived political parable than an organic, plausible narrative. The over-complicated structure, switching back and forth between time-frames, doesn't help, while the dialogue tends towards the baldly sententious ("People are what matter! " …. "Anything that makes people happy can't be bad, can it?") when it isn't striking an unhelpfully anachronistic note ("I'm a Jew. You're a Nazi. End of story.")
And whereas Pyjamas managed to overcome the distracting, mainstream-courting decision to have all of its German character speaking English-accented English throughout, Good never quite succeeds in pulling off the same ploy – partly because the characters (John, Anne, Maurice) have such unmistakeably British names. It's a mannered, stilted kind of period-prestige picture, with a mannered, stilted performance from Mortensen at its core – we never get around the fact that this is a film which expects us to feel at least some degree of sympathy for a member of the SS, however "accidental" this status may be, and however admirable the underlying idea of showing how easily well-meaning individuals can be led down extremely dark pathways.
Tonally and thematically, this is a tough challenge for any director – too much, as it turns out, for Austrian-born Brazilian Amorim, a former documentarian whose 2003 feature-debut The Middle of the World (2003) was a disarmingly charming and atmospheric road-movie on bicycles. Here he's tackling much more difficult, more sensitive subject-matter on what is his first movie in English, and it's a shame that he comes such a cropper – seemingly cowed by the scale of the task before him.
Proceedings only really come alive when the ever-reliable Isaacs is on screen, and he does his gallant best with a decidedly thankless role. But his contribution is outweighed by Good's lapses and fumbles – most disastrously the sub-sub-Dennis Potter interludes in which the mentally-unstable John imagines passers-by breaking into song. Presumably this had a chilling effect on stage – in the cinema, it comes across as ludicrous and mood-shattering. A classic case of 'lost in translation,' then, in more ways than one.
Neil Young
5th April 2009
a shorter version of this review appears in the 15th April edition of Tribune magazine
GOOD : [4/10] : UK(/Hun/Ger) 2008 : Vicente AMORIM : 96m (BBFC) : seen 23rd January 2009, CineWorld cinema, Milton Keynes (press show – 60th CinemaDays event)
