`GOOD GERMAN' IS ONLY SO-SO.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

`The Good German'' isn't very good.

Even if you give it points for sheer cussed weirdness. Which it has aplenty. And which contributes more problems to the project than its worth.

This is the movie director Steven Soderbergh, under his director of photography guise Peter Andrews, shot in 1940s Hollywood-style black-and- white. Only instead of the noirish play of high-contrast light and shadows we might expect from such an exercise, much of it looks like murky gray sludge. It's more Gower Street than Sunset Boulevard.

And that's just the most obvious manifestation of how this retro experiment doesn't work. The action is studiedly clunky, the dialogue (courtesy of the usually sharp Paul Attanasio, who adapted Joseph Kanon's source novel) alternately florid and mind-numbingly expositional, delivered for the most part in an overdramatic studio-era style.

Time warp 

But what's weirdest about ``GG,'' and what actually gives the thing whatever interest it manages to generate, is how Soderbergh just tosses aside the double fakery of period re-creation and '40s movie imitation whenever the spirit moves him. Set in occupied Berlin just after the Third Reich's surrender, ``GG'' is awash in foulmouthed dialogue, rough sex and cynical distaste for American hypocrisy in the face of new Cold War realities.

The story also follows a risky, subversive pattern in which narrative point of view shifts at least three times, usually just as we're getting used to the character we think the movie is about. This is audacious and deserves praise for being so, and it certainly reinforces the fundamental unknowability of a complex and duplicitous situation. But it also makes you care even less about the outcome of ``GG's'' convoluted and ultimately not very startling mystery.

Channeling Dietrich

Soderbuddy George Clooney plays Jake Geismer, a correspondent who comes to the rubble of Berlin to cover the Potsdam Conference. He'd been there before the war, running a news bureau with a local correspondent Lena Brandt (Cate Blanchett, vigorously channeling Marlene Dietrich and not convincing for a minute). She was married at the time, they had an affair anyway. Now she's listed as a widow and like most surviving German females is a prostitute. When she and Jake reunite, he naturally wants to save her. What she wants from him is far more difficult to figure out, or even if you can, to explain.

Their story takes place against a backdrop of U.S. and Soviet competition to flush out as many useful German brains as each side can grab, said geniuses' Nazi atrocity records notwithstanding. It's a great subject for a movie; this just isn't a great movie about the subject.

Another obstacle

Jake has some kind of moral objection to this business. But not only is his outrage suspect, he's a poor excuse for a protagonist. The guy's always getting cold-cocked, embarrassed, easily misled. I think this nonheroic presentation is supposed to be intentional. But, if so, why are they promoting this movie as some kind of latter-day ``Maltese Falcon'' or ``Casablanca''?

Of course, what the classic ``Good German'' really aspires to approximate is Carol Reed and Graham Greene's ``The Third Man.'' But the only thing here that comes close to recapturing that film's dark carnival of corrupt giddiness is Tobey Maguire's Tully. He's Jake's driver, a superficially upstanding example of militarized Midwestern values who turns out to be a freak beyond all bounds. The movie's alive and dangerously crazy whenever Maguire's around. But he's out of the picture all too soon. And the pictures that remain aren't good for a whole lot more than calling attention to their own artificiality.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

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THE GOOD GERMAN - Two and one half stars

(R: violence, sex, language)

Starring: George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Tobey Maguire, Beau Bridges.

Director: Steven Soderbergh.

Running time: 1 hr. 45 min.

Playing: The Grove, Farmers Market; Broadway 4, Santa Monica.

In a nutshell: Strange attempt to make a postwar Berlin thriller like Hollywood actually might have done it in 1945, only with cussing and sex for some reason. Aims for drama, but is too stylized, and talky, to really grab you.

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Photo:

George Clooney encounters a woman, played by Cate Blanchett, who he loved before the war in ``The Good German.''